14. Daniel G. Crandon

Daniel Goddard Crandon (1849 – 1936) was a prominent businessman, civic leader, lay preacher, and biographer in Boston, Massachusetts. The son of a physician, Crandon began his career as a store clerk before he married Florence Jane Pillsbury, one of Vassar College’s earliest students, in 1871. By 1873, Crandon was fancy goods merchant in Boston and eventually opened a chain of “99-cent stores” in Bangor, Maine, and Poughkeepsie, New York. 

Crandon’s civic engagements followed in the line of other anti-bellum abolitionists and social reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Julia Ward Howe. He served various positions in the Chelsea Young Men’s Tariff Club, the Liberal Union Club, the Free Religious Association of America, the Boston Ethical Society, and the Masons. In 1889, he preached a sermon on “Character” in Boston’s Church of the Unity and led a failed attempt to reform the theater by starring in a touring company of Richelieu in 1892. He was more successful the following year when he led a group of prominent religious, literary, and business leaders in a successful petition to open the Chelsea Public Library reading room on Sundays. In 1907, Crandon was appointed as an American Peace Society delegate to their universal conference in Munich, Germany. After his retirement from business, Crandon became a biographical editor for a Boston publisher and “travel[ed] round the world.” He died in his Newton, Massachusetts home in 1936.