Ezra Cornell, born in 1807 in New York State to Quaker parents, was a farmer, inventor, businessman, statesman, and philanthropist who founded the City of Cornell, Wisconsin, though he never lived there. He became a line building contractor and invested his earnings in the Western Union telegraph system, which he helped organize. He also founded and benefited Cornell University in Ithica, New York. While seeking lands to help the university, he often visited Jean Brunet's trading post and home. In 1866, during the last year of the Civil War, Cornell located and surveyed lands around Brunet Falls and the Chippewa River, and, impressed by the area and advised by his close friend Jean Brunet, purchased vast tracts of land and waterpower. He hoped to establish mills and manufacture lumber to create a market for the vast timber on more than 100,000 acres, with the purpose of assisting Cornell University. In 1867, he organized the New York Manufacturing & Improvement Company to advance plans for a mill and town at Brunet Falls, and he prepared a map of the future village that closely resembles the city's plat today. Cornell died in 1877 before these plans were realized, but on his death bed he gave all his land, the waterpower, and the site of Brunet Falls to Cornell University as a rich endowment, and Brunet Falls was later renamed Cornell in his honor.