Peter Bent Brigham, born in Bakersfield on February 4, 1807, left at age 17 to seek his fortune in Boston and, despite little formal schooling, became a self-made millionaire through success as a restaurant owner, real estate investor, and founding director of the Fitchburg Railroad. Upon his death, he endowed the Town of Bakersfield with $40,000 and directed that the residue of his estate be sold to found the Brigham Hospital for the care of sick persons in indigent circumstances. That endowment reached $2,000,000 in 1902, and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital opened in 1913 in Boston and today is part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His bequest to Bakersfield also provided a $30,000 endowment for the Brigham School Fund to support education in district schools or a higher-grade school. Opened in August 1879, Brigham Academy was hailed as the beginning of the educational millennium in Vermont, occupied a monumental Second Empire-style building designed by Ira Sweat and A.H. Goff, and served as a high school bridging elementary school and college with classes in classical languages, music, art, and science. Its notable graduates included Warren Austin, U.S. senator and first ambassador to the United Nations, and the academy closed in 1966.