About RICE

William Marsh Rice moved from his native Massachusetts to Houston in 1839 and established a store in the new city. Soon he was trading cotton, investing in land and railroads and on his way to making a fortune. After the Civil War, he retired to the East Coast, but he still had investments in Houston and often returned to the city. During an 1891 visit, he called together a group of friends and his lawyer, Captain James A. Baker, and chartered the William Marsh Rice Institute for the advancement of literature, science and art. This charter was a vague document that listed a variety of functions but did not specifically call for the establishment of a university. It did say that nothing was to be done before his death.

  

Rice died on Sept. 23, 1900, but not of natural causes.   Albert T. Patrick, an unscrupulous lawyer, was in cahoots with Rice's valet, Charles Jones. They had concocted a plot to steal his fortune by means of a forged will. Impatient for Rice to die, the crooked lawyer and greedy valet suffocated him. They might have gotten away with their scheme; however, the next day, they tried to cash a check written out to the lawyer by the valet. In their rush, the valet misspelled the lawyer's name. An alert bank clerk noticed the discrepancy, and the bank president called Rice's apartment for verification. With Capt. James Baker, Rice's lawyer, pressing the investigation, the plot soon unraveled. The valet confessed, the lawyer was sent to Sing Sing, and Rice's fortune was saved. A counterclaim to much of the estate, based on Rice's second wife's will, was settled in 1904, and the funds became available to fulfill the intentions of the 1891 charter.

Youth Impact Program at Rice University: The Youth Impact Program at Rice University conducted it's first year of operations this summer.  The YIP program at Rice University took their participants to NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas at no cost to the parents.