Robert Garrett - Life After Olympics

Life After Olympics

Later he became a banker and donator to science, especially to history and archeology. He helped to organize and finance an archaeological expedition to Syria, led by Dr. John M. T. Finney. From 1932 to 1939, he was involved with the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and Its Vicinity both helping to fund the excavations and working on them. His hobby was collecting Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. In 1942 Garrett donated to Princeton University his collection of more than 11,000 manuscripts, including sixteen Byzantine Greek manuscripts, containing rare and beautiful examples of illuminated Byzantine art for the use of scholars. He was for many years a trustee of Princeton University and The Baltimore Museum of Art.

Garrett had amassed this collection of historical volumes of Western and non-Western manuscripts, fragments, and scrolls, originating from Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia and Mesoamerica, ca. 1340 B.C.-1900s.

Garrett inherited his collecting interest from his father, Thomas Harrison Garrett, Princeton Class of 1868. After his father's sudden death in 1888, Garrett spent the following two and a half years traveling extensively with his mother and two brothers, Horatio and John, in Europe and the Near East. During his travels Garrett developed a particular interest in manuscripts and began collecting. He used the text Universal Paleography: or, Facsimiles of Writing of All Nations and Periods by J. B. Silvestre (by Sir Frederic Madden, London, 1949–50) as his guide for collecting primary examples of every known type of script.

Mr. Garrett was a leader in the development of public recreational facilities in Baltimore, many of which were privately funded by himself and his friends and colleagues. He was the first chairman of Baltimore's Department of Recreation, and the first chairman of the city's combined Department of Recreation and Parks. Mr. Garrett was through much of his life an active member of the National Recreation Association, and was elected its chairman in 1941. His value as a public citizen can clearly be recognized in the Baltimore mayoral campaign of 1947, when both the Republican and Democratic nominees promised that, if elected, they would name Mr. Garrett as chairman of the city's Department of Recreation and Parks. A devout Presbyterian throughout his life, he was a member of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, and was recognized in 1948 as the year's outstanding layperson in the field of religious education by the International Council of Religious Education.

Through a mayoral appointment, he served as the chairman of the city's Public Improvement Commission. He was also largely responsible for bringing the Boy Scouts of America to his beloved city in 1910, and took an active role in managing that organization in Baltimore until his retirement from the Baltimore Area Council in 1934. In 1919, Mr. Garrett gave to the City of Baltimore a tract of land in its Brooklyn neighborhood to be used as a public park, which was named in his honor; this was but one of many properties which he offered to the city for use as public parkland.

Robert Garrett died on April 25, 1961, in Baltimore, Maryland.