Thomas Ignatius Gasson was born in Seven Oaks, Kent, England on September 23, 1859 to parents of English and French Huguenot ancestry. Originally instructed in the Protestant tradition, Gasson was educated at Saint Stephen’s Anglican School in London and under the private tutelage of the Reverend Allen Edwards, a clergyman of the Church of England. In 1872, following the death of his mother and his father’s subsequent remarriage, he left England planning to join his elder brother in the United States.

Failing to settle with his brother, Gasson attempted to support himself in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Two Irish women, Catherine Doyle and Anne McGarvey, befriended the young Englishman, and arranged for the Sisters of the Convent of the Sacred Heart to provide him with board and instruct him in the Catholic faith. He was baptized on October 5, 1874 at the Chapel of the Holy Family, now the Church of the Gesu in Philadelphia.

In November 1875, he entered the Jesuit order at Frederick, Maryland, and began his studies at the Woodstock College seminary. He taught at Loyola College in Baltimore and St. Francis Xavier College in New York while preparing for ordination. For his theological studies, he was sent to the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where he was ordained on July 26, 1891. In 1892, he returned to the United States to take a teaching post, possibly at Mount St. Mary’s University in Frederick County, Maryland. In 1895, he was assigned to the faculty of Boston College where he taught ethics, economics, and the junior classes. On January 6, 1907 he was appointed the thirteenth president of Boston College.

In an attempt to alleviate overcrowding on the Boston College campus in the South End, Gasson purchased property in Chestnut Hill and moved the University to newly-constructed facilities there in 1913. The new campus buildings, designed by Charles Donagh Maginnis and Timothy Walsh in consultation with Ralph Adams Cram, have since become national collegiate architectural models.

After his term as Boston College president, Father Gasson was appointed dean of the Graduate School and professor of philosophy and economics at Georgetown University. In 1924, he left Georgetown to teach philosophy, economics, and theology at Loyola College, Montreal, Quebec. He died in Montreal on February 27, 1930, and was buried in the Jesuit Cemetery at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Sources

Donovan, Charles F., David R. Dunigan, and Paul A. FitzGerald. History of Boston College: From the Beginnings to 1990. Chestnut Hill, MA: The University Press of Boston College, 1990.