Excerpt from Jay Dowd's book on the history of the White fund:
"Charles S. Storrow reported the maiden voyage of the White Fund lecture series. The Essex Company treasurer and first trustee of the White Fund believed his successors “will esteem themselves fortunate if they are able to secure from year to year in the future lectures of as high a character as those by which the course has been so auspiciously introduced.” Charles S. Storrow (1809-1904), the first trustee, throughout his forty-six-year tenure always made his search for “speakers of the first eminence” his highest priority. After Judge White died in 1861, the Trustees enlisted his close friend the Rev. Dr. James Walker, Harvard’s president, to be the inaugural White Fund lecturer. That first series, staged at City Hall in 1864, also included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Storrow’s mandate—“of as high a character”—was a tall order indeed. Judge Rowell and his fellow trustees answered Storrow’s call. Booker T. Washington spoke about “The Elevation of the Negro in the South” to a full house at City Hall in 1903. Shortly after the Strike of 1912, when Rowell’s trustees discovered that the son of Leo Tolstoy, Count Ilya, was touring America, they brought him to Lawrence to lecture on “The Life and Writing of My Father.” Rowell stayed true to form in his invitation to another Harvard president, Charles W. Eliot. “We do not conceive it our duty to furnish amusement to people, but something better,” Rowell said. Eliot filled City Hall in 1913. Other experts and authors presented on “Joan of Arc,” “Dramas of Protest,” and “David Copperfield.” I doubt that the mill-owning class was very happy with any of these, but Daniel White would have loved them. The trustees made Frost a White Fund speaker in 1916, the year after he published “Birches” and “The Road Not Taken.” He titled his lecture “The Sound of Poetry'' and presented it to a large audience at City Hall. Frost spoke in Lawrence again in 1939. Besides reciting his own poems, he spoke about other eminent American poets whom he had known personally."
The lecture series in modern times brought many contemporary luminaries to Lawrence including Julia Alvarez and Angela Davis. In-person free lectures continue to be offered, now in partnership with the Lawrence campus of Northern Essex Community College.
