A 19-year-old, working as a contractor in Syracuse, helping to build sawmills and shipping timber on the Erie Canal. Then in Homer, N.Y., toiling for a wool-carding machinery company. Devoting what free time there was to the study of mechanics, a lifelong interest that would come to include millwork, the telegraph, railroads, coal oil, agricultural machinery and photolithography.

That was young Ezra Cornell's life in 1828.

That spring he made his way to the booming community of Ithaca, where water from creeks powered lumber, flour, plaster, paper, cotton and woolen mills. First he worked as a carpenter, then was hired as a mechanic by Otis Eddy to work at his cotton mill on Cascadilla Creek. Jeremiah Beebe then hired him to repair and overhaul his plaster and flour mills on Fall Creek. During Cornell's long association with Beebe, he designed and built a tunnel for a new mill on Fall Creek, where a stone dam formed Beebe Lake. By 1832, he was in charge of all Beebe's concerns at Fall Creek.

In the 1830s, Cornell also became active in local politics, speculated in real estate -- and fell in love.

Eleven days before he married, he wrote to his father:

"I presume you will expect to hear that I have made a wife of Miss Byington but that ant [sic] the case and I never intended it should be but I am happy to inform you that I am about to form a matrimonial connection with Miss Mary Ann Wood ..." (March 8, 1831).

Cornell later wrote to a friend: "I have always considered that choosing a companion for life was a very important affair and that my happyness [sic] or misery in this life depended on the choice." (1832).

Cornell married Mary Wood on March 19, 1831, and from all accounts was happily married. He bargained with Beebe for a building lot and acreage for a garden and orchard at Fall Creek, where that summer he built and moved into a one-and-a-half-story frame house he nicknamed the Nook. The house, now the site of the Cornell mausoleum in Lake View Cemetery, was the couple's home for more than 20 years, and nine children were born there. Of these, three sons died in infancy and the eldest daughter died at 15.

Adapted by Susan S. Lang from the Web site "Invention and Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-Century Life."