ABSTRACT
As the nal judgement on decades of belligerence and contested authority and as an inaugural act for the second centenary of the Franklin Fund, in 1908, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made the board of managers of the Franklin Fund ‘a body corporate under the name e Franklin Foundation’.1 e decree built on the 1904 Supreme Judicial Court’s construction of the board of managers, declaring the right of the court to appoint successors to the eight lay members and remove any of the eight managers for ‘cause’. e three ministers would qualify as members as long as they held their appointments as the clergy of the three churches speci ed in the codicil. e court decreed that the board be ‘deemed a board or department of the city of Boston and on behalf of the city should have custody, management and control of the Franklin Union and of part of the fund accumulating for the second hundred years’. e city retained title to the Franklin Union, the land it sat on, and any of the funds given to the city of Boston for the establishment of the trades school. e title to the second century fund was also recognized as vested in the city.2 e Franklin Foundation was entitled to hold title to any funds donated to the Franklin Union a er 1908.3
While the incorporation of the Franklin Foundation and the founding of the Franklin Union settled the issue of authority over the centennial gi from Franklin, the language establishing the foundation and the union lacked clarity and precision. While the school was a ‘department of city government’ and the Mayor of the City continued to sit on the Board of the Foundation, the issue of control, particularly over the Franklin Fund (sometimes referred to as the Second Part of the Accumulating Fund in the foundations accounting records), remained a matter of contention. Con ict between city o cials and managers of the trust had rst broken open in the 1890s over the application of the Franklin Fund First Part.
