John Harvard (November 26, 1607 - September 14, 1638) was a Massachusetts clergyman, after whom Harvard University is named.
He was born and raised in the London borough of Southwark, Surrey, the fourth of nine children, the son of Robert Harvard, a butcher, and his wife, Katherine, a native of Stratford-on-Avon. In the summer of 1625, his father, a stepsister, and two brothers died of the plague. Only his mother and one brother, Thomas, remained of his immediate family.
He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, then a Puritan stronghold, in December 1627 and received his B.A. in 1632. Katherine died in 1635 and Thomas in the spring of 1637. John married Ann Sadler, of Ringmer, Sussex, in April 1636.
In 1637 he emigrated with his wife to New England and settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In fact, one-third of the first 100 university graduates in New England were graduates of Emmanuel College.
John Harvard died childless on September 14, 1638. He bequeathed £800 (half of his estate) and his library of around 400 volumes to the New College at nearby Cambridge, which had been founded on September 8, 1636.
The school renamed itself "Harvard College" on March 13, 1639, and Harvard was first referred to as a university rather than a college by the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.
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