Nathan Ancell helped establish the Ancell School of Business at Western Connecticut with a gift of $900,000 at the prompting of then Governor Ella Grasso. After the school opened in 1982, Ancell taught ethics and marketing.
He wanted to help business students discover work they felt passionate about. Contemporaries who discovered late in life they’d followed the wrong career path saddened him. Ancell, who passed away at 90 in 1999, once recalled “falling hopelessly in love” with Vermont and its history of craftsmanship.
In 1939, he and his brother-in-law introduced a line of “early American” furniture under the name Ethan Allen. Eventually they adopted the name of the company’s most popular line as the corporate name and moved the company’s headquarters to Danbury. Ancell pioneered the concept of selling furniture in room-like settings – an important factor in the company’s growth. Though the firm was sold in 1980, Ancell remained an advisor until his death. Today, Ethan Allen is one of the nation’s largest furniture companies, with more than 300 dealers and 21 manufacturing plants in the U.S.
