John C. Cummings

John C. Cummings (19 October 1812 – 21 December 1898) served as the president of Shawmut Bank for 32 years, from 1868 until 1898. Owner of a farm and tannery in Woburn, Massachusetts. John Cummings also served in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Massachusetts Senate. He ran for Congress, unsuccessfully, in 1876.

John Cummings was affiliated with many institutions, but the one in which he took the most interest was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he served as treasurer for seventeen years, and he was also a member of its executive committee. By a vote of the Corporation in 1889, when he retired from the office of Treasurer, Mr. Cummings' name was applied to the laboratories of Mining Engineering and Metallurgy, at MIT's former Boston campus, in recognition of his services.

He was a trustee of the Woburn Public Library and of the Warren Academy of Woburn. He was also on the school committee. He was a director of the Perkins Institution for the blind.

It is also said that his great recreation was the study of Natural History and "he became so interested in that, that he was led to join the Boston Natural History Society, where he became much interested in Botany, and was chairman of the Botany section." [cite book |title=Biographical History of Massachusetts: Biographies and Autobiographies of the Leading Men in the State |last=Eliot |first=Samuel |year=1914 |publisher=Massachusetts Biographical Society |location=Boston, MA ]

Mr. Cummings took a great interest in his large farm in Woburn which he had bought from the heirs of his grandfather. Today his farm is kept as a public pleasure ground known as Mary Cummings Park named after his second wife who gave the farm on Babylon Hill to the City of Boston to be kept in trust "forever open as a public pleasure ground".