They came by the hundreds Thursday - mayors and newspaper executives, a governor and one of his predecessors, college presidents and military students - to honor the local patriarch of journalism and philanthropy.

This mission statement, "The Duty of Landmark Newspapers," was written by Frank Batten Sr. in the mid-1970s. Batten became publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in 1954 and was chairman of Landmark Communications from 1967 to 1998. He died early Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82. By FRANK BATTEN SR.

Since the mid-1990s, Frank Batten Sr., who died Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82, had donated more than $223 million to schools and other educational organizations. Here are some of them:

1999
Gives $60 million in 1999 to the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

2000
Gives $10 million to Virginia Wesleyan College.

2003

Friends and former colleagues remember Frank Batten Sr., retired chairman of Landmark Communications, who died Sept. 10, 2009, at age 82:
 
“He overreached. He overreached to do things he really didn’t have to do.”

-- E. Bradford Tazewell, lifelong friend
 

A timeline of events in the life of Frank Batten Sr., retired Landmark chairman:

Feb. 11, 1927
Born in Norfolk to Dorothy Martin Batten and Frank Batten.

March 1928
His father dies at age 32. Frank is 14 months old. The family moves into the home of Frank’s aunt Fay and her husband, Samuel L. Slover.

1941

By Earl Swift He was a son of privilege, the heir to a family fortune, a man whose life, in other hands, might have been measured in dollars and cents. Instead, Frank Batten forged a legacy not on what he made but what he created.

Frank Batten Sr. and two other state leaders in journalism are recipients of the Virginia Press Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

ROANOKE One of Hollins University's biggest donors has come through with an additional $3 million.

Frank and Jane Batten presented the gift Thursday to the university leadership program that bears the family name: the Batten Leadership Institute.

The couple has given the university more than $6 million since 1995. 

Frank Batten Sr., the retired chairman of Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, and his wife, Jane, have made a gift of up to $70 million to Culver Academies, the military boarding school he attended in Indiana. The gift consists of $20 million for faculty salaries and a challenge that will match other gifts up to $50 million, the school announced Wednesday.

NORFOLK Frank Batten Sr. will donate $20 million to help the city build a $50 million downtown library complex a decade sooner than expected, Mayor Paul Fraim will announce today.