USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York, 1609-1909 > Part 47
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His writings, as his life, are imbued with the American spirit, and yet he is a true Scot. His heart beats true to Scotland in general and to Dunfermline in particular. He has endowed that town with more than half a million pounds sterling for its public institutions. In Scot- land he is the Laird of Skibo Castle ( which he bought in 1897). He fills the role in harmony with the best Scottish traditions and he keeps his own piper. He was elected Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrew, Edinburgh, in 1902, and he has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from all the Scottish Universities: of Glasgow, 1905, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 1906, and the University of Birmingham, 1907; as well as from the University of Pennsylvania, 1906, and McGill University, Mon- treal. He was elected president of the British Iron and Steel Institute in 1903, being the only American who has ever received that honor. Mr. Carnegie has also received more freedoms of cities in his native land than any other man, having received over fifty in England, Scotland and Ireland.
Mr. Carnegie cares nothing for the ostentations of wealth. His home life is domestic and comfortable, though in no degree lacking in hospitality. His way of living is very modest in comparison with that of some of the young partners he has helped to fortune. He is very earnest in the things that interest him, from the advocacy of simplified spelling to the propaganda of universal peace. He was married late in life (1887), to Miss Louise Whit- field, of New York, and has one daughter, Margaret, born in 1897. The family town house is in New York. His public activities carry him to many places, and his summers are spent in Scotland.
The career of Mr. Carnegie has been intensely interesting, and has been the subject of many articles and volumes. His characteristics are marked by great individuality in all the phases of his activity as capitalist, philanthropist, litterateur, philosopher and publicist.
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HISTORY OF NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1905. BY ALMAN & Co. N. Y.
LEVI PARSONS MORTON
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LEVI PARSONS MORTON
A MONG living men no name is more closely connected with the history of the City, State and Nation than that of Hon. Levi Par- sons Morton. In the country at large, which he served with great ability and distinction as Minister to France and as Vice President of the United States; in the State of New York whose executive affairs he administered most effect- ively as governor, and in the City of New York, of which he has for many years been one of the foremost citizens, his name is held in high honor.
He is of old New England lineage, being descended in direct line from George Morton, of Bawtry, Yorkshire, England, one of the Pilgrim Fathers who landed from the ship "Ann" at Plymouth, Mass., in 1623. Mr. Morton was born in Shoreham, Vermont, May 16, 1824, being the youngest son of Rev. Oliver and Lucretia (Parsons) Morton. His mother was also of a good New England family, and was a sister of Rev. Levi Parsons, distinguished in religious history as the first American missionary to Palestine, and it was after him that Mr. Morton was named. He was educated in the Shoreham Academy, but derived fully as much educational benefit from the refined and intellectual influences of his family life in the modest parsonage which was his boyhood home as from any of the formal teaching he received.
He became connected with mercantile business and was thus engaged for five years at Hanover, N. H., and later as a clerk with the prominent house of James M. Beebe & Co., Boston, of which he became a partner in 1852, another member of that firm being Junius Spencer Morgan, afterward an international banker of the firm of George Peabody & Co., London, and the father of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Morton came to New York City in 1854, and established the wholesale dry goods commission house of Morton and Grinnell, which became one of the most successful in the country.
He established a banking business in 1863, under the style of L. P. Morton & Co., in which firm Mr. George Bliss became a partner in 1868, the style changing to Morton, Bliss & Co., and in the same year, in association with Sir John Rose, who had previously been Minister of Finance of Canada, he founded the London house of Morton, Rose & Co., of which he remained at the head until its dissolution. The firm of Morton, Bliss & Co. was suc- ceeded October 1, 1899, by the Morton Trust Company, of which he has ever since been president; he is also president of the Fifth Avenue Trust Company, and a director of the Guaranty Trust Company, Home Insurance Company, Panama Coal Company, and the Washington Life Insurance Company.
Mr. Morton's London house was, from 1873 to 1884, and again after 1889, the fiscal agent of the United States Government in London, and he had charge of many of the largest financial negotiations of the government. He organized the syndicate of banks, including Drexel, Morgan & Co., J. S. Mor-
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gan & Co., N. M. Rothschild and Sons, and Jay Cooke, McCulloch & Co., which successfully placed the 5-per-cent. Government loan of 1871, and assisted in the funding of the national debt and in making possible the resumption of specie payments at a fixed rate. Morton, Rose & Co. were also asso- ciated with the Messrs. Rothschild and other London bankers in the pay- ment of the Geneva Award of $15,000,000, and the Halifax Fishery Award of $5,500,000.
In the arena of diplomacy and statesmanship Mr. Morton has had a career as distinguished as in finance. In 1876, in a convention held shortly before the election, he was nominated for Congress by the Republicans of the Elev- enth Congressional District, without having been previously consulted. There was no time for effective canvass, but the Democratic majority was reduced by 400 votes. He was appointed in 1878, by President Hayes, honorary commis- sioner of the United States to the Paris Exposition. In the Fall of the same year he was again nominated for Congress in the Eleventh District and after an energetic canvass was elected by more than 7,000 plurality to the Forty- sixth Congress; and he was reelected to the Forty-seventh Congress in 1880.
In Congress Mr. Morton's standing as a financier of unsurpassed ability and untarnished record gave him a position of authority in connection with financial legislation, and his speeches in opposition to the unlimited free coin- age of silver in 1879 were among the most direct and authoritative in that debate. He was also much interested in international politics and foreign relations, and was a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Forty-sixth Congress. He received an informal tender of the Republican nomination for Vice President on the ticket with General Garfield in 1880, but though this offer was equivalent to an election, he declined it. He also declined the position of Secretary of the Navy, tendered by President Garfield in 1881, but served as United States Minister to France from 1881 to 1885.
Mr. Morton was one of the most successful and popular representatives ever sent by our Government to France. He removed the Legation from its former place into one of the best localities in Paris in a mansion which he rented at his own expense. He gained the friendship of the great French statesmen of that day-Ferry, Gambetta, De Freycinct, and others, and in social as well as in governmental circles won the favor of the French, and the municipality named the square upon which he had established the Lega- tion, "Place des Etats Unis." He drove the first rivet in the Bartholdi Statue of "Liberty Enlightening the World," and had the honor of accepting that statue for his government; took a public part in the ceremony of unveiling of the statue of Lafayette at Le Puy, his birthplace. was a commissioner to the Paris Electrical Exposition, and a representative of the United States at the Sub- marine Cable Convention. Americans resident in or visitors to France during
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LEVI PARSONS MORTON
Mr. Morton's incumbency found the Legation efficient and courteous, and in practical diplomacy he was especially successful, notably in securing from France the recognition of American corporations, and the removal of restric- tions upon the importation of American pork.
Mr. Morton was nominated at the Chicago Convention June 25, 1888, for the office of Vice President of the United States on the ticket with Benjamin Harrison and was elected in the following November. There was never a man who filled the Vice-Presidential chair with more ability or presided over the United States Senate with greater courtesy or impartiality. When his term was closing he received a letter written in highly complimentary terms and signed by the entire membership of the Senate, tendering to him a ban- quet at the Arlington Hotel in Washington, held February 27, 1893, at which Mr. Morton was warmly eulogized by Senators of both parties.
In 1894 Mr. Morton was nominated for Governor of New York. The State had been in Democratic hands since 1882, and the Democratic plurality had been 45,000 in 1892. Mr. Morton was elected by a plurality of 156,000, and his term was one of great benefit to the State and its people.
Governor Morton is the owner of "Ellerslie" at Rhinecliff, Rhinebeck-on- Hudson, one of the most beautiful of American country houses, a modern structure in the English Renaissance style, surrounded by a park and a large farm, cultivated in the best manner, and pastures and large barn for what is probably the finest herd of pedigreed Guernseys in this country, and there are also yards and buildings for flocks, numbering thousands, of fine poultry. The situation is one of unsurpassed beauty, com- manding fine views of the Hudson River and Valley and of the mountain range beyond. The town house is at 681 Fifth Avenue.
In social life Governor Morton is held in highest esteem, for his has been a career typical of public and personal rectitude, and expressive of the highest ideals of American citizenship. He is a member of the New England Society and the Sons of the Revolution, is president of the Metropolitan Club of New York, and member of the Union, Union League, Century, Lawyers', Republi- can, Tuxedo and Down Town Clubs.
He married, in 1856, Miss Lucy Kimball, daughter of Elijah H. Kimball and member of an old Long Island family. She died in 1871, and in 1873 he married Anna Livingston Street, daughter of William I. Street and grand- daughter of General Randolph S. Street, and a descendant of the old Man- hattan families of Livingston, Schuyler and Van Rensselaer. Of his five chil- dren, four are now living: Edith Livingston, who married, April 30, 1900, William Corcoran Eustis; Helen, who married in London, in October, 1901, the Comte de Perigord, now Duc de Valencery; Alice, married in February, 1902, to Winthrop Rutherford; and Mary Morton, unmarried.
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JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER
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JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER
J OHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER, whose achievements in business
and philanthropy have earned him world-wide distinction, was born at Richford, Tioga County, New York, July 8, 1839, son of William Avery and Eliza (Davison) Rockefeller. His grandfather was son of Godfrey Rocke- feller, of Massachusetts. William A. Rockefeller, his father, engaged in various enterprises, and trained his son to practical business ideas. In 1850 the family removed to Cuyahoga County, Ohio, locating on a small farm at Strongsville, a few miles south of Cleveland, and later removed to Parma, another Cleveland suburb.
His father's training and his own bent led him early into practical busi- ness activities, the first of which was when, at the age of eight, he became the proud possessor of a flock of turkeys, of which, with the assistance of his mother, who gave him the curds from the milk to feed them, he made a sub- stantial success. His education had been conducted as a preparation for a college course, but when he was sixteen it was decided that he should leave the high school course, which he had nearly completed, and spend a few months in a commercial college in Cleveland, a training which he had always highly valued. When the course was finished he found, after a long and tedious search, a place in the forwarding commission house of Hewitt & Tuttle, Sep- tember 26, 1855, remaining with that house as clerk for fifteen months, receiv- ing fifty dollars for his first three months' work, and twenty-five dollars a month during the year 1856, and after that becoming cashier and bookkeeper in charge of the office of the firm, whose business activities were so diversified that his duties gave him many problems to work out. His experience in that house was of the highest value as a business training, and his genius for business was evidently of great value to the firm, which confided many of its most important matters to his hands, although he was still a boy in years, and every account against the firm was carefully scrutinized and audited by him.
In 1858, although only nineteen years old, he left that firm to establish, as an equal partner of M. B. Clark, the commission firm of Clark & Rocke- feller, each putting in two thousand dollars. Mr. Rockefeller had saved up about seven or eight hundred dollars, and borrowed the remainder from his father at ten per cent., then a common rate for private loans. The business was successful from the first, and soon attained large proportions, the sales for the first year aggregating half a million dollars. To carry the business frequent loans had to be procured from the banks, but Mr. Rockefeller was the financial man of the firm, and succeeded at all times in securing sufficient funds to keep the business going, although the process was often attended with difficulties, which all went into the training which made him one of the world's greatest financiers.
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In 1860 the firm went outside of its regular produce business to join James and Richard Clark and Mr. Samuel Andrews in the oil refining business of Andrews, Clark & Company, which they organized, Mr. Andrews being the manufacturing man of the concern. He had learned the process of cleans- ing crude petroleum by the use of sulphuric acid, and he attended to that fea- ture of the business. As that business developed, the firm of Clark & Rocke- feller was called upon to supply a large special capital, and in 1865 the part- nership of Andrews, Clark & Company was dissolved. The arrangement that the cash assets should be collected and the debts paid was a matter of course, but the plant and good will remained for disposition. It was decided that the partners should compete among themselves for the ownership, and a lawyer who represented the Clarks served as auctioneer. Mr. Rockefeller, who wanted to go actively into the oil business with Mr. Andrews, secured the business at his bid of $72,500 and the firm of Rockefeller & Andrews was established. Very soon after, Mr. Rockefeller sold out his interest in the produce commission business of Clark & Rockefeller to his partner.
Thus began Mr. Rockefeller's long and successful career in the oil busi- ness, then in its infancy and very crudely organized. To Mr. Rockefeller and his associates must be credited the most important steps in its development, by the introduction of new processes for the improvement of the oil, the util- ization of by-products, the reduction of the cost of oil to the consumer, by the building of pipe lines and the consequent cheapening of the cost of deliveries, and by dealing in large measure direct with the consumer.
Later Messrs. Rockefeller & Andrews, with Mr. William Rockefeller, established in Cleveland the firm of William Rockefeller & Company, which built a new plant called the Standard Oil Refinery, and shortly afterward the partners united in establishing in New York City the firm of Rockefeller & Company, for the sale of the products of their refineries. In 1867 the firms of William Rockefeller & Company, Rockefeller & Andrews, Rockefeller & Com- pany, and S. V. Harkness and Henry M. Flagler, united in forming the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, thus uniting under one executive management the business which these separate firms and individuals had carried on, and combining into one harmonious organization the departments of production, transportation and sale of their products and by-products.
In 1870 the business had so increased that a corporate form of organiza- tion of the business seemed desirable, and The Standard Oil Company of Ohio was organized with a capital of $1,000,000, taking over the business of Rocke- feller, Andrews & Flagler. Of this company John D. Rockefeller became president; William Rockefeller, vice president; and Henry M. Flagler, secre-
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JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER
tary and treasurer. Many other refineries in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York associated themselves with the Standard Oil Company from time to time, and in 1882 The Standard Oil Trust was formed with a capital stock of $70,000,000, later increased to $95,000,000, and which, within seven or eight years, came into possession of the stocks of the companies controlling the greater part of the petroleum refining business of the country as well as of the oil producing interests. After prolonged litigation, begun in 1890, the Trust voluntarily dissolved, and in 1899 the present form of organization was adopted. The chief of the Standard Oil corporations is The Standard Oil Company, incorporated under the laws of New Jersey, in addition to which there are many subsidiary corporations in this and other countries, constitu- ting the largest business interest under identical control in the world. It owns many thousands of acres of oil lands, vast numbers of wells, refineries, pipe lines, and oil steamships and has business houses not only in all principal American cities but also in the most important cities in foreign countries, all over the world.
At various times Mr. Rockefeller has owned large interests outside of those connected with the Standard Oil Company. Notable among those in- terests may be named the control of the great iron ore interests of Minnesota, which he finally sold to the United States Steel Corporation, the story of which, as well as many other interesting details of his life history, is found in Mr. Rockefeller's Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, published in 1909.
While the place earned by Mr. Rockefeller as a great capitalist, and as creator of an industrial organization far surpassing any previous one in the world's history gives him great distinction, it is probable that he will be longest remembered for his philanthropies and benefactions. This will be so not only because of their large aggregate amount ($122,554,662 to the beginning of 1910), though that surpasses all precedent, but even more because the same mastery of the art of effective organization which built up his business enter- prises has been applied by him to his philanthropic endeavors. They cover a wide range, and include plans for education and generally for moral, intellec- tual and spiritual uplift, for the relief of physical suffering, and for the promo- tion of scientific research into the causes for disease and the means for its prevention.
Many educational institutions have been objects of his bounty, and the University of Chicago, of which he was the founder, has received from him more than $25,000,000, exclusive of $6,000,000, to its Medical Department (Rush Medical College). The churches, missions and benevolences of the Baptist denomination, of which he is a devoted member, have been favored objects of his bounty, as have also been various branches of the Young Men's
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Christian Association, juvenile reformatories, the Cleveland city parks, social settlements, and other good causes. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, to which he has given $4,300,000 and the Hookworm Fund, which he endowed with $1,000,000, are examples of the highly practical scope and purpose of some of the most far-reaching of his benefactions. The General Education Board, which he has endowed with the unprecedented sum of $53,- 000,000, is a broadly though carefully planned organization having for its purposes the promotion of education in the United States, without distinction of race, sex or creed, and especially to systematize and make effective vari- ous forms of educational beneficence.
Mr. Rockefeller, as the result of his long experience, has come to the con- clusion that what is most needed to make benevolence effective is to organize it, so that misdirection, duplication and waste will be eliminated: to establish, in fact, a Benevolent Trust, or corporation to manage the business side of benefactions. This idea is most interestingly and lucidly expressed in the final chapter of Mr. Rockefeller's Random Reminiscences, before mentioned, and has recently received concrete expression in the proposition for the federal incorporation of The Rockefeller Foundation, for which the authorization of Congress has been asked. Through this Foundation Mr. Rockefeller proposes to endow and set in motion a vehicle of most complete effectiveness for the business side of philanthropy, and a medium for the benefactions of himself and others to promote all uplifting and humane causes and to alleviate mis- fortune, dispel ignorance, and remove wrong and injustice.
Mr. Rockefeller is a man of domestic habits, fond of his home, and little attracted by clubs or social organizations. His delight in tree-planting is one of his best-known hobbies, and he has attained a skill in that direction which few of the professional landscape gardeners can surpass. Golfing has been Mr. Rockefeller's favorite amusement in recent years, and he finds it a health- ful and pleasant relaxation. He has not been active in his large business interests for several years past, leaving their management in the hands of younger associates.
Mr. Rockefeller married, in Cleveland, Ohio, September 8, 1864, Laura C. Spelman, and they had four children and eight grandchildren. Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, who was born in 1866, died in 1906. She was married to Professor Charles A. Strong in 1889. Alta, born in 1871, is now the wife of E. Parmalee Prentice, and Edith, born in 1872, married Harold F. McCor- mick in 1895. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the only son, was born in 1874, and married Abby Greene Aldrich, daughter of United States Senator Nelson A. Aldrich, of Rhode Island.
Besides his town house in New York City, Mr. Rockefeller has estates at Tarrytown, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio.
ORLANDO BRONSON POTTER
491
O RLANDO BRONSON POTTER, distinguished business man and financier, was born at Charlemont, Franklin County, Massachusetts, March 10, 1823, of Puritan descent, the son of Samuel and Sophia ( Rice) Potter. He was educated in local schools, took a partial course in Williams College (which later gave him the LL.D. degree), then taught school and studied law in Harvard Law School and a Boston office. In 1848 he was admitted to the bar and engaged in practice.
In 1852 he became a partner in the sewing ma- chine firm of Grover, Baker & Company; removed to New York and established the business here in 1853, and in 1854 became the first and only president and gen- eral manager of the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company until it termina- ted active business in 1876.
He acquired large real estate interests, and con- structed, under his own supervision, many large stores and warehouses, and became prominent as a financier. He was origina- tor of the present national banking system, which was first outlined by him in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury, in 1861, and was adopted by act of Congress of February 25, 1863.
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ORLANDO BRONSON POTTER
He was a Whig before the war, voted for Mr. Lincoln in 1860, was a Democrat after 1861, was elected to and served in the Forty-eighth Congress from 1883 to 1885, and he continued always active in public affairs until his death, January 2, 1894.
He married, in 1850, Martha G. Wiley, who died in 1879, and had seven children by that marriage; and he married, second, Mary Kate Linsly.
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HISTORY OF NEW YORK
HENRY MORRISON FLAGLER
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HENRY MORRISON FLAGLER
H ENRY MORRISON FLAGLER-A man of high rank among America's great upbuilders, whose home has long been New York, but whose habitat is as often Palm Beach as Fifth Avenue, is Henry Morrison Flagler. He was born in the town of Hopewell (near Canan- daigua, New York), January 2, 1830, the year when there were exactly twenty-four miles of railroad in the United States. The son of a Presby- terian clergyman of narrow means, he went to the district school. At fourteen, feeling that his room was more valuable to his father than his company, he treked to Bellevue, a town of the Western Reserve of Ohio. There he worked for some years, entering on his way that great Nine- teenth Century high school of high finance "the country store." But like others with the ferment of greater things in his system, he sought a wider field, though he had lifted himself from clerk to partner and made the firm the chief shipper of grain in the town. The salt wells of Saginaw, Michigan, were the magnet that drew him into strange enterprise. Out of this venture, which in those days constituted a "craze," he came out a loser, after seeing the vision of fortune grow golden-edged only to fade away. Then to Cleveland he turned. He tried grain-commission, an old ground. Here he met the youthful John D. Rockefeller, then struggling also out of his commercial shell. Flagler was the older, but the two men were of a mind, and Flagler joined the newly forming firm of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler. This was in February, 1867. It is history how the firm, attracted by the great petroleum possibilities, went into oil refining; how Mr. Flagler mastered the details of the oil business in all its ramifications, exhibit- ing an exactitude of theory and practice almost unique; how in pursuit of this the firm standardized petroleum products in a way unknown to the some- what chaotic oil business of that day; how greatly they prospered, attracting other oil refiners to join fortunes with them, and how with clear heads and unbounded vigor they entered the kingdom of Petrolia, in 1870, with the flag of the Standard Oil Company at the head of the allied forces. Their com- pany won all along the line, and to H. M. Flagler it owed much of this prog- ress. Wealth rolled in, and accumulations grew. In the Board of Directors, his vigor, his healthy optimism, balanced by a certainty in his estimates of men, of ways and means, carried the company's banner continually forward. They were a masterful group that met daily about the directors' table, and the way H. M. Flagler held his own and helped swell the total of the marvelously expanding business without obtrusion of his personality, bespeaks the mod- esty, devotion and simple sincerity of the man. For eighteen years all his energies were so directed. The company that started with one million had now, in 1882, seventy millions of capital. A new generation of officials was arising, and Mr. Flagler believed that on their sturdy shoulders the bur-
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