History Of The Great American Fortunes Vol I Conditions In Sett

In writing this work my aim has been to give the exact facts as far as the available material allows. Necessarily it is impossible, from the very nature of the case, to obtain a...

The noted private fortunes of settlement and colonial times were derived from the ownership of land and the gains of trading. Usually both had a combined influence and were freq...

While this seizure of land was going on in New Netherlands, vast areas in New England were passing suddenly into the hands of a few men. These areas sometimes comprised what are...

The creation of the great landed estates was accompanied by the slow development of the small trader and merchant. Necessarily, they first established themselves in the sea port...

Thus it was that at the time of the Revolution many of the consequential fortunes were those of shipowners and were principally concentrated in New England. Some of these dealt...

Scarcely any details are preserved of the underlying methods and circumstances by which these fortunes were amassed. Sixty years ago, when it was the unqualified fashion to exto...

Girard was born at Bordeaux, France, on May 21, 1750, and was the eldest of five children of Captain Pierre Girard, a mariner. When eight years old he became blind in one eye, a...

In point of succession and importance the next great fortunes came from ownership of land in the cities. They far preceded fortunes from established industries or from the contr...

The founder of the Astor fortune was John Jacob Astor, a butcher's son. He was born in Waldorf, Germany, on July 17, 1763. At the age of eighteen, according to traditional accou...

While at the outposts, and in the depths, of the Western wilderness an armed host was working and cheating for Astor, and, in turn, being cheated by their employer; while, for A...

Astor flourished at that precise time when the traders and landowners, flushed with revenues, reached out for the creation and control of the highly important business of profes...

It was at this identical time, in the panic of 1837, that Astor was phenominally active in profiting from despair. "He added immensely to his riches," wrote a contemporaneous na...

At the time of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were s...

drawn by fast horses, he walked to and from his business errands. This severe economy he not only practiced in his own house, but he carried it into every detail of his business...

The impressive fortune that William B. Astor left was mainly bequeathed in about equal parts to his sons John Jacob II. and William. These scions, by inheritance from various fa...

Next to the Astors' estate the Goelet landed possessions are perhaps the largest urban estates in the United States in value. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhatt...

In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which h...

But if only to give at the outset a translucent example of Field's method's in the management of industrial corporations, it is well to advert here to the operations of one of h...