This explanation is found partly in the fraudulent means by which, decade after decade, they secured land and water grants from venal city administrations, and in the singularly dubious arrangement by which they obtained an extremely large landed property, now having a value of tens upon tens of millions, from Trinity Church. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. By 1879 it was a central part of the city and brought high rentals. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. His wealth is vastnot less than five or six millions, wrote Barrett in 1862The Old Merchants of New York City, I: 349. In his stable he kept a cow to supply him with fresh milk ; he often milked it himself. [16] He also owned a fishing lodge on the Restigouche River, which separates New Brunswick from Quebec (which he left to his children). While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were transmuting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati. The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Father of Robert Goelet. They allowed themselves a glittering effusion of luxuries which were popularly considered extravagances but which were in nowise so, inasmuch as the cost of them did not represent a tithe of merely the interest on the principal. It is not merely business sections which the Rhinelander family owns, however ; they derive stupendous rentals from a vast number of tenement houses. So long as Vanderbilt produced the profits, Astor and his fellow-directors did not care what means he used, however criminal in law and whatever their turpitude in morals. [16] His widow was given his personal effects and property along with life use of their home on Narragansett Avenue in Newport and their estate in France. This railroad was built in the proportion of twelve parts to one by public funds, raised by taxation of the people of that State, and by prodigal gifts of public land grants. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. He was. It is entirely needless to iterate the narrative of how the city officials corruptly gave over to these men land and water grants before that time municipally owned grants now having a present incalculable value.1. He never tired of doing this, and was petulantly impatient when houses enough were not added to his inventory. The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. So long as Vanderbilt produced the profits, Astor and his fellow-directors did not care what means he used, however criminal in law and whatever their turpitude in morals. The great fire of 1871 destroyed the firms buildings, but they were replaced. As population increased and the downtown sections were converted into business sections, the fashionables shifted their quarters from time to time, always pushing uptown, until the Goelet lands became a long sweep of ostentatious mansions. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one ; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The same combination of economic influences and pressure which so vastly increased the value of the Astors land, operated to turn this quondam farm into city lots worth enormous sums. The wealth of the Rhinelander family is commonly placed at about $100,000,000. Unlike the founder of the fortune the present Longworth generation never strays from the set formulas of respectability ; it has intermarried with other rich families : and Nicholas, a namesake and grandson of the original, and a representative in Congress, married in circumstances of great and lavish pomp a daughter of President Roosevelt, thus linking a large fortune, based upon vested interests, with the ruling executive of the day and strategetically combining wealth with direct political power. The unsold land grant, says Professor Frank Parsons, amounted to 344,368 acres, worth probably over $5,000,000, so that those to whom the securities of the company were issued, had obtained the road at a bonus of nearly $2,000,000 above all they paid in.4. In later years, the family's main residence was at 591 Fifth Avenue in New York. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire.. This large fortune, as is that of the Astors and of other extensive landlords, is not, as has been pointed out, purely one of land possessions. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. 10 So valuable was a partnership in this firm that a writer says that Field paid Leiter an unknown number of millions when he bought out Leiters interest. It was through this property that the Goelet family accumulated their vast real estate empire in Manhattan, second only to the Astors. This eccentric was very melancholy and, apart from his queer collection of pets, cared for nothing except land and houses. Together, Anne Marie and Robert were the parents of four children: After several months of ill health, Goelet died on May 2, 1941 of a heart attack, aged 61, in his brownstone on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. Then after the beggar left, Longworth sent a boy to the nearest shoe store, with instructions to get a pair of shoes, but in no circumstances to pay more than a dollar and a half. What the circumstances were that attended this grant are not now known. Since the full and itemized details of these transactions have been elaborated upon in previous chapters, it is hardly necessary to repeat them. John Jacob Astor of the fourth generation repeats this performance in aligning himself, as does Goelet, with that masterhand Harriman, against whom the most specific charges of colossal looting have been brought.5 But it would be both idle and prejudicial in the highest degree to single out for condemnation a brace of capitalists for following out a line of action so strikingly characteristic of the entire capitalist class a class which, in the pursuit of profits, dismisses nicety of ethics and morals, and which ordains its own laws. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. Nearly a century and a half ago William and Frederick Rhinelander kept a bakeshop on William street, New York City, and during the Revolution operated a sugar factory. It fitted. OTHER LAND FORTUNES CONSIDERED. His land lay in the very center of the expanding city, in the busiest part of the business section and in the best portion of the residential districts. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. On the other hand, the feminine possessors of American millions, aided and abetted doubtless by the men of the family, who generally crave a blooded connection, lust for the superior social status insured by a title. Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. The unsold land grant, says Professor Frank Parsons, amounted to 344,368 acres, worth probably over $5,000,000, so that those to whom the securities of the company were issued, had obtained the road at a bonus of nearly $2,000,000 above all they paid in.4. In the last ten years the value of the Goelet land holdings has enormously increased, until now it is almost too conservative an estimate to place the collective fortune at $200,000,000. The great impetus to the sudden increase of their fortune came in the period 1850-1870, through a tract of land which they owned in what had formerly been the outskirts of the city. He was 68 years old. Field was the son of a farmer. For respectability in any form he had no use ; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. These wielders of a fortune so great that they could not keep track of it, so fast did it grow, abandoned somewhat the rigid parsimony of the previous generations. This railroad was built in the proportion of twelve parts to one by public funds, raised by taxation of the people of that State, and by prodigal gifts of public land grants. He had a clear notion (for he was endowed with a highly analytical and penetrating mind) that in giving a few coins to the abased and the wretched he was merely returning in infinitesimal proportion what the prevailing system, of which he was so conspicuous an exemplar, took from the whole people for the benefit of a few ; and that this system was unceasingly turning out more and more wretches. It fitted. That they conducted their business in the accepted methods of the day and exercised great astuteness and frugality, is true enough, but so did a host of other merchants whose descendants are even now living in poverty. On the other hand, they bought constantly. "[28] She received the French Legion of Honor for aiding French-American wives during World War II and for providing medical services to inhabitants in the vicinity of Sandricourt, the Goelet family estate outside Paris, after it was liberated in August 1944. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. Then was witnessed that characteristic so symptomatic of the American money aristocracy. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. Here the growth of large private fortunes was marked by much greater celerity than in the East, although these fortunes are not as large as those based upon land in the Eastern cities. On one occasion they bought eighty lots in the block from Fifth to Sixth avenues, Forty-second to Forty-third streets. Another large tract of New York City real estate came into their possession through the marriage of William C. Rhinelander, of the third generation, to When Ogden Goelet died he left a fortune of at least $80,000,000, reckoning all of the complex forms of his property, and his brother, Robert, dying in 1899, left a fortune of about the same amount. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors constantly increasing their land possessions. Upon the death of their father Robert R. Goelet (1809-1879) and their bachelor uncle Peter (c.1800-1879), they inherited holdings throughout Manhattan. Robert and Ogden jointly controlled the family fortune of tens of millions of dollars and, beginning in the early 1880's, embarked on an ambitious construction campaign that included the 1883 .
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