The ROMANCE of the VANDERBILT FORTUNE

Northern Advocate, 7 December 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

The ROMANCE of the VANDERBILT FORTUNE

ANOTHER Vanderbilt has come into ** his own. George, the son of Alfred Vanderbilt, who was drowned in the Lusitania, came of age recently, and inherited the fortune of his father. The figure is not known, but estimates give it as £4,000,000. Twenty-one-year-old G'eorge Vanderbilt thus takes his place as one of the headmen of that ultra-conservative aristocratic tribe that has been called the uncrowned Royal Family of America. He will succeed men who have given fetes that recall the pageantry of Versailles, and for whose daughters’ hands princes have clamoured and been repulsed. So much grandeur is the heritage of a Vanderbilt. From what source does it all come? From the efforts of a farm boy .-who started a tiny ferry-boat and developed into a selfish, blasphemous, dyspeptic and determined old man, who lived to be probably the richest man in America. At the age of IG. This old man, Cornelius, was born to a family of farmers in Staten Island, N.Y., in 1794. At the age of sixteen he began to run his own small sailing ferry boat between Staten Island and New York. He sailed it sixteen hours in the 24. He gave his mother £220 at the end of the first year, and bought a part interest in three more boats.

By the time he was twenty-three he was worth £I,BOO. He had been making £6OO a year. But he sensed he was in a doomed trade. Steam had arrived. So he gave up all the position he had created for himself and took a poorly paid position as captain of. a small steam boat in another man’s fleet. He stayed, learning all there was to learn, for twelve years. He saved money steadily. They were exciting years. * His steamer was a “pirate” running without a license, and the New York city officials were contstantly trying to catch him.

Secret Chamber. For sixty consecutive days officers boarded his boat with writs to arrest him. At first he would hide near the gangway, and then, as so&n as they had come aboard, slip off on to the dock. Later he had a secret chamber with a sliding panel constructed in the hold. Irt-1829 he started to build steamboats on his own account. His boats were faster and more luxurious than those of his rivals whom he gradually bought up. Before he was forty he had twenty boats, and was worth £IOO,OOO. For fifteen years more he extended his steamboat lines. Then came the great Californian gold rush of 1849. Vanderbuilt found. a shorter way of getting to the West than any one else. It involved sailing down to Central America, going up a rapid, dangerous river, . and crossing to the Pacific coast by coaches. “Jumped” the Rapids. The engineers reported that the river could not be ascended. So Vanderbilt took the wheel of his own boat, tied down the safety valves, hauled the boat over the rocks in the river by cables, and “jumped” the rapids. Having proved that the passage could be made he started carrying such adventurours souls as would risk the journey.

This line was soon paying its founder £IOO,OOO a year! In his fifties he was one of the richest men in New York. He came to be known as “the commodore,” and no one had any reason to_ expect that this elderly man w'ould be remembered as anything but a successful steamboat owner. But instead, a few years later, he did an extraordinary thing. Changed his Mind. He was nearly seventy. He was worth £5-,000,000. He had always declared he would never go into railways. Then, without a qualm, he changed his mind. He sold all his ships and put put all the money into railways. He put his whole life’s work into this grand last throw. People said it was senile madness.

Actually the steptudgenarian Vanderbilt doubled and redoubled his fortune in fifteen years of railways. Even in his first five years he made a clear profit of £5,00,000. One midnight during these five years he walked home with £1,200,000, his share of profits, in his pocket in notes. At the age of seventy he was just another millionaire, but gradually he became a legendary figure, a man famous even in Europe. A Private Yacht. He astounded the whole world by building himself a private yacht, which was as large and luxurious as the best transatlantic liners' of the time. Nothing had been seen like it before. At eighty he was richer than ever and still as straight as an Indian. He owned 978 miles of railway across the richest country in the world from New York to Chicago. He had never read any book except the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

At the age of eighty-two he died, leaving £20,000,000. The bulk of his money went to his son, William K. Vanderbilt.

Out of it W.K. built the finest house in America on Fifth Avenue. Six hundred men worked on it and it cost £500,000. When he gave a banquet in it the guests ate off gold plate and flowers came from the Southern States at a cost of £BOO.

He lived only eight years after his father. In that time he had so tended the fortune that his will disposed of £40.000,000.