VAST FORTUNE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXL, Issue 20283, 5 December 1935, Page 11

VAST FORTUNE

ESTIMATE OF FORTY MILLIONS GEORGE VANDERBILT’S INHERITANCE 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, states the Sunday Express, London. The figure is not known, but estimates give it as £40,000,000. Twenty-one-year-old George Vanderbilt thus takes his place as one of the headmen of that ultra-conserva-tive 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 running a tiny ferry-boat and developed into a determined old man who lived to be probably the richest man in America. This old man, Cornelius, was born to a family of farmers in Staten Island, New York, in 1794. At the age of 16 he began to run his own small sailing ferry boat between Staten Island and New York. He sailed it sixteen hours in the twenty-four. 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 £IBOO. 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 poorlypaid job as captain of a small steam boat in another man’s fleet. He stayed learning all there was to learn, for 12 years. He saved money steadily. Great Gold Rush In 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 £100,000.' For fifteen years more he extended his steamboat lines. Then came the great Californian gold rush of 1849. Vanderbilt found a shorter way of getting to the West than anyone else. It involved sailing down to Qentral America, going up a rapid, dangerous river, and crossing to the Pacific coast by coaches. 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 adventurous souls as would risk the journey. This line was soon paying its founder £IOO,OOO a year! Money Put Into Railways 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 would be remembered as anything but a successful steamboat owner. But instead, a few years later he did an extraordinary thing. 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 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 septuagenarian Vanderbilt doubled and redoubled his fortune in fifteen years of railways. 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. And 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 the 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.