Far from it. 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. Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. 4 The Railways, the Trusts and the People: 104. Longworth had been born in Newark, N.J., in 1782, and at the age of twenty-one had migrated to Cincinnati, then a mere outpost, with a population of eight hundred sundry adventurers. The Goelet fortune was estimated to be around $50 million and it was principally maintained by brother Ogden and Robert Goelet. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. This land was once a farm and extended from about what is now Union Square to Forty-seventh street and Fifth avenue. His wealth is vastnot less than five or six millions, wrote Barrett in 1862The Old Merchants of New York City, I: 349. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. 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. Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year. The second generation of the Goelets counting from the founder of the fortune were incorrigibly parsimonious. 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. The price they paid was $600 a lot. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. By 1830 the population was 24,831 ; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. Net worth: $10.7 billion Source of wealth: E & J Gallo Winery The Gallo family fortune is. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. 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. 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 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. This Rutgers was a lineal descendant of Anthony Rutgers, who, in 1731, obtained from the royal Governor Cosby the gift of what was then called the Fresh Water Pond and Swamp a stretch of seventy acres of little value at the time, but which is now covered with busy streets and large commercial and office buildings. What the circumstances were that attended this grant are not now known. There were only a few millionaires in the United States, and still fewer multimillionaires. There were only a few millionaires in the United States, and still fewer multimillionaires. Goelet was a man who not only outlived William B. Astor, A.T. Stuart, and Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, but who was once the wealthiest bachelor in New York State. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. In this podcast series we dive into the long and shadowy history of America's ruling elite through the works of authors who were either silenced, suppressed, or forgotten, to discover the origins of the 1% and from where their power and wealth was, and still is, extracted. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its con- Another notable example of this glorifying was Nicholas Biddle, long president of the United States Bank. 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. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. In Chicago, with its phenomenally speedy growth of population and its vast array of workers, immense fortunes were amassed within an astonishingly short period. 8 Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau: 104-253. Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. 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. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. In a voluminous biography giving the genealogies of the rich families of New York material which was supplied and perhaps written by the families themselves this boast occurs in the chapter devoted to the Goelets : They were also numbered among the founders of that famous New York financial institution, the Chemical Bank.2 Thus do the crimes of one generation become transformed into the glories of another ! Two children survived each of the brothers. 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. Younger brother Ogden married Mary R. Wilson [Mary R. Goelet] in 1878 and had two children, Mary "May" Wilson Goelet [Mary W. Goelet] (1879?-1937) and Robert Goelet (1880-1966). The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. These also were high in the appraisement of property values, for they could be used to make whisky, and whisky could be in turn used to debauch the Indian tribes and swindle them of furs and land. 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. These two sons, with an eye for the advantageous, married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a rich Scotch merchant of New York City, and for a time a director of the United States Bank. These various factors were intertwined ; the profits from one line of property were used in buying up other forms and thus on, reversely and comminglingly. His wealth is vastnot less than five or six millions, wrote Barrett in 1862The Old Merchants of New York City, I: 349. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. The result was that when their father died, they not only inherited a large business and a very considerable stretch of real estate, but, by means of their money and marriage, were powerful dignitaries in the directing of some of the richest and most despotic banks. 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. He was a member of the Jekyll Island Club on Jekyll Island, Georgia. The arrangement becomes easy. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. In the early 1880s, they constructed such buildings in Manhattan as the Gorham Building, the Judge Building, The Goelet Building, and the Metropolitan Club. 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. THE GOELET FORTUNE. Outstanding Business Executive Was One of Largest Property Owners in New York City", "OPERA STAIRCASE TO HONOR GOELET; Family Donates $500,000 for Metropolitan House at Lincoln Sq. Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.10 The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang a cash basis: that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The fortunes of the brothers descended to Roberts two sons, Robert, born in 1841, and Ogden, born in 1846. The creation of GWE consolidates the original vision of founder John Goelet and the winemaking philosophy of co-founder Bernard Portet. At first the fringe of New York City, then part of its suburbs, this tract lay in a region which from 1850 on began to take on great values, and which was in great demand for the homes of the rich. The man so the story further runs had no money to pay Longworths fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. They're collectively worth $1.2 trillion. Robert G. Goelet, a civic leader, naturalist and philanthropist whose marriage merged two families that date to 17th-century New Amsterdam and made the couple stewards of Gardiners Island, a. How great the wealth of this family is may be judged from the fact that one of the Rhinelanders William left an estate valued at $50,000,000 at his death in December, 1907. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. 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. [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. After proper periods of mourning, their widows May and Harriet resumed their regal lifestyles with open speculation as to the possibility of one or the other remarrying. 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. The Goelet family is much less known than the Astors, but their fortune and the fact that there were only few heirs in each generation, put them in the rank of America's first families in terms of wealth. 3 At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. Of Peter Goelets business methods and personality no account is extant. The founding and aggrandizement of other great private fortunes from land were accompanied by methods closely resembling, or identical with, those that the Astors employed. Storks, pheasants and peacocks could be seen in the grounds about his house, and also numbers of guinea pigs. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. In getting their charter for the notorious Chemical Bank, they bribed members of the Legislature with the same phlegmatic serenity that they would put through an ordinary business transaction. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. CHAPTER VIII As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. These two sons, with an eye for the advantageous, married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a rich Scotch merchant of New York City, and for a time a director of the United States Bank. This they could easily do for two reasons. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. 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. Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. He was a lover of fancy fowls and of animals. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.9 In the words of one of Fields laudatory biographers, the firm coined money a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system. Indeed, so rapidly did its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. Field was the son of a farmer. Longworth ranked next to John Jacob Astor. In marrying the Duke of Roxburghe in 1903, May Goelet, the daughter of Ogden, was but following the example set by a large number of other American women of multi-millionaire families. Business Magnate. Sportsman, a Leader in Social Circles in Newport and New York, Kin of Early Settlers", "MISS BEATRICE GOELET DEAD. 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. This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. 2 Prominent Families of New York: 231. [11], Upon the death of his mother in 1915, he inherited a fortune estimated to be $40 million (equivalent to $780million in 2021),[2] which included 591 Fifth Avenue (a brownstone built in 1880 by Edward H. Kendall at the southeast corner of 48th Street) and her estate at Ochre Point in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by Stanford White and built between 1882 and 1884 and known as "Southside". In that day, although but thirty years since, when none but the dazzlingly rich could afford to keep a sumptuous steam yacht in commission the year round, Robert Goelet had a costly yacht, 300 feet long, equipped with all the splendors and comforts which up to that time had been devised for ocean craft. The Goelets were three brothers descended from Peter Goelet, an ultra-wealthy 19th century ironmonger who used profits from the Revolutionary War to buy up Manhattan real estate. Longworth ranked next to John Jacob Astor. The Goelet family is an influential family from New York, of Huguenot origins, that owned significant real estate in New York City . He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire.. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated ; he knew them all ; he had practiced them himself. In the basement he had a forge, and there were tools of all kinds over which he labored, while upstairs he had a law library of 10,000 volumes, for it was a fixed, cynical determination of his never to pay a lawyer for advice that he could himself get for the reading. The result was that when their father died, they not only inherited a large business and a very considerable stretch of real estate, but, by means of their money and marriage, were powerful dignitaries in the directing of some of the richest and most despotic banks. In his stable he kept a cow to supply him with fresh milk ; he often milked it himself. Little by little, scarcely known to the people, laws are altered ; the States and the Government, representing the interests of the vested class, surrender the peoples rights, often even the empty forms of those rights, and great railroad systems pass into the hands of a small cabal of multimillionaires. Thus, like the Astors and other rich landholders, partly by investments made in trade, and largely by fraud, the Goelets finally became not only great landlords but sharers in the centralized ownership of the countrys transportation systems and industries. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. It is usually set forth, in the plenitude of eulogistic biographies, that their thrift and ability were the foundation of the familys immense fortune. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place. [15] The estate, where he spent much of his time, which he purchased for $300,000, had 139 buildings, grain fields and herds of cattle. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads : On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers.MSS. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. The case looked black. He died in 1879 aged seventy-nine years ; and within a few months, his brother Robert, who was as much of an eccentric and miser in his way, passed away in his seventieth year. a daughter of John Rutgers. CHAPTER VIII 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. Gina Gallo and her husband Jean-Charles Boisset. [16], He inherited vast real estate holdings in New York, sometimes known as the Goelet Realty Company, which included the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the property between 52nd and 53rd Streets on Park Avenue which the Racquet and Tennis Club leased. Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. The principal landowner in this one section, not to mention other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with $11,000,000 worth of land ; the next was Leiter, who owned in that section land valued at $10,500,000.8 It appeared from this report that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. These lots have a present aggregate value of perhaps $15,000,000 or more, although they are assessed at much less. By 1830 the population was 24,831 ; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. Land acquired by political or commercial fraud has been made the lever for the commission of other frauds. 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. "[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. Graduate of Columbia and Its Law School, but Never Had Practiced. The factors constituting this fortune are various. Another notable example of this glorifying was Nicholas Biddle, long president of the United States Bank. The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. 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. The grant consisted of what are now many blocks along Broadway north of Lispenard street. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. The price they paid was $600 a lot. His two sons continued the business of ship chandlers ; one of them Peter the Younger was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. 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.