The balance represents the investments of private individuals. 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. The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. Of this amount all that private individuals contributed was $4,930 a mile above their receipts ; these latter were sums which the private owners gathered in from selling the land given to them by the State, amounting to $35,211 per mile, and the sums that they pocketed from stock waterings amounting to $8,189 a mile. Then was witnessed that characteristic so symptomatic of the American money aristocracy. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . Land acquired by political or commercial fraud has been made the lever for the commission of other frauds. Of Peter Goelets business methods and personality no account is extant. 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. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials, made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. 3 At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. RELATIVES HERE NOT TOLD Rich Bachelor Spends Much of His Time at His Sandricourt Estate in France", "Anne-Marie Goelet, Legion of Honor Officer", "ROBERT W. GOELET WEDS MLLE. 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. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Fields real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiters to nearly the same. degree in 1902 and an M.A. 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. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up. The death of brothers Ogden and Robert Goelet near the end of the nineteenth century left vast multi-million estates for their heirs, which in both their cases consisted of a widow, a teen-aged son, and daughter. It is usually set forth, in the plenitude of eulogistic biographies, that their thrift and ability were the foundation of the familys immense fortune. John Goelet, who married Henrietta Fanner, daughter of William Rogers Fanner, This page was last edited on 16 July 2021, at 15:31. 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. The Rhinelanders, also, employ their great surplus revenues in constantly buying more land. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Fields executors reported to the court early in 1907. 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. 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. Posts about Goelet Family written by fileandclaw322. From the frauds of this bank the Goelets reaped large profits which systematically were invested in New York City real estate. Storks, pheasants and peacocks could be seen in the grounds about his house, and also numbers of guinea pigs. 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 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. The Goelet family is an influential family from New York, of Huguenot origins, that owned significant real estate in New York City . America's Richest Families List - Forbes 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. 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. 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. The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. What the circumstances were that attended this grant are not now known. In imitation of the Astors the Goelets steadily adhered, as they have since, to the policy of seldom or never selling any of their land. 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. Mr. Goelet, who spent much of his life abroad, was a principal in two film-producing companies, Voyagers Inc. and Normandy Productions Inc. Robert Goelet Jr., a motion picture producer and heir to a fortune, died of a heart attack June 28 at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla. Category:Goelet family - Wikipedia In those frontier days, a horse represented one of the most valuable forms of property ; and, as under a system wherein human life was inconsequential compared to the preservation of property, the penalty for stealing a horse was usually death. Cincinnati, with its population of 325,902,7 pays incessant tribute in the form of a vast rent roll to the scions of the man whose main occupation was to hold on to the land he had got for almost nothing. It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City ; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. [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. 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. [16] He also owned a fishing lodge on the Restigouche River, which separates New Brunswick from Quebec (which he left to his children). But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. tracts at a time of distress. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. The basic structure of this was New York City land, but a considerable part was in railroad stocks and bonds, and miscellaneous aggregations of other securities to the purchase of which the surplus revenue had gone. After a funeral service at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. 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. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows : His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. The railroads now controlled by a few men, among whom the large landowners are conspicuous, were surveyed and built to a great extent by public funds, not private money. Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen Girard. The cost of the road as reported by the company in 1873 was $48,331 a mile. Peter the Younger quickly gravitated into the profitable and fashionable business of the day the banking business, with its succession of frauds, many of which have been described in the preceding chapters. By this manipulation, private individuals not only got this immensely valuable railroad for practically nothing, but they received, or rather the laws (which they caused to be made) awarded them, a present of nearly four millions for their dexterity in plundering the railroad from the people. Ogden Goelet was born on September 29, 1851 in Manhattan, New York . As was the case with John Jacob Astor, the fortune of the Goelets was derived from a mixture of commerce, banking and ownership of land. 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. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its con- But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. The case looked black. He was the only son born to Henrietta Louise (ne Warren) Goelet and Robert Goelet (18411899), a prominent landlord in New York. An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth. It also includes blocks upon blocks filled with residences and aristocratic mansions. Alma Mater: Erecting the Statue | Columbia University Libraries 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 land was once a farm and extended from about what is now Union Square to Forty-seventh street and Fifth avenue. They also built ships and did a large commission business. 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. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. These two brothers not only maintained the family fortune but also were one of the wealthiest landowners in New York City (second only to the Astors). He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. a daughter of John Rutgers. 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. 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. [5][6] His maternal grandparents were George Henry Warren, a prominent lawyer, and Mary (ne Phoenix) Warren (herself the daughter of U.S. Representative Jonas P. Phoenix and granddaughter of Stephen Whitney). 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. The family was descended from Peter Goelet, a wealthy New York merchant in the 18th century. The creation of GWE consolidates the original vision of founder John Goelet and the winemaking philosophy of co-founder Bernard Portet. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a ship chandler during the Revolution. 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. 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. But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. Field was the son of a farmer. It will be recalled that, as important personages in Tammany Hall, the dominant political party in New York City, the Rhinelanders used the powers of city government to get grant after grant for virtually nothing. Since the full and itemized details of these transactions have been elaborated upon in previous chapters, it is hardly necessary to repeat them. Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. Peter P. Goelet was for several years one of the directors of the Bank of New York, and both brothers benefited by the corrupt control of the United States Bank, and were principals among the founders of the Chemical Bank. They also built ships and did a large commission business. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. The stock of the Chemical Bank, quoted at a fabulous sum, so to speak, is still held by a small, compact group in which the Goelets are conspicuous. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate. GUESTIER; New York Financier's Troth to Daughter of Bordeaux Land Owner Reported in Paris. 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. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. THE GOELET FORTUNE. The brothers admired Kendall's work-within four years he would design . The factors entering into the building up of the Schermerhorn fortune were almost identical with those of the Astor, the Goelet and the Rhinelander fortunes. Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. In exchange, Longworth received thirty-three acres of what was then considered unpromising land in the town.6 From time to time he bought more land with the money made in law ; this land lay on what were then the outskirts of the place.