The Richest Woman in America Read Online Free PDF

wagons, hansom cabs, hackney coaches, and horse-drawn omnibuses clattering and clopping on the cobblestones, a cacophony of sounds ricocheting against the iron and stone buildings crammed together on the lower Manhattan streets. Hammers rang against stones as workers constructed new buildings, and all around, old structures moaned under crumbling blows.
    New York was celebrating a financial boom. New institutions were opening on every corner, filling the canyons of Wall Street with retail banks, commercial banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms. Investors in mining, real estate, and transportation were flush with funds. Eager to spend their new wealth, they were tearing down old buildings as fast as they could and putting up new ones so frequently that
Harper’s Magazine
complained the city was unrecognizable for anyone born forty years before. Walt Whitman called it a “rabid, feverish itching for change.”
    Newly rich couples filled extravagant mansions with fabulous furnishingsand installed bathrooms with hot and cold running water on every floor. Those who earned $10,000 a year and wanted a place in society were expected to have a big new house, a country place, a carriage, and a box at the opera, and, of course, to play host to lavish parties and balls.
    Welcomed at the boat pier on the Hudson River, Hetty settled herself and her bags in the carriage and rode across town.The city founders had “the novel plan of numbering the streets,” noted Isabella Bird, an English traveler visiting at the time. The carriage rolled along the cobblestones, past the posh new Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street to the older part of town where the streets had names: past the well-paved avenue of Broadway, burgeoning with shops and theaters; past the stately Greek Revival houses of Colonnade Row that were home to Vanderbilts, Astors, and Delanos; past the Society Library on Astor Place where members like Herman Melville borrowed books; past the new Astor Library, free to the public, on Lafayette Place; and on to the Grinnells’ Greek Revival townhouse at the corner of Bond Street and Lafayette.
    The city’s swells might be marching uptown to newer neighborhoods, but successful merchants like the Van Cortlandts, the Tredwells (proud descendants of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens), and the Henry Grinnells (his brother Moses had moved uptown) still maintained their homes downtown, just a few blocks away from Grace Church, where the upper crust still worshipped.
    No one challenged the status of Henry Grinnell and his wife, Sarah Minturn Grinnell. Henry and his two brothers had left behind their Quaker restrictions and made their mark on the world. Joseph, the oldest, had prospered in New York in merchant shipping before he served in Congress and started Wamsutta Mills.
    Their younger brother Moses arrived in the city at the age of fifteen to make his fortune in the family business, completed one term in Congress, presided over the Chamber of Commerce of New York, and served on the commission helping to create Central Park. Not only did he have one of the finest wine cellars in the city, it was said he knew every important and influential person in New York. His wife was the niece of the author Washington Irving.
    Henry Grinnell, whose intimate friends included the Whig senatorsHenry Clay and Daniel Webster, joined his brother Moses in the family’s prestigious merchant shipping firm, Grinnell and Minturn. Owners of the famous clipper ship
Flying Cloud
, they were the largest shippers and consignors of whale oil, and were business colleagues of Edward Robinson in New Bedford. Henry Grinnell, a passionate student of geography and generous patron of Arctic explorations, distinguished himself as founder and first president of the American Geographical Society. When Hetty arrived, the latest expedition with his sponsorship was under way, one that would commemorate him in a book and immortalize him on maps when the