Cornelius Vanderbilt

The famous 100 dollars is not certain. The story that he borrowed it from his mother at 16 to buy a two-masted periauger competes with the first published account of his life, which appeared in 1853 and says the boat belonged to his father and the boy took half the profit. What is not in dispute is that he left school at 11 to work the family ferry in New York Harbor, that rival captains started calling him the Commodore as a joke, and that at 19 he married his first cousin Sophia Johnson, who bore him 13 children and ran a profitable New Jersey inn while he learned the steamboat business from the inside as Thomas Gibbons's manager.

He took the steamboat trade by cutting fares until the incumbents paid him to go away, then did the same to the subsidized Atlantic packet lines and to the California route he ran across Nicaragua. In 1864 he sold his last ships and bought railroads instead — the Harlem, the Hudson River, the New York Central, merged in 1870 into one of the first giant American corporations, with Grand Central Depot as its front door. BriefHistory has that record and what the country got out of it. What follows is the household it came out of.

He was worth about 105 million dollars at his death, roughly one eighty-seventh of the entire American economy, and in 82 years he gave away close to 1 million of it — the founding gift to Vanderbilt University, which his second wife pressed him to make, plus 50,000 dollars for her congregation's church. The estate went the same way. Ninety-five percent of it passed to his eldest son William and four of William's boys. Nine daughters received between 250,000 and 500,000 dollars apiece. Cornelius Jeremiah, whom his father regarded as a wastrel, got the income from a 200,000-dollar trust and killed himself five years later. The son Vanderbilt had actually wanted, George Washington Vanderbilt II, a West Point graduate and his named heir, had fallen ill and died during the Civil War without ever reaching combat.

Four of his children took the will to court, arguing that their father had been of unsound mind and worked on by spiritualists. Testimony held that William had paid a medium to have the spirits report that his other children were merely waiting for him to die. The case ran more than a year before William settled and raised his siblings' bequests. What he built lasted better than what he left. The depot came down in 1913 and Grand Central Terminal replaced it, and in 1929 the Plassmann statue moved from the old St. John's Park freight depot to the terminal's south face. Historians still divide him between robber baron and captain of industry, the argument of his lifetime too.

Cornelius Vanderbilt's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Accessory Transit Company company
  Carried gold rush passengers across Nicaragua by lake and river 1851
• The steamship Vanderbilt other
  Donated to the Union Navy and refitted as a cruiser to hunt the Alabama 1862
• New York Central and Hudson River Railroad company
  The consolidation of his lines into one of the first giant US corporations 1870
• Grand Central Depot building
  Built on 42nd Street and replaced by Grand Central Terminal in 1913 1871
• Vanderbilt University company
  A 1 million dollar gift, the largest American charitable donation to that date 1873

• December 19, 1813 aged 19 Marries his first cousin Sophia Johnson at 19
• November 24, 1817 aged 23 Thomas Gibbons hires him to captain a steamboat between New Jersey and New York He kept his own businesses running and became Gibbons's business manager.
• March 2, 1824 aged 29 The Supreme Court decides Gibbons v. Ogden and breaks the New York steamboat monopoly Vanderbilt had gone to Washington himself to retain Daniel Webster.
• November 8, 1833 aged 39 Nearly killed in the Hightstown rail wreck in New Jersey John Quincy Adams was on the same train.
• 1849 aged ~55 Switches from regional steamboats to ocean steamships as the California gold rush opens
• 1863 aged ~69 Corners the stock of the New York and Harlem Railroad and takes its presidency It was the line everyone else thought was worthless.
• August 21, 1869 aged 75 Marries Frank Armstrong Crawford at London, Ontario Sophia had died the year before. His second wife pressed the Vanderbilt University gift on him.
• 1873 aged ~79 Gives 1 million dollars to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville
• January 4, 1877 aged 82 Dies at 10 Washington Place after eight months confined to his rooms The stated cause was exhaustion after long chronic illness.

• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. hired to argue Gibbons v. Ogden
• Jay Gould 1836–1892
  Controlled major railroad and telegraph systems through aggressive stock manipulation. fought in the Erie War
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. survived the same train wreck
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. the fortune that finally passed his
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. the next answer to the same question
• Anderson Cooper b. 1967
  CNN anchor and correspondent known for his international reporting and coverage of major disasters and conflicts. descendant