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Vanderbilt's And The Vanderbilt Millions
Vanderbilt's And The Vanderbilt Millions
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Nook version of vintage magazine article originally published in 1900. Contains 21 Nook pages, with 14 illustrations.
Nice early look at one of America's first millionaire families, and how they got to be that way.
excerpt -
The Vanderbilt picture upon which the public loves most to dwell is that of the founder of the family plying a sail boat back and forth between Staten Island and New York in the days when the century was young. The water front of the city was not a thicket of masts, nor the city itself an aerial forest of spires, towers, and chimneys meeting the sky. A week would show no such stream of travel as a single morning ferry boat bears now; but here was laid the beginning of the fortune that has built marble palaces, changed a trackless Southern county into a baronial estate, and helped to restore to Blenheim the glories of its early days.
It is not wonderful that it is upon this picture that the average mind loves most to dwell. If Biltmore and the Breakers and English duchies grew out of a ferry boat, what future splendor may not arise from the toil in which the average mind is busied? It is not the unfriendly spirit which desires to keep down the pride of present greatness by allusions to a lowly past that makes the story of Commodore Vanderbilt the favorite one. Indeed, the Vanderbilt descendants themselves have been agreeably free from any ap¬parent desire to forget the sail boat and the Half Way House at New Brunswick, New Jersey, which he established as an adjunct to his growing travel system, and which his wife Sophia managed with notable skill.
Of all the money getters the first Cornelius was the most picturesque. To overcome fundamental difficulties, to put in motion a great machine, is more conspicuously splendid than to keep the, machine from running amuck when it is started. The founder of the Vanderbilt fortunes substituted steam power for wind at his little ferry; becoming a capitalist, he foresaw that the great fortune of America would belong not to the man who had ships crossing the seas, but to him who had trains crossing the lands. He bought the little spur of railroad now known as the New York and Harlem, and so the Vanderbilt system was begun.
Nice early look at one of America's first millionaire families, and how they got to be that way.
excerpt -
The Vanderbilt picture upon which the public loves most to dwell is that of the founder of the family plying a sail boat back and forth between Staten Island and New York in the days when the century was young. The water front of the city was not a thicket of masts, nor the city itself an aerial forest of spires, towers, and chimneys meeting the sky. A week would show no such stream of travel as a single morning ferry boat bears now; but here was laid the beginning of the fortune that has built marble palaces, changed a trackless Southern county into a baronial estate, and helped to restore to Blenheim the glories of its early days.
It is not wonderful that it is upon this picture that the average mind loves most to dwell. If Biltmore and the Breakers and English duchies grew out of a ferry boat, what future splendor may not arise from the toil in which the average mind is busied? It is not the unfriendly spirit which desires to keep down the pride of present greatness by allusions to a lowly past that makes the story of Commodore Vanderbilt the favorite one. Indeed, the Vanderbilt descendants themselves have been agreeably free from any ap¬parent desire to forget the sail boat and the Half Way House at New Brunswick, New Jersey, which he established as an adjunct to his growing travel system, and which his wife Sophia managed with notable skill.
Of all the money getters the first Cornelius was the most picturesque. To overcome fundamental difficulties, to put in motion a great machine, is more conspicuously splendid than to keep the, machine from running amuck when it is started. The founder of the Vanderbilt fortunes substituted steam power for wind at his little ferry; becoming a capitalist, he foresaw that the great fortune of America would belong not to the man who had ships crossing the seas, but to him who had trains crossing the lands. He bought the little spur of railroad now known as the New York and Harlem, and so the Vanderbilt system was begun.
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