Ira Gordon

As sometimes happens, when one looks into one story, another more-or-less unrelated story emerges.  In this case, while Dr. Richard Thomas was researching the Hawkins family cemetery in Brookhaven hamlet, the short article to the right was uncovered:

This led  to several questions:

While the location of the Harrison estate was well, known, who was Colonel Green?

While the members of the Post family were well known, who was Frederick Post?

This following is the “story” as developed by Dr. Thomas.

The Death of Ira Gordon, heir of Mrs. Emily O. Hawkins

by Richard Thomas

First, the back story:  Henrietta Green and her son Col. Edward Green

The Harrison estate on Beaver Dam Road, Brookhaven, NY was rented for the summer of 1920 by Col. Edward “Ned” Green, the son of the richest woman in the world, Henrietta “Hetty” Howland Robinson Green.

Col. Edward Green, son of the late Hetty Green, has leased the Harrison place on River Road [Beaver Dam Road], Brookhaven and will spend the season there. (Suffolk County News (Sayville), 18 Jun 1920, p. 6.
Hetty’s mother, Abby (Howland) Robinson, was constantly ill, so her father, Edward Robinson, performed most of the parental duties.  At the age of six, Hetty was reading the financial columns to her father and was instructed by him on what it all meant.  By the time she was 15, she knew more about how to make money on Wall Street than the men who had spent most of their lives trying to do it.

Upon her father’s death, Hetty Robinson inherited most of the Howland fortune, $7.5 million dollars.  Her maiden aunt controlled the rest, and when Aunt Sarah died and left her $2 million to New Bedford for libraries and school programs and to charities, Hetty challenged the will, and although not winning, did succeed in getting use of the income generated by the $2 million dollars until her death.  The principal had to be held in trust until she died.

After the Civil War, the price of government bonds was depressed because of uncertainty in the cost of recovering from that war.  Hetty had plenty of capital and invested heavily in US bonds and made $1.25 million in one year.

Hetty was generally not a speculator and did not look for a quick return.  When asked how she made her fortune, she replied, “I buy cheap, and I sell dear.

When she read about how Chicago was rapidly expanding, she went to Illinois, determined where the boundaries of Chicago might extend in fifteen to twenty years, and bought up a great deal of property in that region while it was still cheap.

She studied the railroads and discovered that while the major railroads owned great expanses of their own track, there were many sections in the country where the railroads paid local companies to use their tracks.  She determined where these small lengths of track existed that provided critical links in the systems of major carriers, then purchased them up, greatly raised the rates, and forced the railroads to buy back her railroads at a much increased price.

When she married at age 33, she insisted on a pre-nup agreement and made it be known that she would not cover her husband’s debts.  Despite that, an old respected financial house on Wall Street, John J. Cisco & Son, where Hetty had $550,000 stored, did make large loans to her husband, and when he couldn’t pay them off, came calling on Hetty.

She would either have to bail them out or they would collapse.  She let them collapse.  Hetty removed what was left of her deposits from the institution and moved them to Chemical Bank.  Even though it meant she would lose 25% of her deposits, Hetty decided that Cisco was not too big to fail, and she was not going to reward them for doing something that they had expressly promised not to do, loan money to her husband.

Along with what was left of her money in Cisco, she brought along, in a cab with two private detectives, millions of dollars of deposits to the Chemical Bank.  In fact, it was more than the total of $23 million that Chemical Bank had on deposit at the time.  The President of Chemical Bank met her at the door and offered her an office in the bank for her own use, but she preferred to use offices and rooms that happened to be empty so that no one would know exactly where she could be found, particularly tax collectors and lawyers.  She hated lawyers, even her own.  The bank assigned two young men to find which rooms Mrs. Green was using for the day and respond to her requests for information or for movement of funds.

She kicked her husband out of her house and never allowed him to return.

Ned did not live frugally like his mother.  He had a suite of rooms at a Dallas hotel.  His mother feared that if Ned were to marry, the wife would squander the fortune she had accumulated.  So Ned instead hired a “housekeeper,” and, after he and his housekeeper moved to larger quarters, he decided to hire another housekeeper, one younger than the one he already had.

Ned soon extended his control into the political life of Texas and was made the chairman of the Texas Republican Party.  It was while he was in Texas that he was given the honorific title of “Colonel” by the governor.

His aging mother finally persuaded him to return to New York, where he occupied 16 rooms of the Waldorf-Astoria.  There he promoted his housekeeper to “confidential secretary” and his other housekeeper to “guest.”

At the time of her death on 03 July 1916, Hetty Green had a net worth of $100 million to $200 million dollars (somewhere between $2 and $4 billion in today’s dollars).