Jay Gould

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Jason "Jay" Gould

Jay Gould , actually Jason Gould , (born May 27, 1836 in Roxbury , New York , † December 2, 1892 in New York City ) was an American investor and entrepreneur .

Life

Gould was the son of a farmer from Roxbury, Delaware County . The principal of his school, the Howard Academy, helped him get a job as an accountant for a blacksmith. After a year the blacksmith offered him to take over half of the forge. Gould sold the stake to his father in 1854, proving his business acumen. He left school at the age of 16 but continued to devote himself to mathematics and land surveying . As a land surveyor, he issued a map of Ulster County, New York. In 1856 he published the History of Delaware County, and Border Wars of New York . He became a partner of Zadock Pratt , with whom he opened a tannery in Pennsylvania, which he named Gouldsboro . Over time, he bought Pratt out of the business, which withdrew. In 1856 he entered into a new partnership with Charles Mortimer Leupp . Charles was the son-in-law of Gideon Lee , the leading leather dealer at the time. The partnership ran satisfactorily until the panic of 1857 . While the financial turmoil was a curse for Leupp, who lost all of the money he had invested in the business, it was a godsend for Gould: the low interest rates on land made him buy up his former partner's property. However, this had an aftermath: the land of The Gouldsboro Tannery was hotly contested with the help of armed troops. Charles Leupp's brother-in-law, David W. Lee, who was also a partner in Leupp and Gould , believed that Gould had betrayed the Leupp and Lee families in the company's demise, and he regained control of the tannery .

Gould's father-in-law introduced him to the railroad industry by asking Gould to help save his investment in the Rutland and Washington Railroad . That was his first acquaintance with banking .

On January 22, 1863, he married Helen Day Miller, who bore him six children. His son Frank Jay Gould (1877-1956) was the owner of several casinos and hotels on the Côte d'Azur . His grandson George Jay Gould II became Olympic champion in 1908 in Jeu de Paume , a forerunner sport of modern tennis .

Railroad business

Through his father-in-law, Gould got a job with the Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad . In a short time he reorganized the company and bought it. He did the same with Rutland & Washington Railway , from which he made high profits. In 1859, Gould went public and fought alongside Daniel Drew and James Fisk against Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad . Eventually Gould and Fisk gained power over the railway company. They manipulated the share value and had to relinquish management in March 1872.

During this time, Gould and Fisk allied themselves with the tycoon "Boss" William Tweed , whom they made director of the Erie Railroad. Tweed, for his part, retaliated by pledging cover from the judiciary to the two of them. In addition, Gould was in close contact with the US President's brother-in-law Ulysses S. Grant . The Black Friday of 1869 made Goulds speculations temporarily to an end when he was big to get into the gold market going.

In 1874 he got into the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad and took over the majority of the shares. On his initiative the organization and the financial situation of the railway were improved. When his efforts to replace the state construction loan were unsuccessful and he feared restrictions in the development of the company, he left again in 1883. He then devoted himself to building the Missouri Pacific Railroad . In this context, he invested again in the Union Pacific Railroad from 1890 to prevent the opposite development for the Missouri Pacific.

At the zenith of his power, Jay Gould controlled 16,000 km of track, one-ninth of all railroad tracks in the United States. He left his family an estimated $ 72 million fortune.

In 1880 he acquired the Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown (New York) , built in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis in neo-Gothic style, and converted it into his country residence. In 1961, his daughter Anna Gould donated it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation .

literature

  • Maury Klein : The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD et al. 1986, ISBN 0-8018-2880-5 .
  • Maury Klein: Jay Gould: "A Revisionist Interpretation", Business and Economic History, 2d ser., 15 (1986): 55-68. pdf
  • Residence of Jay Gould Publisher: The Decorator and Furnisher, Vol. 2 (July 1, 1883) - on the Internet Archive - online
  • Edward J. Renehan: Dark Genius of Wall Street , Basic Books 2011

Web links

Commons : Jay Gould  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Famous People: Jay Gould Biography
  2. ↑ Photographer: Portrait of Mr. Jay Gould . Published in "The Lotus Magazine", Volume 5. (June 1, 1914)
  3. ^ Lyndhurst also known as Jay Gould Estate
personal data
SURNAME Gould, Jay
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gould, Jason (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American investor and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Roxbury (New York) , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 2, 1892
Place of death New York City