Description:

Cornelius Vanderbilt
New York, NY, ca. January-June 1824
Cornelius Vanderbilt Pays for Installation of New Pump in the Same Year that the Supreme Court Broke the Steamboat Monopoly Allowing Him to Make His 1st Fortune
MD
CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, Manuscript Document, Account with Andrew Agnew, January – June 1824, New York. 1 p., 7.625" x 7.75". Expected folds; light toning; very good.

Andrew Agnew wrote this account of work performed for Cornelius Vanderbilt, including taking out an old pump and installing a new one. The total bill was £7..19..0. After Vanderbilt paid the account, Agnew added, "Recd the above in full / $19-87½ / Andw Agnew." The conversion suggests they were operating with a conversion factor of £1 = $2.50

[Docketing by Vanderbilt:] "Andrew Agnew / $19 – 87½"

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born in Staten Island, New York, as the descendant of some of the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (New York). He began working on his father's ferry as a boy and started his own ferry business between Staten Island and Manhattan at age 16. Other captains began calling him "The Commodore," a nickname that remained with him for the rest of his life. In 1813, he married his first cousin Sophia Johnson (1795-1868), and they had thirteen children between 1814 and 1839. His oldest son William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885) became a businessman and philanthropist, who when his father died succeeded him as the richest American at the time. Cornelius Vanderbilt began working for Thomas Gibbons as a manager of his ferries. Gibbons went on to win the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) to overturn the New York steamboat monopoly of Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton. In 1829, Vanderbilt began operating his own steamboat lines out of New York, eventually dominating the steamboat business in Long Island Sound. In the 1840s, he began to invest in railroad lines, beginning with the New York, Providence, and Boston Railroad, which he took over in 1847. In the late 1840s, he began operating ocean-going steamships to meet the demand for migration to California and then transatlantic routes. During the Civil War, Vanderbilt donated his largest steamship to the Union Navy, for which he received a Congressional Gold Medal. In the 1850s and 1860s, Vanderbilt invested in and sometimes took control of several railroads; he sold the last of his ships in 1864 to concentrate on railroads. After his first wife died in 1868, he married a cousin in 1869 with the unusual name of Frank Armstrong Crawford (1839-1885). She convinced him to donate $1 million to establish Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. At his death in 1877, Vanderbilt left 95 percent of his $105 million estate to his oldest son William and William's four sons and left his other living son and nine daughters comparatively little.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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  • Dimensions: 7.625" x 7.75"
  • Medium: MD

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