Biography:

Cornelius Vanderbilt was a successful steamship and railroad tycoon, one of the wealthiest men of the Gilded Age. Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island, one of many children of a modest farming family. To supplement the family income, Cornelius’s father, also Cornelius, ferried produce to Manhattan. Young Cornelius much preferred sailing to school or farming, and by the age of sixteen he had established his own ferry service, a business that expanded during the War of 1812. In 1813, Vanderbilt married his cousin, Sophia Johnson, and together the couple had thirteen children. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth-century, Vanderbilt expanded his boating enterprises and his fortune, entering the steamboat business by 1818 when he went to work for Thomas Gibbons running a service between New York and New Jersey and settling his family in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Sophia ran a successful tavern. In 1829, with a capital of $30,000, he ventured out on his own to ply the Hudson River and Long Island Sound, competing successfully with steamboat established lines. By the late 1830s he was known as “Commodore” Vanderbilt and had a fortune of $1 million. In 1840, the Vanderbilts moved to a new mansion next to the old family farm on Staten Island. In the later 1840s, the family moved to Manhattan. It was during the 1840s, too, that Vanderbilt entered the railroad business, buying stock in several Long Island and New Jersey lines. In 1857 he became the director of the New York and Harlem Railroad, and he continued his acquisitions into the 1860s and 1870s. By 1865 he held a controlling interest in the Hudson River Railroad and was elected president. After a rate war with the New York Central Railroad, Vanderbilt acquired large quantities of its stock and became its director in 1867. In that same year he consolidated  the New York Central and the Hudson River Railroad, with himself as president. Sophia Vanderbilt died in 1868. The bereaved widower soon remarried, marrying a woman named Frank Crawford in August 1869. In 1871, Vanderbilt—at the instigation of his new wife—donated $1 million to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He also completed construction of Grand Central Depot in New York. By late 1876, Vanderbilt, now in his eighties, suffered a prolonged illness. He died at his New York City home on January 4, 1877, leaving a fortune of $100 million, mostly to his son William.