Cornelius Vanderbilt

 Shyla Jogi

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

4/19/2022

Cornelius Vanderbilt

    

    Cornelius Vanderbilt originally started making money in the steamship business before shifting his focus to investing in railroads. In the early 1850s, Vanderbilt launched a steamship service that went from New York to San Francisco. This was via Nicaragua, which made the route much faster than the already established one across Panama. There was also another alternative, which went around Cape Horn, but Vanderbilt's line was much faster than that as well. It was an instant, booming success, and went on to make Vanderbilt more than $1 million a year, which today is around $26 million. He was married twice, both times to his female cousins, Sophia Johnson and Frank Crawford. He had 13 children. He had an incredibly ruthless approach to business matters, and sometimes his competitors would pay him large amounts of money just to ensure that he wouldn't compete with them. 

    Unlike the other Gilded Age titans (such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller), Cornelius Vanderbilt did not give away a lot of his fortune to philanthropic causes. He also didn't spend his money on grand houses and other high-value purchases. One of the only notable donations he made was the 1 million dollars he put towards building Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Although there are a few mansion under the Vanderbilt name that were built during the Gilded Age, they were all built by Vanderbilt's descendants. Some examples of these are the Biltmore in North Carolina and the Breakers in Rhode Island. When Vanderbilt died at age 82 in Manhattan, he left more than $100 million, which was most of his fortune, to his son, William. He was born in 1794 and died in 1877. 

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