Henrietta “Hetty” Green was one of the most extraordinary figures to emerge in American business during the Gilded Age. She was among the richest women in the United States, yet her name became synonymous with miserliness. To the public, she was the Queen of Wall Street. To those who knew her habits and choices, she was the Witch of Wall Street.
She was born Henrietta Howland Robinson on November 21, 1834, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Edward Mott Robinson and Abby Howland. Her family was affluent, running the largest whaling fleet in the area and engaging in American trade with China at a time when that trade was heavily protected and restricted to a select few. Surrounded by business from childhood, she learned to read stock reports and financial papers at a young age. By the time she was thirteen, she was working as a bookkeeper for the family business.
Frugality was drilled into her early. Her father reportedly told her never to give anyone anything, not even kindness. Her first substantial inheritance came in 1860, when her mother died, leaving Hetty, then twenty-five, a house worth more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money. Her father then diversified the family interests, investing in New York shipping companies and buying government bonds that paid an exceptionally lucrative six percent annual interest.
The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, and there was significant money to be made. When her father died in 1865, five years after her mother, he left Hetty six million dollars, equivalent to well over a hundred million dollars today. Around the same time, her aunt passed away, leaving her a comfortable two million dollar estate. Although these inheritances became the subject of protracted legal battles in the years that followed, Hetty also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
Combined, this made her a very wealthy woman. Her determination to control her own finances was clear in her marriage arrangements. In the early 1860s, she met Edward Henry Green, a Boston businessman who also worked in the China trade. He was a millionaire in his own right.
When they married in 1867, Hetty insisted on a legal arrangement that gave him no claim to her money or estate. The couple had two children: Edward, born in 1868, and Harriet, known as Sylvia, born in 1871. Both were born in London, where the couple lived for several years in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Hetty and Edward eventually separated in the mid-1880s, though they remained legally married and partially reconciled later in life.
The cause of their falling out was Edward’s financial problems after they returned to the United States in 1873. On several occasions, Hetty had to bail him out with money. By that time, she could afford it. Hetty Green emerged into the American business world during the Gilded Age, the period roughly between 1870 and 1900 that saw explosive economic growth driven by railways, electricity, the telegraph, and the telephone.
This was also an era of major industrial expansion in the United States, Britain, Germany, and Russia. The resulting wealth creation gave rise to a new aristocracy of rich businesspeople and industrialists, even as the poorer classes endured grinding poverty and appalling working conditions. At the center of this financial boom was Wall Street in New York City. The street, named for the northern wall of the city built in the late seventeenth century, had become the financial capital of the United States in the early nineteenth century.
After the Erie Canal was completed in 1821, linking the Great Lakes to New York City, the city became the entry point for maritime traffic between the Atlantic and the rapidly developing Great Lakes region. Over the 1860s and 1870s, influential companies and businesspeople such as J. P. Morgan, John D.
Rockefeller, the American Tobacco Company, and General Electric established their interests there. By 1889, when the Wall Street Journal began circulation, Wall Street had become synonymous with American finance. This was the Wall Street where Hetty Green began making her presence felt in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Even while living in London, she had been investing in American bonds traded on Wall Street.
She initially invested the interest accumulating from her father’s estate, plowing it into railroad bonds as the country was rapidly being connected by railway lines. She also purchased large quantities of greenbacks, the emergency paper money printed by the Union government between 1861 and 1865 to pay for the Civil War. The value of these notes had depreciated in the years that followed, but Hetty held them in large quantities. She was handsomely rewarded in 1875 when President Ulysses S.
Grant’s administration backed the greenbacks with gold, causing their value to surge. Hetty made a considerable profit. Her investing philosophy was consistent: buy when things are low and nobody wants them, and hold them until people are desperate to obtain them. As the years passed, her wealth grew into the tens of millions.
She became a major lender to the municipal government of New York City as the Gilded Age ended and serious economic problems overwhelmed the American economy in both the 1890s and 1900s. At one point, she was believed to be the largest individual private lender in all of New York. Her wealth, however, was matched by an extreme reluctance to spend it. Despite having an office in the Chemical Bank on Broadway near Wall Street, she had no fixed home, drifting instead between hotels, boarding houses, and rented flats.
The apparent reason was her unwillingness to purchase a home in New York because she would have to pay city property tax. She also frequently changed residences to avoid tax collectors. Her miserliness extended to her personal habits. She reportedly never used hot water and did not turn on the heating during winter.
She supposedly did not wash her hands, leaving her fingernails constantly dirty and crusty. Many claimed she stank, especially in summer, and that those working in the same office as her stayed as far away as possible. She even avoided going to the doctor. After twenty years of being troubled by a painful hernia, she eventually had no choice but to undergo surgery.
Despite her immense wealth, she was outraged by the fee and tried to avoid paying. Numerous stories circulated about her stinginess, though some may have been exaggerated. She was believed to wear the same black dress every day until it became completely tattered and green from filth, and only then would she buy another plain black dress. One well-known story claimed she spent hours rummaging through a carriage looking for a lost two-cent stamp.
Whether true or not, it fit her reputation. She did routinely dress in a plain black dress, possibly due to her Quaker upbringing as well as her frugality. Hetty herself responded to such criticism: just because she dressed plainly and did not spend a fortune on gowns, people said she was cranky or insane. There were darker consequences to her obsessive guarding of her wealth.
She disapproved of her daughter Sylvia’s suitors, suspecting that anyone courting her was after the fortune Sylvia would inherit. Sylvia remained unmarried into her thirties. Eventually, Matthew Astor Wilks, a minor member of the enormously wealthy Astor family with some independent wealth of his own, met with her qualified approval. Even so, before the two married in 1909, Hetty insisted that he sign an agreement relinquishing any claim to money Sylvia would inherit.
The most dreadful episode of Hetty Green’s unwillingness to part with her money concerned her son Edward, known as Ned. When Ned was a child, he broke his leg. Hetty refused to pay for expensive medical care and tried to have him admitted to a free clinic. The administrators recognized her and refused her service, as free clinics at the time were reserved for the poor and lower middle classes, while the Queen of Wall Street could easily afford the best medical care in New York City.
Unperturbed, Hetty treated her son’s injury herself. The wound did not heal properly in the weeks that followed, and gangrene set in. Ned’s leg was amputated, and he used a cork prosthesis for the rest of his life. Despite this, Ned worked for his mother in later years, managing her business affairs in Texas and Chicago before returning to New York.
She spent her final months living with him, finally having a fixed residence. Hetty Green died on July 3, 1916, at the age of eighty-one. By that time, she was reputedly the richest woman in America. Her estate, split between Edward and Sylvia, was estimated at between one hundred million and two hundred million dollars, equivalent to roughly two and a half billion to five billion dollars today.
It can reasonably be said that she was the wealthiest woman in the world at that time. Unlike his mother, Edward enjoyed his wealth and liked to party. He built a mansion in Round Hill, Massachusetts, amassed notable stamp and coin collections, and made generous contributions to society. With her mother’s inheritance, Sylvia became one of the richest women in America.
When Edward died in 1937, she inherited almost all of his estate as well. Sylvia Green Wilks had no children and no close relatives. She died in 1951, leaving an estate worth about ninety million dollars after taxes. Her will could not be located at first, but it was eventually found stuffed in a tin cabinet.
A cousin, her closest genetic relative, was left five thousand dollars, though she went to court and was later awarded a hundred and forty thousand. The remainder of the fortune was divided among charities, schools, and hospitals. In the end, a large portion of the Witch of Wall Street’s great fortune, which she had been so unwilling to spend, was given away to complete strangers.