1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Stewart, Alexander Turney
STEWART, ALEXANDER TURNEY (1803–1876), American merchant, was born, of Scotch descent, at Lisburn, near Belfast, Ireland, on the 12th of October 1803. He studied for the ministry for about two years at Trinity College, Dublin, emigrated to New York in 1823, and in 1825 opened a small dry goods store In 1848 he built at the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway a store which became the wholesale department upon the completion in 1862 of the large store on Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The business grew to enormous proportions for those days, with foreign branches in Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow, Berlin, Paris and Lyons. Stewart was chairman of the commission sent by the United States to the Paris Exposition of 1867. In 1869 he was appointed secretary of the treasury by President U. S. Grant, but the Senate refused to confirm the appointment because of an old law excluding from the office any one interested in the importation of merchandise. Grant asked Congress to repeal the law, and Stewart offered to transfer his business to trustees and to give its proceeds while he held office to charitable institutions, but the nomination was never confirmed. Stewart sent to Ireland a shipload of provisions during the famine of 1846; he manufactured and sold to the government, at less than the prevailing rates, great quantities of cotton cloth for the use of the army during the Civil War; he took an active part in the prosecution of the “Tweed Ring” in New York; he sent a shipload of flour to the French sufferers from the Franco-German War, and he gave $50,000 to the sufferers from the Chicago fire of 1871. In 1869 he bought some 7000 acres on the Hempstead Plain, Long Island, New York, and established Garden City for working men. The cathedral of the Incarnation (Protestant Episcopal) dedicated in 1885, was erected in Garden City by Stewart’s widow as a memorial to him. He died in New York on the 10th of April 1876,[1] leaving the bulk of his great fortune to his widow, Mrs Cornelia (Clinch) Stewart (1802–1886)[2]. His large art collection was sold by auction in New York in 1887.
See William O. Stoddard, “Alexander Turney Stewart,” in Men of Business (New York, 1893) ; “A Merchant Prince,” in Chambers’s Journal (1876), vol. liii. ; Edward Crapsey, “A Monument of Trade,” in The Galaxy (1882), vol. ix.; “Stewart’s,” in The Nation (1882), vol. xxxiv.; “The Story of a Millionaire’s Grave,” in Chambers’s Journal (1888), vol. lxv.; and George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York, 1887).
- ↑ On the 6th of November 1878 his body was stolen from St Mark’s churchyard in New York, but recovered in 1881 upon the payment of $20,000, and buried in the crypt of the cathedral in Garden City.
- ↑ Upon her death she left a small part of her estate to her other relatives and her servants, about $4,631,000 to Charles J. Clinch, a kinsman, and about $9,262,000 to Judge Henry Hilton (1824–1899), a business associate of Stewart, who had received a legacy of $1,000,000 from Stewart, and who managed Mrs Stewart’s business affairs after her husband’s death. Clinch and Hilton were executors, and it was understood that Hilton should complete the cathedral at Garden City and endow schools there. A nephew of Mrs Stewart in 1887 sued to break the will on the ground that Hilton had unduly influenced her; the case was compromised out of court in 1890 and Mrs Stewart’s relatives received more of her estate than they would have got under the terms of the testament.