Harrison Williams (entrepreneur)

For other people named Harrison Williams, see Harrison Williams (disambiguation).

Harrison Charles Williams (1873 – 1953) was an American entrepreneur, investor and multi-millionaire.

Early life

Harrison Williams was born in Avon Township, Ohio in 1873 to Everett Williams and Laurett A. Williams. He graduated from Elyria High School in 1890. Williams abandoned an unsuccessful bicycle manufacturing business in Lorain in 1903. He went to New York City and took a job with a carpet sweeper company.

In 1900, he married Katherine Gordon Breed in Pittsburgh.[1] She died in 1915.

In 1906 he created American Gas & Electric Co., with his wife's brother, and six years later created another holding company, Central States Electric Corp.[2]

When the Prince of Wales visited the U. S. on various occasions, he was Williams' guest at Glen Cove, Long Island, in the house Williams rented from J. P. Morgan Jr..[3]

In 1923, Williams financed and sponsored a trip to the Galápagos Islands through the New York Zoological Society that was led by William Beebe. Because of his patronage, there is a volcano in the Galapagos named after him.[4] With Vincent Astor and Marshall Field he also financed Beebe's expedition to the Sargasso Sea. He also contributed financially to the American Museum of Natural History's 1926 expedition to Greenland, led by George P. Putnam.[5]

Williams bought the Krupp-built Vanadis, then the largest yacht afloat, with a cruising radius of 12,000 mi., renamed her Warrior and refitted her for his own oceanographic and pleasure purposes. He also had built, a fifty-six foot hydroplane type cruiser named "Whim III", by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation, of Morris Heights, New Jersey, and said by the New York Times, in an August 8th 1928 article, to be "the fastest cabin cruiser, in the world". At 51.8 miles per hour, Whim III enabled Williams to commute from Long Island to Wall Street, on a daily basis, when living on the Gold Coast. [6]

In 1926 at age 53 after being a widower for 11 years, Williams married the divorcée Mona Bush, 24 years his junior. They departed on a year-long around the world honeymoon cruise on Williams' yacht, the "Warrior". The trip was chronicled by Paul Cravath a prominent New York City attorney. When they returned, they bought Elbert Gary's mansion at 94th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. He further purchased "Dunstable" in Bayville, on Pine Island, New York near Oyster Bay, Long Island (renaming it "Oak Point"), and an additional home on North Ocean Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. In later years Mona would several times be voted the "Best Dressed Woman in the World". With the Williams' home in Bayville, and memberships at The Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club and The Creek Club nearby for sailing & golf respectively, weekending at "Oak Point" in Bayville became a much sought after invitation.

"Dunstable"/"Oak Point" had been the home of Winslow S. Pierce, the Sr. partner in the Wall Street Law Firm of Pierce & Greer, and the Attorney for George Gould the son of Jay Gould. The "Dunstable" Estate of some 150 acres sat just to the west of "Shorewood", the summer home of Joseph (Giuseppe) Serra (1867–1942), a politically active New York City real estate developer. The estate sat at the western end of a crescent shaped white pebbled beach, facing Marshall Field's "Caumsett" estate at the far eastern end of the view, several miles away.

Williams had the Pierce mansion converted from a Dutch Colonial exterior to an English Georgian motif by the New York Architectural Firm of Delano & Aldrich. He also added an indoor tennis & swimming pavillion, several practice holes of golf, and a U shaped carriage house for his fourteen Rolls Royce automobiles, which now serves as the Village Hall, Library & Museum, for the Incorporated Village of Bayville. The interior of the sports pavillion was decorated as an Art Deco French Cabaret, and contained murals by Jose Maria Sert, the renowned Spanish muralist. The pool house contained an hydrolicly operated pool cover, which served to convert the pool area into a ballroom.

The estate was considered one of the finest ever built on Long Island's Gold Coast, and was visted by many famous people including Cecil Beaton, the British photographer and socialite, who loved photographing Mrs. Williams, and Cole Porter, who famously wrote in one of his Broadway shows, "what do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is The Best Dressed Woman in the World".

By 1929, Williams had accumulated a fortune estimated at a $680 million dollars in public utilities, making him the wealthiest man in the country. He also began a business partnership with Waddill Catchings of Goldman Sachs & Co.

In 1937 he was investigated regarding investment trusts by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also that year he began an affair with Coco Chanel.

After Williams death, his wife Mona married her "secretary" Count Albrecht "Eddy" Von Bismarck, and spent much of the balance of her life living in Paris, and summering at her villa "Il Fortino" on the Isle of Capri, but returned to her Bayville estate several times each year. At Mona's death in 1983, by then known as "The Kentucky Countess", her will established the Mona Bismarck Foundation, at 34 Avenue de New York in Paris. The Foundation is dedicated to improving Franco-American cultural relations and is housed in Mona's former Parisian townhouse.

Books

John N. Ingham; Biographical dictionary of American business leaders.