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.

Adult life and career

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

In 1906 he created American Gas & Electric Co., and six years later created another holding company, Central States Electric Corp.

During WW1 he served as an assistant to Bernard Baruch, at the War Industries Board, in Washington D.C.

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 banker J. P. Morgan, Jr.

In 1923, Williams financed and sponsored a trip to the Galápagos Islands through the New York Zoological Society that was led by naturalist William Beebe. Because of his patronage, there is a volcano in the Galapagos named after him. 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.

Williams bought the Krupp-built Vanadis, then largest yacht afloat, with a cruising radius of 12,000 mi., renamed her Warrior and refitted her for his own oceanographic and pleasure purposes.

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 the City. They further purchased "Dunstable" in the Village of Bayville, on Pine Island, New York near Oyster Bay, Long Island (renaming it "Oak Point"), and an additional home "Blythedunes", designed by Maurice Fatio, at 513 North County Blvd., in Palm Beach, Florida. In later years Mona would several times be voted the "Best Dressed Woman in the World."

"Dunstable" had been the home of Winslow S. Pierce, the senior partner in the Wall Street law firm of Pierce & Greer, and the attorney for George Jay Gould I, the railroad executive and son of railroad financier Jay Gould. 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 pavilion, several holes of golf, beautiful formal gardens, and a U-shaped carriage house for his fourteen Rolls-Royce automobiles, which now serves as the Village Hall for the Village of Bayville.

By 1929, Williams had accumulated a fortune estimated at a $680 million 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 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.

References

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