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Frederick H. Prince

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Frederick Henry Prince (1859 – 3 February 1953) was an American stockbroker, investment banker and financier.

He was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, the son of Frederick O. Prince, former Mayor of the city of Boston and Helen Henry Prince. He studied at Harvard University, but left in his sophomore year to get an early start in the business world. He acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, on 10 December 1885 and retained his individual membership throughout his life.

Business career

Prince made a fortune through his investments in a number of business ventures. Seeing the potential for the stockyard business, during the first decade of the 20th Century, he began buying up small companies, merging them into the giant Union Stockyards and Transit Company, of which he was chairman. To ensure control over delivery service to his stockyards, a significant and integral part of the food and tobacco sector, Prince's company acquired outright or held a controlling interest in the Pere Marquette Railway and the Chicago Junction Railway. Combined, these gave his stockyard operations hundreds of miles of rail lines and close to 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land. In the early 1920s, Prince acquired Armour and Company, one of the country's major slaughterhouses and meatpacking operations.

A friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Prince helped finance Kennedy's 1925 acquisition of the Robertson-Cole/Film Book Offices, which would evolve into RKO Pictures.

A Republican Party member and delegate to the 1928 convention, Prince aided President Franklin D. Roosevelt efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1933, he formulated a widely debated program for consolidation for the nation's railroads. Known as the 'Prince Plan', it was projected to create savings for the nation's railroads of $740,000,000 annually. The Plan was rejected, because it would have thrown thousands of workers out of their jobs.[1] This experience led him to also propose sweeping changes in the United States Constitution to make the President more independent.

Personal life

Prince married Abigail Kinsley Norman (1860–1949) in 1884. They they had two sons, Frederick Henry Prince Jr. (1885–1962) and Norman Prince, who died in 1916 while flying with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I.

Besides his home in Biarritz, Mr. Prince had an estate "Villa Sainte-Helene" at Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France (today the residence of the Préfet des Pyrénées-Atlantiques), where he had been Master of Foxhounds in the annual hunt for more than 25 years. He had homes in Boston (including Princemere, detailed below) and Aiken, South Carolina, and in 1932, bought the Marble House at Newport, Rhode Island from Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont (formerly Alva Vanderbilt).

In 1947, Frederick H. Prince and his wife established the Prince Charitable Trusts, that is a benefactor to various philanthropic endeavours in the city of Chicago, Washington, D.C. and the state of Rhode Island.[2]

Sportsman

Prince was a member of the New York Yacht Club, he owned the Weetamoe, a J-class yacht. The Weetamoe competed for a berth in the America's Cup, losing in the 1934 trials to the ultimate Cup winner Harold Stirling Vanderbilt and his yacht, Rainbow.

In the 1890s, Prince purchased a 994 acres (402 ha) estate at Wenham, Massachusetts, that he called Princemere. He owned a large number of horses and established numerous riding trails and carriage roads on the estate. Prince was one of the nine founding members of the National Steeplechase Association, created in 1895 to organize competitive steeplechase racing.

Following his death, Gordon College relocated to the estate in 1955. The most distinct building on campus is the stone mansion, built in 1911, which had been Prince's residence. Today, it is known as Frost Hall and houses many of the College's faculty and administrative offices, as well as the Admissions Department.

References

  1. ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,762088,00.html?iid=digg_share
  2. ^ "Profile of Prince Charitable Trusts on Foundation Center". Archived from the original on August 20, 2018. Retrieved August 20, 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
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