E. H. Harriman

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E. H. Harriman
Born	Edward Henry Harriman 20 February 1848(1848-02-20) Hempstead, New York, USA
Died	September 9, 1909 (aged 61) Orange County, New York, USA

Edward Henry Harriman (20 February 1848 – 9 September 1909) was an American railroad executive.

Biography

Early years

Harriman was born in Hempstead, New York, the son of Orlando Harriman, an Episcopal clergyman, and Cornelia Neilson. His great-grandfather, William Harriman, emigrated from England in 1795 and engaged successfully in trading and commercial pursuits.

As a young boy, Harriman spent a summer working at the Greenwood Iron Furnace in the area owned by the Robert Parker Parrott family that would become Harriman State Park. He quit school at age 14 to take a job as an errand boy on Wall Street in New York City. His uncle Oliver Harriman had earlier established a career there. His rise from that humble station was meteoric. By age 22, he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. And, by age 33, he focused his energies on acquiring rail lines.

Career

In 1885 Harriman learned that the 7,863 acres (31.82 km²) Parrott family estate was for sale. He bought it for $52,500 and named it Arden (now a hamlet in Tuxedo, New York). Over the next several years he purchased an additional 20,000 acres (81 km²) almost forty different parcels of land, and built forty miles of bridle paths to connect them all. His master 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m²) home (Arden House) which sat high above the Palisades Parkway, was completed only seven months before he died. In the early 1900s, his sons W. Averell Harriman and E. Roland Harriman hired landscape architect Arthur P. Kroll to work closely with the head gardener and landscape those many acres. It was from this estate that his widow would donate ten thousand acres (40 km²) to New York state to start Harriman State Park in 1910.

Harriman was nearly fifty years old when in 1897 he became a director of the Union Pacific Railroad. By May 1898 he was chairman of the executive committee, and from that time until his death his word was law on the Union Pacific system. In 1903 he assumed the office of president of the company. From 1901 to 1909, Harriman was also the President of the Southern Pacific railroad. The vision of a unified UP/SP railroad was planted with Harriman. (The UP and SP were reunited on Sept. 11, 1996 when the ICC approved their merger.)

At the time of his death Harriman controlled the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Saint Joseph and Grand Island, the Illinois Central, the Central of Georgia, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the Wells Fargo Express Company. Estimates of his estate ranged from $200 million to $600 million. It was left entirely to his wife.

The Harriman Alaska Expedition

In 1899, Harriman financed and accompanied a scientific expedition to catalog the flora and fauna of the Alaska coastline from its lush southern panhandle to Prince William Sound. Among the scholars who joined him were John Burroughs, John Muir, George Bird Grinnell, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Edward Curtis, Trevor Kincaid, G. K. Gilbert, Albert Fisher, Robert Ridgway, Charles Keeler, Frederick Coville, Frederick Dellenbaugh, William Emerson Ritter and Clinton Hart Merriam. They made the trip on a luxuriously refitted 250-foot (76 m) steamer, George W. Elder.

Personal life

In 1879 he married Mary Williamson Averell, the daughter of William J. Averell, a banker of Ogdensburg, New York, who was president of the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad Company. This relationship aroused his interest in up-state transportation and two years later his career as a rebuilder of bankrupt railroads began with a small broken-down railroad called the Lake Ontario Southern which he renamed the Sodus Bay & Southern, reorganized, and sold with considerable profit to the Pennsylvania Railroad.

• Averell Harriman, son
  • His third wife was Pamela Harriman
• E. Roland Harriman, son
• Mary Harriman, daughter, founder of the Junior League

Upon Harriman's death in 1909, naturalist John Muir, who had joined him on his 1899 Alaska expedition, wrote in his eulogy of Harriman, "In almost every way, he was a man to admire."

Legacy

The Union Pacific Harriman Dispatch Center in Omaha, Nebraska is named for Edward H. Harriman. In 1913, his widow created the E. H. Harriman Award to recognize outstanding achievements in railway safety. The award has been presented on an annual basis since then.

His estate, Arden, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

Harriman is mentioned in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the commercial baron who, annoyed by how frequently the film's eponymous bandits stole money from trains travelling Harriman-controlled frontier railways, sent bounty hunters after the pair and outfitted a specially-equipped train. In the movie The Wild Bunch, railroad man named 'Harrigan' similarly hires bounty hunters and outfits a special train to track down the outlaws.

Harriman was also featured in the computer game Railroad Tycoon II, as a computer AI character.

It is unknown whether the character 'Herriman' of the children's cartoon Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is a parody of E.H. Harriman. Their last names are near-identical, both wear formal attire, and the whiskers seen on the rabbit closely resemble E.H. Harriman's moustache.

References

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External links

• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 254 photographs from 1899 of Edward Harriman's scientific expedition to Alaska, including images of Alaskan Native Americans and their villages, scenic views of the coastline, glaciers and Alaskan towns.