The coffin rested in the center of the great mansion hall surrounded by lilies, roses, and palms. At the head of the coffin was a large cross made from ivy with a wreath of lilies on it. There were also two baskets filled with roses. The service was limited to several prayers. Former Judge Horace Russell told reporters that Mrs. Stewart had been opposed to ostentation during her life and that her wishes were to keep her funeral simple, plain, and private.
“Nothing would have disturbed her more while living than the thought that an unusual display should be made over her when dead,” Russell told reporters.
In keeping with Mrs. Stewart’s wishes, there were no pallbearers. The undertakers’ employees carried the coffin out through the wide front door and down the steps to the hearse and slid the coffin inside. Twenty carriages were lined up on the street waiting to follow the procession to the train station. A special train of seven cars had been prepared to carry the body and mourners to Garden City for the burial ceremony.
At Garden City, the coffin was taken to the Cathedral of the Incarnation and carried to the front. Family and friends followed the coffin into the church and took their reserved seats at the front. About 1,500 people gathered in the cathedral for the burial service, which was conducted by Bishop Littlejohn. Following the service, the coffin was taken to the crypt. Only relatives and several close friends were allowed to accompany the body. Cornelia Stewart’s coffin was placed in a lead-lined casket that was put inside another chestnut box, which then was placed in the crypt beside the remains of her husband. A huge marble slab was placed on top of the crypt, and a three-thousand-pound marble urn was set on top of the slab.
“Mrs. Stewart died in the belief that she was to be placed beside her dead husband’s corpse. But, as a matter of fact, the magnificent cathedral in Garden City stands over that which in name only is the grave of A. T. Stewart. And that is what his riches brought him.”
—Louis Megargee, Seen & Heard, Vol. 1, 1901
MRS. STEWART’S FUNERAL
SIMPLE SERVICES IN THE
GARDEN CITY CATHEDRAL
A Few Friends And Relatives
Follow The Dead Woman From The
City—The Will Still Unopened
A crowd gathered as early as 9 o’clock yesterday morning in front of the house in which Mrs. Stewart lay dead. A belief seemed to be quite generally held that when the body of Mrs. Stewart was placed in the coffin, the big double doors would be thrown open to the public. It required the influence of the police to convince many persons that the funeral would be private. … It was 2:35 o’clock when the special train of seven cars, including two parlor coaches, pulled out from the station. … The run to Garden City was made without a stop in 45 minutes. … Ex-Judge Russell said yesterday that the contents of the will would not be made public until it was presented for probate. It is thought likely that it will be offered to-morrow.
—New York TimesOctober 29, 1886
Cornelia Stewart was dead and buried. Since her husband’s death in 1876, she had endured not only the theft of his remains, which were held for ransom, but also a seemingly endless string of civil litigation in the courts over her husband’s will and the millions it included. The stress of it all overwhelmed her at times, affecting her physical as well as mental health. According to some reports, gossip mostly, perpetrated by anonymous servants, she had lost her mind to the point that she would dress up each night in her finest gowns and jewelry, lighting every lamp in the Marble Mansion, pretending to entertain imaginary guests—bowing and curtsying—and carrying on lengthy conversations with ethereal high-society ghosts.
“Meanwhile, Mrs. Stewart sat at her 34th Street window, increasingly reclusive, absorbed with the dream of restored youth, watching the comings and goings at Mrs. Astor’s house across the street.”
—Wayne Craven, Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society, 2009
Still, despite rumors of her failing mental and physical condition, Cornelia Stewart managed to complete at least one of her husband’s most prized projects—Garden City—the planned community that he had envisioned and begun in 1869. She completed the construction of the $3 million monument to her husband, the Cathedral of the Incarnation, as well as the St. Paul’s School for boys and the St. Mary’s School for girls. It was not an easy task.
She was not able to save the Working Women’s Hotel, nor was she able to save her husband’s vast retail empire. Yet, the realization of the hotel as well as the retail business were in the hands of Henry Hilton, and so she could not be held accountable for their demise. And, at least in her own mind, and reportedly through her own pains, she was able to negotiate for the return of her husband’s remains and inter them safely in the cathedral in Garden City.
There were many people inside the Stewart family as well as outside who believed that Hilton’s Svengali-like hold over Mrs. Stewart and the family fortune was twofold. First, as one rumor had it, Hilton was, in fact, the illegitimate son of A. T. Stewart. One Philadelphia periodical, Seen & Heard, published by newspaperman Louis Megargee in 1903, wrote that American publisher G. W. Childs (1829–1894), who co-owned the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper, once said, “Why there is nothing at all wonderful in the fact that he should have favored his own son over all others, even though that son was illegitimate.”
Such speculation would answer why Hilton was able to obtain most of Stewart’s fortune following his death and the remainder of it following the death of Cornelia Stewart. There was no proof offered to corroborate this rumor.
The second most prevalent rumor was that Hilton was holding A. T. Stewart’s remains and had promised Cornelia Stewart their safe return and burial in Garden City’s Cathedral of the Incarnation if she acquiesced to his demands. Hilton knew full well Mrs. Stewart’s grief over the theft and her desire to have the remains recovered at any cost—even at the price of the entire Stewart fortune. This rumor also went uncorroborated.
“Hilton became her ruler, and the manner in which this man gradually absorbed the enormous fortune that Stewart left behind him, until the widow was almost without ready money to supply the needs of the palatial residence which had become a burden to her, passes belief. And since then, and almost even to the present day, the Hilton harpies have been snarling over the remains of the Stewart fortune, until they have come to be looked upon in the public eye as even more infamous than the ghouls who stole the bones of the dead millionaire.”
—Louis Megargee, Seen & Heard by Megargee, Vol. 3, 1903
The reading of Cornelia Stewart’s will took place in late October 1886 and was filed in probate court in early November. Only Henry Hilton was privy to the contents of it. The reading of the will set off another firestorm of litigation that would last until 1893 when all the stipulations in the will were finally resolved.
STEWART HEIRS IN COURT
SEEKING TO HAVE THE
WIDOW’S WILL DECLARED VOID.
Charges Made Against Ex-Judge Hilton
In The Complaint Filed
By P. H. Butler, An Heir At Law
A complaint has been filed in the County Clerk’s office by Prescott Hall Butler, who is about to bring suit in the Supreme Court to set aside the will of Cornelia M. Stewart. The complaint is perhaps one of the largest ever filed. … The alleged codicil in the will, the complaint says, giving Mr. Hilton this trust, was obtained by fraud and was part of a scheme or contrivance on the part of this defendant. … It is also claimed that the defendant never filed an inventory of about $20,000,000 worth of property including a large and valuable collection of works of art.
—New York Times
February 19, 1887
Mrs. Stewart made the will in July 1877. Subsequently, several codicils or additions were made to it. According to the New York Times, Henry Hilton, along with Charles Clinch and Sarah Smith, the children of Mrs. St
ewart’s deceased brother, James, received the bulk of the estate. Charles Clinch and Sarah Smith were to receive an estimated $4.6 million each. Hilton, on the other hand, was awarded, in trust, an estimated $9.2 million.
The entire Stewart estate was estimated at approximately twenty million dollars, substantially less than the reported forty million dollars that A. T. Stewart had left to his wife upon his death. The decline in the Stewart fortune was attributed to the transfer of the retail business to Hilton, the building of the Garden City cathedral and schools, and various gifts and homes that Mrs. Stewart reportedly gave to relatives. No mention of the fate of either the Marble Mansion or Stewart’s huge, expensive art gallery was made in the will. Mrs. Stewart had planned on bequeathing the mansion and its notable collection of paintings and sculptures to New York City as a gift of a sustaining fine arts museum. She entrusted her plans to Hilton, who, as he had previously done to many of the Stewarts’ requests, never carried them out.
“The curious members of New York’s money-oriented society wondered why the widow Stewart was wandering around in the marble barn, virtually alone, and who would be given the house in the end.”
—Mosette Broderick, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age, 2010
The New York Times reported the bequeathed legacies, both actual and estimated, as: Sarah N. Smith, actual, $250,000; Cornelia S. Butler, actual, $200,000; Lawrence Butler, actual, $100,000; Charles Butler, actual, $50,000; Kate A. Smith, actual, $200,000; Louise Smith, actual, $100,000; Ellen Smith, actual, $100,000; Bessie Smith, actual, $100,000; James Smith, actual, $100,000; Rosalie Butler, actual, $50,000; Helen Butler, actual, $50,000; Virginia Butler, actual, $50,000; Maxwell Butler, actual, $50,000; Prescott Butler, actual, $50,000: household servants, actual, $25,000; Henry Hilton (in trust), estimated, $9,262,500; Charles J. Clinch, estimated, $4,631,250; Sarah N. Smith, estimated, $4,631,250; total, $20,000,000.
Along with receiving the largest share, Hilton was named as executor of the estate, overseeing the Marble Mansion on Fifth Avenue as well as the complete Stewart art holdings. And what of the will’s amendments?
In May 1878, an amendment was added revising the legacy given to Henry Hilton. He was to be given half of the estate to be held in trust for completion of work on the Garden City cathedral and schools as deemed necessary. The codicil also stipulated that any heir who contested the will would forfeit his or her claim to the estate.
In July 1878, another amendment was added, authorizing Hilton to manage the money bequeathed him in the trust as he saw fit and without substantiating any of his expenditures.
A third amendment was added to the will in May 1882 giving Sarah N. Smith a one-half share of the interest in the estate left to Charles J. Clinch and adding a $25,000 legacy for her household servants.
The fourth and final codicil was added in November 1885, and it again increased the share of the estate left to Hilton, absolving him of any obligation to use any of the nearly ten-million-dollar trust fund he had been bequeathed in conjunction with Garden City, the cathedral, or the schools. Since the cathedral and schools had been deeded over to the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of Long Island, they were no longer Hilton’s responsibility.
So far as the public is concerned, this is the end of the Stewart estate.
—New York Times,
November 2, 1886
The luxurious Marble Mansion remained vacant for a short period of time, and finally in 1890, it was rented to the New York City Manhattan Club, a noted Democratic organization, which remained there until 1899. In 1901 it was sold to a private corporation and was subsequently razed to make room for the Knickerbocker Trust Company, one of the largest banks in the country at the time. The Stewart art holdings contained in it—consisting of some 240 paintings, statuary, and sculptures reportedly worth four million to five million dollars—were auctioned off in February 1887.
THE STEWART COLLECTION
It Is To Be Sold At Auction In
February
All doubt about the disposition of the paintings and other art treasures at the A.T. Stewart mansion has been settled by an order from the Executors to sell them at public auction. … Many of the paintings and other articles have never been seen, even by the most frequent visitors to the Stewart gallery.
—New York Times
December 17, 1886
“Hilton’s main force was audacity.”
—Louis Megargee, Seen & Heard, Vol. 1, 1901
The series of lawsuits, brought by heirs of the estate, contesting Cornelia Stewart’s will dragged on for years. Newspaper coverage of the lawsuits only further sullied Hilton’s already tarnished reputation. Reports exposed a sordid assortment of Hilton’s shenanigans. A June 20, 1888, New York Times article reported that an examination of the A.T. Stewart & Co ledgers showed that Hilton had paid himself about $5.5 million over a six-year period based on company profits, interest on capital, and guaranteed commissions. Payments he made to himself depleted the company’s working capital to the point that it was barely able to function.
It appeared that Judge Hilton was in the habit of drawing out of the business about all of his credits … making the total yield of the business to him as income on his capital, profits and commissions $5,490,615.75. He withdrew capital from the business during the closing months of the partnership until toward the end it was reduced from about $8,170,000 to about $3,300,000.
—New York Times,
June 21, 1888
Other public revelations demonstrated Hilton’s abuse of Cornelia Stewart. In an incident in 1880, made public in a Times article published in April 1889, Hilton had Mrs. Stewart sell her Chemical Bank stock to him for $190 per share. The stock was worth $1,700 per share at the time, and the value of it increased to $2,100 per share in 1885 and $3,000 per share in 1888. According to the newspaper account, “The point of the inquiry was to show that when in 1880 Judge Hilton allowed Mrs. Stewart 190 for 100 shares of that stock, he knowingly took care of himself at her expense.”
Going as far back as 1877, at the time Stewart’s body was stolen, Hilton had been the brunt of public ridicule and the object of scorn because of his many manipulations. Puck, the humor magazine that began publishing in New York in 1876, lambasted Hilton for his ridiculous and boorish behavior regarding the Grand Union Hotel incident in 1877.
“He made Stewart’s Grand Hotel in Saratoga ridiculous by excluding one of the leading bankers of the world because he was a Jew,” Puck proclaimed.
The magazine berated him for his handling of the Working Women’s Hotel, exclaiming, “He excited the laughter of the whole country by his absurd management of the Woman’s Home which Stewart built.”
But the magazine aimed its most profound attack on Hilton for his handling of the Stewart grave robbery.
For common decency’s sake, if they are not found soon, Mr. Judge Hilton ought to cut his throat and give his own bones to that grand mausoleum—for a mausoleum without bones is a farce. … He has got Stewart’s millions and in common decency he can offer a few thousands for the old man’s bones. … Puck’s advice to Mr. Henry Hilton is “Remember A.T. Stewart—his grave is empty now. Put yourself in his place!”
In January 1890, the Stewart heirs settled out of court, although some particulars of the litigation were not completely settled until 1893. The heirs, it was reported, were disheartened to discover that by the time the case was settled, most of the Stewart fortune was gone. According to reports in the New York Times, “The settlement of the litigation is much more advantageous to Judge Hilton than had been popularly conjectured.” Hilton was able to hang on to a vast majority of the wealth bequeathed him by Cornelia Stewart.
FINAL VICTORY FOR MR. HILTON
Litigation Over A. T. Stewart’s Estate
Believed To Be At An End
The decision of Chief Justice Daly of the Court of Common Pleas Thursday, in the action brought by Alexander Stewart to eject Henry Hilton from the realty of Alexander T. Stewart, was a victory for Mr. Hilton. … Lawyers believe that this decision undoubtedly ends all litigation over the property inherited by Mr. Hilton and the decision is of sufficient significance and weight to debar any suit in the future.
—New York Times
November 4, 1893
Despite Hilton’s victory in the courts, his ultimate handling of the once great retail empire built by Stewart ended in disaster. He tried to replicate the vast success of his benefactor, but all of his business endeavors and those of his sons were costly and abysmal failures. He formed Hilton, Hughes & Co. to oversee Stewart’s once vast and thriving retail empire, but the more Hilton established business corporations to further the retail trade, the more significant his losses became. This, however, did not curtail Hilton from buying splendid hotels and extravagant homes and lavishing himself and his family with other luxuries—all at the expense of the dwindling Stewart fortune. The downward financial spiral was unstoppable.
Bag of Bones Page 26