several
hundred ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The average fortunes graded
from $100,000 to $200,000. A similar pamphlet published in Philadelphia
showed that that city contained a bevy of nine millionaires, only two of
whose individual fortunes exceeded $1,000,000.[140] No facts are
available as to the private fortunes in Boston and other cities.
Occasionally the briefest mention would appear in the almanacs of the
period of the death of this or that rich man. There is a record of the
death of Alexander Milne, of New Orleans, in 1838 and of his bequest of
$200,000 to charitable institutions, and of the death of M. Kohne, of
Charleston, S. C., in the same year with the sole fact that he left
$730,000 in charitable bequests. In 1841 there appeared a line that
Nicholas Girod, of New Orleans, died leaving $400,000 to "various
objects," and a scant notice of the death of William Bartlett, of
Newburyport, Mass., coupled with the fact that he left $200,000 to
Andover Seminary. It is entirely probable that none of these men were
millionaires; otherwise the fact would have been brought out
conspicuously. Thus, when Pierre Lorillard, a New York snuff maker,
banker, and landholder, died in 1843, his fortune of $1,000,000 or so,
was considered so unusual that the word millionaire, newly-coined, was
italicized in the rounds of the press. Similarly in the case of Jacob
Ridgeway, a Philadelphia millionaire, who died in the same year.

The passing away now of a man worth a mere million, calls forth but a
trifling, passing notice. Yet when Henry Brevoort died in New York City
in 1848, his demise was accounted an event in the annals of the day. His
property was estimated at a valuation of about $1,000,000, the chief
source of which came from the ownership of eleven acres of land in the
heart of the city. Originally his ancestors cultivated a truck farm and
ran a dairy on this land, and daily in the season carried vegetables,
butter and milk to market. Brevoort, the newspaper biography read, was a
"man of fine taste in painting, literature and intellectual pursuits of
every kind. He owned a large property in the fashionable part of the
city, where he erected a splendid house, elegantly adorned and furnished
in the Italian style; for he was quite a connoisseur in the arts."

It can be at once seen in what transcendent degree Astor's wealth
towered far above that of every other rich man in the United States.

ASTOR'S TOWERING WEAL