Henry Melville Whitney (1839 - 1923)

Born 22 Oct 1839 in Conway, Franklin, Massachusetts, United States

Ancestors

Died 25 Jan 1923 at age 83 in Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States

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Biography

Henry Melville Whitney (October 22, 1839 – January 25, 1923) was an American industrialist, the founder of the West End Street Railway Company of Boston, Massachusetts, and later the Dominion Coal Company Ltd. and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company Ltd. of Sydney, Nova Scotia. He was also president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, long an important transportation link between Boston and New York City.

Henry Whitney was born on October 22, 1839 in Conway, Massachusetts[1] to Brigadier General James Scollay Whitney (1811–1878) and Laurinda Collins. Henry's well known younger brother was the financier William Collins Whitney (1841–1904), who served as Secretary of the Navy in the first administration (1885–1889) of President Grover Cleveland.His sister Lucy Collins "Lily" Whitney married Charles T. Barney, who became the president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Another sister, Susan Collins Whitney, married Henry F. Dimock.

On October 3, 1878, Whitney married Margaret Foster Green (1856–1932) of Brookline, Massachusetts, daughter of Admiral Joseph F. Green. Residing in Brookline, the couple were the parents of one son and four daughters:

• Ruth Whitney
• Eleanor Whitney, who married J. P. Gardner
• Laura Whitney
• James S. Whitney, who attended Harvard[28] with the class of 1908.[35]
• Josephine Whitney (b. 1891), who married Frank Boott Duveneck (1886–1985), the only child of painters Frank Duveneck and Elizabeth Boott.

Whitney lived in Brookline, where he died on January 25, 1923, at the age of 84. Largely because of the easy success of his younger brother, Whitney was generally supposed to be wealthy, but he had suffered losses from poor investments over a period of years. When the estate of "the supposed multi-millionaire", as The New York Times put it, was probated, it was found to be worth only $1,221.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Melville_Whitney