Harold I. Pratt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harold Irving Pratt (1877-1939) was an American oil industrialist and philanthropist, the son of Charles Pratt and Mary Helen Richardson. He was a graduate of Amherst College.

Pratt was a director of Standard Oil of New Jersey, now Exxon. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1923-1939. Pratt was also president of the board of trustees of Brooklyn Hospital, and treasuer of the Pratt Institute.

In 1944, his widow, Harriet Barnes Pratt, donated the family's four-story mansion on the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue and this became the CFR's new headquarters, Harold Pratt House, where it has remained to the present. This elegant limestone-clad building was designed by Delano & Aldrich in a neo-classical style

Welwyn, the family home built in 1913 at Glen Cove, Long Island is now the Nassau County Museum.

He married Harriet Barnes (1879-1969), a wealthy New York philanthropist, collector of Americana, and horticulturist. She served on several White House advisory committees on furnishings from the Coolidge to the Truman administrations. In 1925, she was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge as chair of the first committee created to advise presidents and first ladies and make recommendations on White House acquisitions and decor. In 1941, through the concerted efforts of Mrs Pratt, Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to the establishment of the Subcommittee upon Furniture and Furnishings and Gifts for State Rooms of the White House to be placed under the United States Commission of Fine Arts. Mrs Pratt served as its chair and a member until 1947.