Edward T. Stotesbury
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Edward Townsend Stotesbury (1849-1938) was a prominent partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. and its Philadelphia affiliate Drexel & Co. for over fifty-five years. Stotesbury was born in Philadelphia on February 26, 1849 of Quaker parentage.
Mr. Stotesbury was married twice, his first wife, the former, Miss Frances Berman Butcher. There were three daughters born of that marriage. The first daughter Helen Lewis Stotesbury (21 AUG 1874 - 4 SEP 1874) died young. The second daughter Edith Lewis Stotesbury (3 APR 1877 - 1935 ) married, on 25 DEC 1903, Sydney Emlen Hutchinson. The third daughter Frances Butcher Stotesbury (7 NOV 1881 - 14 OCT 1950) married, on 5 JAN 1909, John Kearsley Mitchell.
Stotesbury got his start going to work for Drexel & Co., the well-known Philadelphia banking house of which Anthony Joseph Drexel was founder and directing head. He was always punctual, never absent. He kept meticulous records of every penny he spent. When Drexel went into partnership with J.P. Morgan, Stotesbury received a lucrative post. Proof of the fashion in which he made himself a valued junior employee of the firm was instanced in 1882, when he was made a partner. Years later he often told the simple story of his success, which, boiled down to: "Keep your mouth shut and your ears open."
One of the significant services which he performed in the course of his business career was that of assisting in the floating of the International Chinese Loan of 1909.
On January 18, 1912 Edward Stotesbury married Eva Roberts Cromwell (Mrs. Oliver Eaton Cromwell) of Chicago. He had been a widower for thirty some years. Stotesbury and his second wife Eva built three palatial estates: Whitemarsh Hall outside of Philadelphia; El Mirasol in Palm Beach, Florida; and Wingwood House in Bar Harbor, Maine.
In 1927, Stotesbury's fortune was estimated at $100 million. At the time of his death in 1938, it was down to an estimated $4 million. The stock market did crash in the years of the decline of his fortune. In the last five years of his life (a rate of withdrawal of more than $10,000,000 a year), while the Depression raged, the banker withdrew $55 million out of his account at J.P. Morgan.
He was also a director of the Reading Railroad, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Philadelphia Fidelity Bank, the Girard Trust Company, the Cambria Iron Company, Pennsylvania Steel Company, Latrobe Steel Company, Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, Keystone Watch Company, and the Jesup and Moore Paper Company.
His stepdaughter, Henrietta Louise Cromwell, married Douglas MacArthur, on February 14, 1922. She had two children from a previous marriage. They were divorced in 1929.
His stepson, James H.R. Cromwell, who was then married to Doris Duke, had become a devoted New Dealer. One day in 1936 Stotesbury told him, "It’s a good thing you married the richest girl in the world because you will get very little from me. I made my fortune and I am going to squander it myself; not your friend Roosevelt."
Stotesbury died at eighty-nine on May 21, 1938 and was buried in The Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Every year since 1927, the annual Stotesbury Cup Regatta, named for Edward T. Stotesbury, has been held in the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The Stotesbury Regatta is one of the oldest and largest high school rowing regattas in the United States.
Stotesbury, West Virginia a coal mining town in Raleigh County was named for Edward T. Stotesbury. Stotesbury was the former home of eight-term U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd.
