Frederick H. Prince

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Frederick Henry Prince (1859 – 3 February 1953) was an American stockbroker, investment banker and financier. He was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, the son of Frederick O. Prince, former Mayor of the city of Boston, and Helen Henry Prince. He studied at Harvard University but left in his sophomore year to get an early start in the business world. He acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange on 10 December 1885 and retained his individual membership throughout his life.

Married in 1884 to Abigail Kingsley Norman (1860-1949), they had two sons, Frederick Henry Prince Jr. (1885–1962) and Norman Prince who died in 1916 while flying with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I.

Frederick Prince made a fortune through his investments in a number of business ventures. Seeing the potential for the stockyard business, during the first decade of the 20th Century he began buying up small companies, merging them into the giant Union Stockyards and Transit Company of which he was chairman. A significant and integral part of the food and tobacco sector, to ensure control over delivery service to his stockyards, Prince's company acquired outright or held a controlling interest in the Pere Marquette Railway and the Chicago Junction Railway which gave his stockyard operations hundreds of miles of rail lines and close to one million acres (4,000 km²) of land. In the early 1920s, Prince acquired Armour and Company, one of the country's major slaughterhouses and meatpacking operations.

A friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, in 1925 Frederick Prince helped finance Kennedy's acquisition of the Robertson-Cole/Film Book Offices which would evolve to RKO Pictures.

A Republican Party member, and a delegate to the 1928 convention, Frederick Prince aided President Franklin D. Roosevelt efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1933 he formulated a widely debated program for consolidation for the nation's railroads. Known as the 'Prince Plan', it was projected to create savings for the nation's railroads of $740,000,000 annually. The Plan was rejected because it would have thrown thousands of workers out of their jobs. This experience led him to also propose sweeping changes in the United States Constitution, to make the President more independent of faction.

Besides his home in Biarritz, Mr. Prince had an estate at Pau, France, where he had been master of the foxhounds in the annual hunt for more than 25 years. He had homes in Boston (including Princemere, detailed below) and Aiken, South Carolina, and in 1932 bought the Marble House at Newport, Rhode Island from Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont (formerly Alva Vanderbilt).

[edit] Sportsman

Frederick Prince was a financial supporter and co-founder of the International Tennis Club of Washington. A member of the New York Yacht Club, he owned the Weetamoe, a J-class yacht. The Weetamoe competed for a birth in the America's Cup, losing in the 1934 trails to the ultimate Cup winner Harold Stirling Vanderbilt and his yacht, Rainbow.

In the 1890s, Frederick Prince purchased a 994 acre (4 km²) estate at Wenham, Massachusetts that he called Princemere. He owned a large number of horses and on the estate established numerous riding trails and carriage roads. He was one of the nine founding members of the National Steeplechase Association, created in 1895 to organize competitive steeplechase racing. Following his death, in 1955 Gordon College relocated to the estate. The most distinct building on campus is the stone mansion, built in 1911, which had been Prince's residence. Today it is known as Frost Hall and houses the majority of the College's faculty and administrative offices, the Admissions Department, as well as a small number of classrooms.

In 1947, Frederick H. Prince and his wife established the Prince Charitable Trusts that is a benefactor to various philanthropic endeavours in city of Chicago, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and the state of Rhode Island.[1]