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.