Rhinelander fortunes. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a ship chandler during the Revolution. Parts of his land and other possessions he bought with the profits from his business; other portions, as has been brought out, he obtained from corrupt city administrations. His two sons continued the business of ship chandlers; one of them—"Peter the Younger"—was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. "Peter the Younger" quickly gravitated into the profitable and fashionable business of the day—the banking business, with its succession of frauds, many of which have been described in the preceding chapters. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852.
It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate.
While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were transmuting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati.
HOW LONGWORTH BEGAN.
Longworth had been born in Newark, N. J., in 1782, and at the age of twenty-one had migrated to Cincinnati, then a mere outpost, with a population of eight hundred sundry adventurers. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The story of how Longworth became a