Harriman was born on February 20, 1848, in Hempstead, New York, the son of Orlando Harriman Sr., an Episcopal clergyman, and Cornelia Neilson.[3] He had a brother, Orlando Harriman Jr.[5] His great-grandfather, William Harriman, had emigrated from England in 1795 and became a successful businessman and trader.
As a young boy, Harriman spent a summer working at the Greenwood Iron Furnace in the area owned by the Robert Parker Parrott family that would become Harriman State Park. He quit school at age 14 to take a job as an errand boy on Wall Street in New York City. His uncle Oliver Harriman had earlier established a career there. By age 22, he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange.
Harriman's father-in-law was president of the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad Company, which aroused Harriman's interest in upstate New York transportation. In 1881, at age 33, Harriman acquired the small, broken-down Lake Ontario Southern Railroad. He renamed it the Sodus Bay & Southern, reorganized it, and sold it to the Pennsylvania Railroad at a considerable profit. This was the start of his career as a rebuilder of bankrupt railroads.
Harriman was nearly 50 years old when in 1897 he became a director of the Union Pacific Railroad. By May 1898, he was chairman of the executive committee, and from that time until his death, his word was the law on the Union Pacific system.[citation needed] In 1903, he assumed the office of president of the company. [citation needed] From 1901 to 1909, Harriman was also the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad.[citation needed] The vision of a unified UP/SP railroad was planted with Harriman. (The UP and SP were reunited on September 11, 1996, a month after the Surface Transportation Board approved their merger.)[citation needed]
In 1910, the first passenger train crossed the Dumbarton Rail Bridge, a project championed by Harriman.
In 1899, Harriman sponsored and accompanied a scientific expedition to catalog the flora and fauna of the Alaska coastline. Many prominent scientists and naturalists went on the expedition, aboard the luxuriously refitted 250-foot (76 m) steamer SSGeorge W. Elder.[6][7]
Harriman became interested in ju-jitsu after his two-month visit to Japan in 1905.[8] When he returned to America, he brought with him a troupe of six Japanese ju-jitsu wrestlers, including the prominent judokasTsunejiro Tomita and Mitsuyo Maeda.[9] Among many performances, the troupe gave an exhibition that drew some 600 spectators in the Columbia University gymnasium on February 7, 1905.[10]
Carol Averell Harriman (1889–1948),[14] who married Richard Penn Smith Jr. (1893–1929) in 1917.[15] After his death, she married W. Plunket Stewart, who had previously been married and divorced from Elsie Cassatt, the daughter of Alexander Cassatt, in 1930.[16]
Harriman died on September 9, 1909, at his home, Arden, at 1:30 p.m. at age 61.[2][3] Naturalist John Muir, who had joined him on the 1899 Alaska expedition, wrote in his eulogy of Harriman, "In almost every way, he was a man to admire."
In 1885, Harriman acquired "Arden", the 7,863-acre (31.82 km2) Parrott family estate in the Ramapo Highlands near Tuxedo, New York, for $52,500. The property had been a source of iron ore for the Parrott Brothers Iron Works. Over the next several years he purchased almost 40 nearby parcels of land, adding 20,000 acres (81 km2), and connected all of them with 40 miles (64 km) of bridle paths. His 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) residence, Arden House, was completed just seven months before he died.
In 1913, his widow created the E. H. Harriman Award to recognize outstanding achievements in railway safety. The award has been presented on an annual basis since then.
Stephen Birmingham writes in the book Our Crowd that "Ned" Harriman was considered one of the most disagreeable men of his period. The book quotes James Stillman of the National City Bank calling him "not a safe man to do business with, yet the Illinois Central run by Harriman was one of the best-run and most profitable in the country."[19]
Places built using funds donated from his sponsorship or estate[edit]
Harriman founded the Tompkins Square Boys' Club, now known as The Boys' Club of New York. The original club, founded in 1876, was located in the rented basement of the Wilson School in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and began with three boys.[21] Harriman's idea for the club was to provide a place "for the boys, so as to get them off the streets and teach them better manners."[22] By 1901, the club had outgrown its space. Harriman purchased several lots on 10th and Avenue A, and a five-story clubhouse was completed in 1901.[23]
Inheritance taxes from Harriman's estate, in the amount of $798,546 paid by his widow on March 1, 1911, to the State of Utah, helped fund the construction of the state's capital.
Harriman is mentioned in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), as the commercial baron whose agents become the title characters' nemeses. In the film's second train robbery, a railroad employee ascribes his refusal to cooperate with the robbery to his obligations to Harriman personally, and one of Butch and Sundance's intimates describes Harriman's hiring of famed outlaw-hunters to track down the gang's leaders.
In the movie The Wild Bunch (1969), a railroad official named Pat Harrigan serves as a stand-in for Harriman.
Harriman is a playable character in the video game series Railroad Tycoon.
Harriman is one of the several prominent industrial figures who serve as inspiration for Leviticus Cornwall in the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2.
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History stories feature a “robber baron” character named D.D. Harriman, a probable reference to E.H. Harriman.
^ abc"Edward H. Harriman". PBS. Retrieved November 22, 2012. Edward Henry Harriman was born in New Jersey [sic] in 1848. His father was an ordained deacon in the Presbyterian Church, his mother a well-connected socialite from New Jersey. ...
^"Orlando Harriman Dead. Brother of E.H. Harriman and Big Realty Operator"(PDF). The New York Times. December 30, 1911. Retrieved November 22, 2012. Orlando Harriman, brother or the late EH Harriman, died early yesterday in Dr. John Walker's Sanitarium, 33 East Thirty-third Street, from a complication of ...
Haeg, Larry, Harriman vs Hill: Wall Street's Great Railroad War, University of Minnesota Press, 2013
Hofsommer, Don L. "For Territorial Dominion in California and the Pacific Northwest: Edward H. Harriman and James J. Hill." California History 70.1 (1991): 30-45. DOI: 10.2307/25158551
Hofsommer, Don L. "Rivals for California: The Great Northern and the Southern Pacific, 1905-1931." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 38.2 (1988): 58-67.
Hofsommer, Don L. Minneapolis and the age of railways (2005)
Kahn, Otto H., Edward Henry Harriman (1911), reprinted as "The Last Figure of an Epoch: Edward Henry Harriman," in Our Economic and Other Problems (1920)
Klein, Maury. The Life & Legend of EH Harriman (U of North Carolina Press, 2000), The standard scholarly biography
"In the Matter of Consolidations and Combinations of Carriers," Interstate Commerce Commission Reports, XII (1908)
Articles and estimates of his life and work in Cosmopolitan, Mar. 1903, July 1909; Moody's Mag., Oct. 1906, Oct. 1909; Am. Rev. of Revs., Jan. 1907, Oct. 1909; McClure's Mag., Oct. 1909, Jan. 1911; N. Y. Times and N. Y. Sun, September 10, 1909; Railway World, September 17, 1909.
