E. H. Harriman

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.

A 1907 cartoon depicting Harriman and his railroads as subject to federal law and the Interstate Commerce Commission

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. In 1903, he assumed the office of president of the company. From 1901 to 1909, Harriman was also the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. 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.)

In 1910, the first passenger train crossed the Dumbarton Rail Bridge, a project championed by Harriman.

At the time of his death Harriman controlled the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Saint Joseph and Grand Island, the Illinois Central, the Central of Georgia, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the Wells Fargo Express Company. Estimates of his estate ranged from $150 million to $200 million. That fortune was left entirely to his wife.

Harriman posing for a photograph alongside his wife, Mary Williamson Averell.

In 1879, Harriman married Mary Williamson Averell, daughter of William J. Averell, a banker in Ogdensburg, New York.[11] Together they had six children:

• Mary Harriman (1881–1934), who married Charles Cary Rumsey (1879–1922), a sculptor, in 1910.[12]
• Henry Neilson Harriman (1883–1888), who died young.
• Cornelia Harriman (1884–1966),[1] who married Robert Livingston Gerry Sr. (1877–1957) in 1908.[13]
• 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]
• William Averell Harriman (1891-1986), the Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, the 48th Governor of New York, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Britain. He was married three times: First to Kitty Lanier Lawrance (from 1915 until their divorce in 1929), then Marie Norton Whitney (from 1930 until her death in 1970), then lastly Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward (from 1971 until his death in 1986)[17]
• Edward Roland Noel Harriman (1895–1978), who married Gladys Fries (1896–1983) in 1917.[18]

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." Harriman was buried at the St. John's Episcopal Church cemetery in the hamlet of Arden, near his estate.[19]

• Harriman is the topic of a verse in the song "The Yama Yama Man" (1908) that concerns the war of succession with Stuyvesant Fish over the Illinois Central Railroad around 1906.
• 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.

• List of railroad executives

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edward Henry Harriman.

• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections – Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 254 photographs from 1899 of Edward Harriman's scientific expedition to Alaska, including images of Alaskan Native Americans and their villages, scenic views of the coastline, glaciers and Alaskan towns.
• Works by or about E. H. Harriman at Internet Archive