George I. Seney

Seney was born in 1826 in Newtown (now called Elmhurst, Queens) in what was then Queens County, Long Island. He was the son of Jane Augusta (née Ingraham) Seney (1800–1871) and Robert Seney (1797–1854), a graduate of Columbia College who became a Methodist minister and preached in Astoria (in present-day Queens).

He was a descendant of Joshua Seney, who represented Maryland in the Continental Congress, and Frances "Fanny" (née Nicholson) Seney (a daughter of James W. Nicholson, who was one of the first commodores in the United States Navy). His uncle, Joshua Seney Jr. was the father of Judge Henry William Seney.[3][4]

After studying at Wesleyan University, he completed his baccalaureate education at New York University, graduating in 1846.[1] He lived for much of his life in Brooklyn.

As president of the Metropolitan Bank in New York City, Seney was situated to become a financier of newly chartered railroads. The Bank failed, however, in 1884.[5] This permanently shadowed the remainder of Seney's life and career. He was forced to sell most of his art collection in auctions held in 1885,[6] and in 1891.[7]

In 1849, Seney married Phoebe Augusta Moser (1833–1904), a daughter of Samuel H. Moser and Lucinda (née Vail) Moser. Together, they lived at 4 Montague Terrace in Brooklyn and were the parents of ten children,[1] including:

• Robert Seney (1850–1923), a banker.[10]
• Jane Augusta Seney (1852–1926),[11] who married Albert Turner Plummer (1848–1913).[12]
• George Ingraham Seney Jr. (1860–1916), who married Grace Tappen, daughter of Frederick D. Tappen, in 1883.[13]
• Mary Robinson Seney (1863–1913), who married George Rumsey Sheldon, a Harvard graduate and banker.[14]
• Kate Seney (1868–1943),[15] who married John Woodruff Simpson, an attorney and art collector.[16]

Seney died of heart disease at the Grand Hotel on Broadway and 31st Street in New York City on April 7, 1893.[17]

Descendants

His granddaughter, Gertrude Sands Whitney

Through his daughter Jane, he was a grandfather of Jane Seney Plummer, who married Grant Barney Schley Jr., a son of Grant B. Schley,[18] in 1902. They divorced in 1922,[19]

Through his daughter Mary, he was a grandfather of Gertrude Alison Sheldon (1888–1969), who married Samuel Stevens Sands of S.S. Sands & Co. in 1910. After his death in 1913, she married financier Richard Whitney in 1916.[20]

When Dakota Territory representative (and later South Dakota senator) Richard F. Pettigrew traveled east in the late 1870s to find investors for a flour milling venture in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Seney was interested and helped bankroll the Queen Bee mill, which ruins still stand above the city's namesake falls. An island a short distance upstream was a popular gathering spot in the city's earlier days, and it was soon renamed Seney Island (however, the island later disappeared after the river's channel was altered to increase the flow to a hydroelectric plant built just north of the mill).[21]

In 1881 Seney endowed the construction of what is now Seney Hall at Oxford College of Emory University. In the same year he was a key founder and backer of what became the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in Park Slope.[1]