Charles W. Harkness
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Charles William Harkness (December 17, 1860 – May 1, 1916)[1] was a rich man.[2] The son of Stephen V. Harkness and his second wife, the former Anna M. Richardson, he was born in Monroeville, Ohio, and his early education was in Cleveland.
Charles Harkness earned a B.A. from Yale College with the Class of 1883. Harkness, his half-brother William L. Harkness (Yale Class 1881), and several hundred others help found Wolf's Head Society, known originally as The Third Society, at Yale in 1883.[3] Harkness married Miss Mary Warden.
While at Yale he was described as "care-free, happy, irresponsible as the rest of us."[4] On his father's death in 1888, Charles inherited a fortune in stock in Standard Oil - the second largest holding in the company, surpassed only by that of the Rockefeller family.[2] He took on the responsibility of managing his father's properties. Harkness was a director at Standard Oil and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad company, and managed his father's immense holdings.[4]
Harkness was a member of the University Club of New York and the Morris County Golf Club of Morristown, NJ.
He died suddenly in 1916, leaving a fortune estimated at $170,000,000.[2]
Legacy
Harkness Tower at Yale is named after Harkness, not because of anything he did, but because his mother, Anna Harkness, provided a $3,000,000 donation to build the Memorial Quadrangle of dormitories in his memory. Harkness tower contains a carillon of 10 bells, the largest of which is inscribed "In Memory of Charles W. Harkness, Class of 1883, Yale College."[4]
The Cleveland Museum of Art has a $100,000 permanent endowment known as the Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund,[5] which was created through a donation, not by Harkness himself, but by his widow, Mary Warden Harkness. Though there is no evidence that Harkness himself ever had the least interest in the museum, the widow Harkness also left other significant bequests in his name, including paintings and china.
References
- ^ "Chas. W. Harkness Left An Estate of 60,000,000," New York Times, December 8, 1916
- ^ a b c Forbes, America's Richest
- ^ Phelps Association Membership Directory, 2006
- ^ a b c Yale University, A History of the Yale Memorial Carillon
- ^ The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 15, No. 2, February 1928
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