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several hundred ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The average fortunes graded from $100,000 to $200,000. A similar pamphlet published in Philadelphia showed that that city contained a bevy of nine millionaires, only two of whose individual fortunes exceeded $1,000,000.[140] No facts are available as to the private fortunes in Boston and other cities. Occasionally the briefest mention would appear in the almanacs of the period of the death of this or that rich man. There is a record of the death of Alexander Milne, of New Orleans, in 1838 and of his bequest of $200,000 to charitable institutions, and of the death of M. Kohne, of Charleston, S. C., in the same year with the sole fact that he left $730,000 in charitable bequests. In 1841 there appeared a line that Nicholas Girod, of New Orleans, died leaving $400,000 to "various objects," and a scant notice of the death of William Bartlett, of Newburyport, Mass., coupled with the fact that he left $200,000 to Andover Seminary. It is entirely probable that none of these men were millionaires; otherwise the fact would have been brought out conspicuously. Thus, when Pierre Lorillard, a New York snuff maker, banker, and landholder, died in 1843, his fortune of $1,000,000 or so, was considered so unusual that the word millionaire, newly-coined, was italicized in the rounds of the press. Similarly in the case of Jacob Ridgeway, a Philadelphia millionaire, who died in the same year. The passing away now of a man worth a mere million, calls forth but a trifling, passing notice. Yet when Henry Brevoort died in New York City in 1848, his demise was accounted an event in the annals of the day. His property was estimated at a valuation of about $1,000,000, the chief source of which came from the ownership of eleven acres of land in the heart of the city. Originally his ancestors cultivated a truck farm and ran a dairy on this land, and daily in the season carried vegetables, butter and milk to market. Brevoort, the newspaper biography read, was a "man of fine taste in painting, literature and intellectual pursuits of every kind. He owned a large property in the fashionable part of the city, where he erected a splendid house, elegantly adorned and furnished in the Italian style; for he was quite a connoisseur in the arts." It can be at once seen in what transcendent degree Astor's wealth towered far above that of every other rich man in the United States. ASTOR'S TOWERING WEAL
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