William Kissam Vanderbilt, I

William Kissam Vanderbilt I

• https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LZKD-XZB
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kissam_Vanderbilt
• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6598354/william-kissam-vanderbilt

Vanderbilt was a member of the prominent American Vanderbilt family. He managed railroads and was a horse breeder.

Born: 1849 in Staten Island, Richmond, New York, USA
Died: 22 July 1920 Paris, France

marriages

1. Spouse 1 Alva Erskine Smith

Born: 17 Jan 1853 in Mobile, Mobile, Alabama, USA Died: Feb 1933 in Domaine Daugerville-La-Riviere, [department], [region], France
Marriage: 20 Apr 1875 in New York, New York County, New York, USA

• Consuelo Vanderbilt F 2 March 1877 in New York, [county], New York, USA
• William Kissam Vanderbilt M 26 October 1878 in New York City, New York County, New York, USA
• Harold Sterling Vanderbilt M 6 Jul 1884 in Oakdale, Suffolk, New York, USA

1. Spouse 2 Virginia Graham Fair

Born: 1874 in Angels Camp, [county], California, USA
Died: 1935 in New York City, [county], New York, USA
Marriage: 12 Apr 1899 in Catholic Service
Theresa Alice Oelrichs Home, New York, New York, USA

Children

• Muriel Vanderbilt F 24 Nov 1902 in [city], [county], New York, USA

1. Spouse 3 Anne Harriman

Born: 1860
Died: 1940 in Paris, France
Marriage: 1903 in London, England

Children

1. #Consuelo Vanderbilt F 2 Mar 1877 in New York, New York, USA
2. Spouse 4 Rosamund Lancaster Warburton

Born: 19 Apr 1898 in Worcester, Worcester County, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 28 Aug 1947 in Northport, New York, USA
Marriage: 1927 in Mayors Office, Paris, France
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William Kissam Vanderbilt (December 12 1849 – July 22 1920) was a member of the prominent United States Vanderbilt family.

The second son of William Henry Vanderbilt, from whom he inherited $60 million, he was for a time active in the management of the family railroads, though not much after 1903. His sons William Kissam Vanderbilt II (1878-1944) and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt (1884-1970) were the last to be active in the railroads, the latter losing a proxy battle for the New York Central Railroad in the 1950s.

William K. Vanderbilt's first wife was Alva Erskine Smith (1853-1933), who he married in 1875. Born in 1853 to a slave-owning Alabama family, she was the mother of his children and was instrumental in forcing their daughter Consuelo (1877-1964) to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895. Not long after this the Vanderbilts divorced, William K. later marrying Anne Harriman Rutherford Sands and Alva marrying Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.

After the death of his brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1899 he was generally regarded as head of the Vanderbilt family.

Like other members of his wealthy family, he built magnificent Vanderbilt houses. His homes included Idle Hour (1900) on Long Island, New York and Marble House (1892), designed by Richard Morris Hunt--who also designed his 660 Fifth Avenue mansion in Manhattan (1883)--in Newport.

William Kissam Vanderbilt died in Paris, France in 1920. His remains were brought home and interred in the Vanderbilt family vault in the Moravian Cemetery at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York.

In World War II the United States liberty ship SS William K. Vanderbilt was named in his honor.

William Kissam Vanderbilt II 1878-1944

William Kissam II, known to friends as “Willie K".

He was educated by tutors, attended St. Mark's Preparatory School, and studied at Harvard. He spent his childhood at the family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, at summer houses in Newport, Marble House, and Long Island, Idle Hour. In the 1920's William and Rosamund Vanderbilt created a splendid winter estate on tropical island Carl Fisher in South Florida. This retreat was named Fisher Island. He was married in 1899 to Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt 1875-1935 known as Birdie, whose father James Graham Fair an Irish immigrant who made $200 million from Nevada's Comstock silver lode, one of the richest silver finds in history. They were the parents of William K. Vanderbilt III, Muriel and Consuelo Vanderbilt. Willie K. was an accomplished sailor and yachtsman, he liked horse racing, motorboats, automobiles and collecting. In 1900 he won the Lipton Cup trophy with his 70-foot yacht Virginia and was presented the award by Sir Thomas Lipton who initiated the races. His yacht were the Hard Boiled Egg and the Eagle.

the legendary 250 foot Eagle yacht swapped in 1925 by William K. Vanderbilt II for Carl Fisher's island

W. K. Vanderbilt Jr.'s auto boat Mercedes VI, won the first race on the Hudson River for the gold Challenge Cup 1904.

In 1904, Willie K. sponsored the first Vanderbilt Cup Race, for motor cars at Long Island. Later he and a group of men formed the Long Island Motor Parkway Corporation and built one of the country's first modern paved parkways. He was an automobile enthusiast in January, 1904 he broke the world's one-mile speed record at Ormond Beach, Fla., covering a mile in just 39 seconds at 92 mph. The Red Devil was only one of several cars Vanderbilt owned in his early days of driving. His first was a Stanley Steamer, purchased in 1899. In 1901, he bought a 33-hp Daimler in Paris that could go 65 mph called the White Ghost, in 1904 he had a white Mercedes.

Motor Racing Vanderbilt Cup

Original cup donated by Willie K Vanderbilt 1904-1905-1906-1908-1909-1910-1911-1912-1914-1915-1916. Revived in 1936 with a new cup donated by George Vanderbilt 1936-1937. A Formula Junior race was held in 1960 with another cup, donated by Cornelius Vanderbilt 1960. CART US 500 gains the rights to the Vanderbilt Cup, 1996-1997-1998-1999. Vanderbilt Cup is now awarded to the CART season champion, replacing the PPG Cup, 2000-201-2002.

The first Vanderbilt Cup started october 8th 1904, on Long Island roads

the Vanderbilt Cup made of Tiffany silver

first international competition for the WILLIAM-K-VANDERBILT-JR-CUP held on Long Island saturday october 8th 1904

and the last in 1916 Santa Monica. The first 300-mile George Vanderbilt Cup race at the new Roosevelt Raceway would be held on October 12, 1936, Columbus Day.

George Vanderbilt, the American multi-millionaire "sponsor" of the race, gives the enormous Vanderbilt Cup to Mantuan that is still on his Alfa Romeo type 12C-36.

He crossed the Atlantic in his father's luxury yacht, and at age 11 had his first ride in a motorcar, a steam-powered three-wheeler, in Monte Carlo. Willie K. went to Harvard, where he joined the yacht club and the polo club, but evidently was not a scholar and he left Cambridge after a year and a half with a certificate of honorable dismissal. In 1917, Vanderbilt was named president of the New York Central, but was always considered something of a figurehead. He attended night classes in navigation at the Merchant Marine School. He served in the Navy during World War I, and was a Lieutenant Commander in the United Naval Reserve. Arriving on Long Island, the Vanderbilts decided to build a country retreat at Lake Success and built a modest, by Vanderbilt standards, colonial-style home on the hilltop at Lake Success and called his new estate Deepdale. An avid collector of natural history specimens, ethnographic objects and other curiosities of exotic cultures, Vanderbilt sailed his yachts the Ara and Alva around the globe on expeditions that yielded a vast array of treasures for his collection, and he left an enduring legacy for all to enjoy in his Centerport estate, now the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum. In 1910, he began work on the “Eagle’s Nest” estate, a spanish revival style mansion on 43 wooded acres overlooking Northport Harbor, the property contrasted in scale with "Deepdale", Great Neck, Long Island, NY, built in 1902. In september 1927 Willie K. and Rosamund Lancaster Warburton, of Philadelphia, were married in a civil cermony at the mayors office in Paris. The official witness was his step-mother Anne, and the mother of the bride. Rosamund was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in May 1897 to John Edward Lancaster and his wife, the former Agnes Maria Fanning. In 1919 she was married at Elkton, MD to Barclay Harding Warburton, Jr. son of Warburton and his wife, Mary Brown Wanamaker, daughter of the department store founder John Wanamaker, of Philadelphia. The Warburtons, who had two children, Rosemary, who married William C.T. Gaynor, M.D. and had a child, and Barkley III, who married twice and who died in 1988 were divorced the year before her marriage to Willie K.

A Memorial Wing was constructed in 1935 in memory of his son, William K. Vanderbilt III, who had died in an auto accident in 1933 on a highway in South Carolina. William K. Vanderbilt III was returning to New York from his father's Florida estate when his car hit a fruit truck parked on the roadside. He was 26 years old. Vanderbilt, built a new wing to Eagle's Nest to commemorate his son, calling it Memorial Wing. It housed stuffed trophies from his son's recent hunting trips in the Sudan and a huge mural depicting young Vanderbilt on safari. In the 1930s Willie K. opened the estate to the public several days a week.

The fortune had dwindled by the time William K. Vanderbilt II died in 1944. The Fifth Avenue mansions built by his parents had been sold and wrecked. And none of the Vanderbilts could afford to live in any of the great estates that their parents and grandparents had built. Willie K. owned a hunting lodge and preserve in Canada, a farm in Tennessee, a place at Fisher's Island in Florida (complete with seaplane hangar, docking facilities, an eleven hole golf course, each hole being named after one of his yachts, tennis courts, swimming pool, etc.), and the summer estate at Centerport, "Eagle's Nest." Willie K. died in early 1944 of a heart ailment and was laid to rest in the Moravian Cemetery Staten Island Richmond County New York. Rosamund died three years later, and Eagle's Nest along with a $2,000,000 fund for its perpetuation, was left to Suffolk County, Long Island

The second son of William Henry Vanderbilt, from whom he inherited $55 million, he was for a time active in the management of the family railroads, though not much after 1903. His sons, William Kissam Vanderbilt II (1878–1944) and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt (1884–1970), were the last to be active in the railroads, the latter losing a proxy battle for the New York Central Railroad in the 1950s.

Vanderbilt's first wife was Alva Erskine Smith (1853–1933), whom he married on April 20, 1875. Born in 1853 to a slave-owning Alabama family, she was the mother of his children and was instrumental in forcing their daughter Consuelo (1877–1964) to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895. Not long after this, the Vanderbilts divorced and Alva married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.

In 1903, Vanderbilt married Anne Harriman, daughter of banker Oliver Harriman. She was a widow to sportsman Samuel Stevens Sands and to Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, Jr., son of the astronomer Lewis Morris Rutherfurd. Her second husband died in Switzerland in 1901. She had two sons by her first marriage and two daughters by her second marriage. She had no children by Vanderbilt.

After the death of his brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, in 1899, Vanderbilt was generally regarded as head of the Vanderbilt family.

Like other Vanderbilts, he built magnificent houses. His homes included Idle Hour (1900) on Long Island and Marble House (1892), designed by Richard Morris Hunt, in Newport, Rhode Island. Hunt also designed Vanderbilt's 660 Fifth Avenue mansion (1883).

Vanderbilt was a co-owner of the yacht Defender, which won the 1895 America's Cup. Vanderbilt was a founder and president of the New Theatre.

Vanderbilt was one of the founders of the The Jockey Club. He was a shareholder and president of the Sheepshead Bay Race Track in Brooklyn, New York and the owner of a successful racing stable.

In 1896, he built the American Horse Exchange at 50th Street (Manhattan) and Broadway. In 1911 he was leased it (and eventually sold it to) the Shubert Organization who then transformed it into the Winter Garden Theatre.[2]

After his divorce from Alva, he moved to France where he built a château and established the Haras du Quesnay horse racing stable and breeding farm near Deauville in France's famous horse region of Lower Normandy. Among the horses he owned was the U.S. Racing Hall of Fame filly Maskette, purchased from Castleton Farm in Lexington, Kentucky for broodmare services at his French breeding farm. Vanderbilt's horses won a number of important races in France including:

Critérium de Maisons-Laffitte: Prestige (1905), Northeast (1907), Montrose II (1911)

Critérium de Saint-Cloud: Illinois II (1901), Marigold (1902)

Grand Critérium: Prestige (1905), Montrose II (1911)

Grand Prix de Deauville: Turenne (1904), Maintenon (1906)

Grand Prix de Paris: Northeast (1908), Brumelli (1917)

Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud: Maintenon (1906), Sea Sick (1908), Oversight (1910)

Poule d'Essai des Poulains: McKinley (1919)

Prix de Guiche: Negofol (1909), McKinley (1919)

Prix de la Forêt: Prestige (1905), Montrose II (1911, dead-heat), Pétulance (1911, dead-heat)

Prix du Jockey Club: Maintenon (1906), Sea Sick (1908), Negofol (1909), Tchad (1919)

Prix Eugène Adam: Alpha (1903), Maintenon (1906)

Prix Boiard: Prestige (1906), Maintenon (1907) et Tchad (1920)

Prix Jean Prat: Prestige (1906)

Prix Kergorlay: Turenne (1904), Maintenon (1906), Sea Sick (1909, 1910)

Prix Lagrange: Prestige (1906)

Prix Morny: Prestige (1905), Messidor III (1909) et Manfred (1910)

Prix Robert Papin: Prestige (1905), Montrose II (1911), Gloster (1912)

Prix La Rochette: Schuyler (1907), Manfred (1910), Brume (1910), Pétulance (1911)

Prix Royal-Oak: Maintenon (1906), Reinhart (1910)

William Kissam Vanderbilt died in Paris, France on July 22, 1920.[1] His remains were brought home and interred in the Vanderbilt family vault in the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, Staten Island, New York.

Railroad executive, yachtsman, horse breeder and racing enthusiast, clubman, art collector and philanthropist. Second son of William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885), and Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt (1821-1896). William Kissam Vanderbilt I closely resembled the distinguishing traits of his grandfather, the success-compelling 'Commodore' Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), founder of the family fortune. Educated in private schools in New York and in Geneva, Switzerland, he began his career at age nineteen when assigned a clerkship in the office of the Treasurer of the New York Central Railroad, eventually becoming Director of the Vanderbilt lines. William K. became identified with the Lake Shore and Michigan Central Railroads, and became Chairman of the Lake Shore Board of Directors. At the time the family acquired the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad he became its financial head. When the illness of his older brother, Cornelius II, required that he assume greater control of the lines, William K. also undertook the management of the entire New York Central rail system, and was the dominant mind in the reorganization and extension of the family's system of railroads. Under his aegis the Grand Central Terminal, and surrounding "Terminal City" of office buildings and hotels, were planned and built. He well understood that architecture could accomplish a polite revolution and built for himself a limestone-clad townhouse, at 660 Fifth Avenue, whose graceful splendor initiated the trend which turned New York from a town of brownstone dwellings into a city of competitive chateaux, and which propelled the Vanderbilts into the uppermost regions of American 'Society'. At Newport, Rhode Island, he built "Marble House", then, as now, that summer resort's most striking 'cottage'. When his eldest son, William Kissam Vanderbilt II, entered the employ of the New York Central, in 1903, William K. Sr. withdrew from business and devoted himself to sport; leaving the Vanderbilt railroad interests in the capable hands of Board Chairman, Senator Chauncey M. Depew. William K., by that time living the better part of the year in France, purchased and restored a 15th-century manor house, "Le Quesnay", outside of Paris, and established a successful horse breeding farm, the Haras du Quesnay, in nearby Deauville, which, for many years, led the winners on the French turf. In April, 1920, while attending the races at Auteuil, in Paris, he suffered a heart attack, and on July 22nd. expired in the presence of his wife and his three children, at his townhouse, 10 rue Leroux, in the French capital. His remains were returned to New York where a private service, attended by his family and close friends, was held at his city residence, 660 Fifth Avenue, before internment in the Vanderbilt Mausoleum near his birthplace on Staten Island.
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Railroad executive, yachtsman, horse breeder and racing enthusiast, clubman, art collector and philanthropist. Second son of William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885), and Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt (1821-1896). William Kissam Vanderbilt I closely resembled the distinguishing traits of his grandfather, the success-compelling 'Commodore' Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), founder of the family fortune.

Educated in private schools in New York and in Geneva, Switzerland, he began his career at age nineteen when assigned a clerkship in the office of the Treasurer of the New York Central Railroad, eventually becoming Director of the Vanderbilt lines. William K. became identified with the Lake Shore and Michigan Central Railroads, and became Chairman of the Lake Shore Board of Directors.

At the time the family acquired the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad he became its financial head. When the illness of his older brother, Cornelius II, required that he assume greater control of the lines, William K. also undertook the management of the entire New York Central rail system, and was the dominant mind in the reorganization and extension of the family's system of railroads.

Under his aegis the Grand Central Terminal, and surrounding "Terminal City" of office buildings and hotels, were planned and built. He well understood that architecture could accomplish a polite revolution and built for himself a limestone-clad townhouse, at 660 Fifth Avenue, whose graceful splendor initiated the trend which turned New York from a town of brownstone dwellings into a city of competitive chateaux, and which propelled the Vanderbilts into the uppermost regions of American 'Society'.

At Newport, Rhode Island, he built "Marble House", then, as now, that summer resort's most striking 'cottage'. When his eldest son, William Kissam Vanderbilt II, entered the employ of the New York Central, in 1903, William K. Sr. withdrew from business and devoted himself to sport; leaving the Vanderbilt railroad interests in the capable hands of Board Chairman, U.S. Senator Chauncey M. Depew.

William K., by that time living the better part of the year in France, purchased and restored a 15th-century manor house, "Le Quesnay", outside of Paris, and established a successful horse breeding farm, the Haras du Quesnay, in nearby Deauville, which, for many years, led the winners on the French turf. In April, 1920, while attending the races at Auteuil, in Paris, he suffered a heart attack, and on July 22nd. expired in the presence of his wife and his three children, at his townhouse, 10 rue Leroux, in the French capital.

His remains were returned to New York where a private service, attended by his family and close friends, was held at his city residence, 660 Fifth Avenue, before internment in the Vanderbilt Mausoleum near his birthplace on Staten Island.

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jun 21 2020, 1:30:40 UTC