FDR - Jean Edward Smith [10]
James responded as Mittie had anticipated. “He talked to her the whole time,” she told Bamie after the guests departed. “He never took his eyes off her.”21 Whether James had met Sara before is unclear. The Delanos were every bit as grand, much richer, and far more accomplished than the Roosevelts.22 Like the Aspinwalls and Howlands, they were an adventurous seafaring family and traced their lineage to the Mayflower. The Pilgrim who chartered the ship, seven of its passengers, and three signers of the Mayflower Compact were Delano forebears.23 Sara’s paternal ancestor Philippe de la Noye was reputedly the first Huguenot to land on American soil, arriving in Plymouth in 1621.24
Sara’s grandfather, the first Warren Delano, went to sea at nineteen, became a merchant captain in his early twenties, pioneered clipper ship trade with the Orient, and retired to the whaling industry in New Bedford. Her father, Warren II, born in 1809, apprenticed himself to importing firms in Boston and New York, and at the age of twenty-four sailed for China as supercargo aboard the clipper Commerce. At Canton he secured a junior position in the tea-exporting firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company, later Russell and Company, the largest American firm in the China trade. At thirty-one he was a senior partner, heading the firm’s operations in Macao, Canton, and Hong Kong. Two years later, having been in China nine years and amassing a considerable fortune, he returned to the United States on home leave, where he met, courted, and married Catherine Robbins Lyman, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Judge and Mrs. Joseph Lyman of Northampton, Massachusetts.
The bride and groom sailed for China on December 4, 1843, and remained there another three years. Warren continued to run Russell and Company, increasing its profits with each successive season. At the end of 1846 he resigned his post and returned to America to stay. His twelve years in China had netted a fortune of more than a million dollars. With that, he entered an exclusive circle of not more than a dozen Americans.25
In New York, Warren threw himself into business with the same force and vigor that had paved the way for success in the Orient. He invested heavily in New York waterfront property, railroads, Tennessee copper mines, and coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town near Wilkes-Barre was named Delano in his honor. He owned clipper ships and paddle steamers, including the first boat on the Sacramento River servicing the California goldfields. By the early 1850s he was well on his way to earning another million.
Befitting their wealth, Warren and Catherine lived at Colonnade Row on Lafayette Place, nine unusual Greek Revival houses linked by a common portico.26 Washington Irving lived in one, as did John Jacob Astor, the founding father, widely regarded as the richest man in America. So did Warren’s younger brother Franklin, who had recently married Mr. Astor’s granddaughter Laura. Franklin Delano, “Uncle Frank” as Sara called him, and for whom FDR was named, was also in the shipping business but had recently retired to manage his wife’s immense trust fund.
Warren and Catherine summered annually at Danskammer Point, six miles above Newburgh on the west bank of the Hudson. In 1851, after much looking, they purchased a sixty-acre estate four miles downstream. The brick and stucco house was modest, but had a commanding view of the river and the Hudson Highlands. Warren named it Algonac and immediately set to convert it into a rural sanctuary for his growing family. Already there had been five children, and eventually there would be eleven, of whom Sara, born September