Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [101]
Ned and Mabel sailed from New York, down the Atlantic coast and around to the Gulf, stopping at ports along the way and making a stir wherever they landed. In Charleston, reporters tried in vain for interviews. In Galveston, the Greens picked up friends from Texas and Chicago and spent a week fishing and cruising. Ned and Mabel had used the United States for barely two years when it met its doom in perhaps the least violent shipwreck in history. Anchored in the tranquil waters of Padanaram Harbor, near Round Hill, the old Howland estate at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the ship swung slowly around and struck a rock. The hull filled with water slowly enough to allow passengers to leave the sinking ship unharmed. Most of the furnishings were saved, but the ship was lost, lying like a dying whale on its side in sixteen feet of water. The wreck of the United States barely registered on Ned’s balance sheets. Already his restless imagination was leading him to other pursuits.
Ned had spent little time in New Bedford and South Dartmouth before he was in his fifties. And Sylvia had never shown much interest in family history, either, but now Ned decided to return to Round Hill, the old family estate. He had no desire to occupy the historic but by now dilapidated farmhouse. Instead, he set about planning and building an immense mansion and estate, costing $1.5 million, set on the 110 acres he’d inherited from his mother. Sylvia, who by rights owned half of the estate, did not object, but showed about as much interest in developing Round Hill as she did in her own family history. Ned acquired an additional 140 acres in the area, giving him 250 acres to play with.
The house, completed in 1921, was an enormous limestone-and-marble palace, three stories high, with sixty rooms. Just to the left of the tiled entranceway was an elevator, and in the center a large, curved hallway. Ned filled the house with the fruits of a breathtaking collecting spree. He collected with abandon, with unrestrained zeal, as if he were trying to buy his way to happiness. He bought shelf after shelf of books from Good-speed’s Book Shop in Boston. That fortunate seller routinely alerted Ned to rare and valuable volumes available. Ned was an avid buyer but not indiscriminate—the surviving correspondence between Ned and Goodspeed’s shows him buying heavily in books on the history of New Bedford, whaling, and New England, returning books when Goodspeed sent him an incorrect volume. He paid $110 for a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary of the English Language; $962.50 for a 151-volume, blue-cloth-bound set published by the Hackluyt Society, devoted to maritime exploration, covering 1847–1923; and he paid $1,000 for a volume on Sir Francis Drake, published in 1626.
He collected jewelry by the bin, more than Mabel could have worn in a thousand lifetimes. A surviving appraisal of his jewelry purchases covers dozens of ledger-sized pages. There was a double bracelet with a half-moon diamond, for which he paid $18,000; a 6.86-karat ring for $28,000; a solitaire pendant purchased for $15,200; a diamond necklace and brooch for $2,700; and the list goes on and on. He collected rare stamps and coins by the thousand. To this day, Ned remains something of a legend among stamp collectors for purchasing the original 100-stamp sheet of perhaps the most famous and rare misprint ever, the 1918 upside-down biplane known as the “Inverted Jenny.” They