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“Two hundred thousand dollars is the largest sum I ever made in a single day,” she told Leigh Mitchell Hodges of her days in London, “though I’ve cleared more than that on single deals.” As her cash piled up and she sought new investments, she became a de facto bank. Her holdings, indeed, were growing larger than those of many banks of the day, in England or America. Banks in need of cash would sell Hetty loans they had made to parties using property as collateral. When inevitably some of the borrowers defaulted on their loans, Hetty began to accrue property. This was the beginning of what would become a real estate empire.

Hetty (and Edward) had also begun to invest in U.S. railroads, expanding rapidly in the wake of the Civil War. It was this interest, probably, that led to their family’s decision to return to the United States after six years in the winter of 1873–74. It was one thing to invest in relatively static U.S. notes from abroad, quite another to keep tabs on the volatile world of railroads, which were as full of potential disaster as of promise. In 1873, the markets were particularly uneasy. Banks had extended loans to hundreds of railroads, in various states of completion—some amounting to little more than grand words in a prospectus. Bonds for these railroads flooded the market. In the fall of 1872, within less than three months, three major U.S. banks—the New York Warehouse and Security Company, Jay Cook and Company, and the Union Trust Company—failed. Other banks soon suspended operations. To stem the panic, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. The distress that lingered through the entire next year became known as the panic of 1873. Before it was over, some eleven thousand companies had failed, and combined losses reached $380 million. Under the circumstances, Edward and Hetty decided they needed to be closer to the seat of their respective fortunes. After a brief stay in New York, they headed north to Edward’s hometown of Bellows Falls, Vermont.

SIX

PRIDE AND PAIN

Bellows Falls buzzed with the impending arrival of Edward Green and his family in the spring of 1874. Despite its somewhat remote location, thirty miles north of Bratdeboro and tucked away on a bend in the Connecticut River, this was no hayseed town. The name came from an early settler named Benjamin Bellows, but the rather industrial image it conjures is appropriate. The village was founded principally on paper mills and the transportation industry. A man-made canal cut through the heart of town, and by the mid-nineteenth century Bellows Falls was an important railroad junction, connecting Burlington and Montpelier upstate with Hartford, Boston, New York, and New Hampshire. There was a prosperous downtown with good hotels and fine old homes lining a promontory overlooking the river. Visitors were not uncommon. But this was no ordinary arrival.

Edward Green, the scion of a prominent Bellows Falls family, was returning to his hometown as a wealthy man of the world. The Tuckers, on his mother’s side, owned the toll bridge leading from Bellows Falls across the river to Walpole, New Hampshire. His father, Henry Atkinson Green, had come to Bellows Falls from Massachusetts and established Hall and Green, a large store on the river side of the main town square. Older residents remembered Edward Green as a tall, lanky, affable youth who loved to play along the river with other boys, watching and imitating the river men who guided their craft through the canal that bisected the town. One day, as Edward stood on a wooden bridge watching his hero, Jack Adams, navigate the canal, he leaned so far over the barricade that he fell twenty feet into the water and nearly drowned. Jack Adams added to his local legend by fishing the boy safely out of the water; Edward added to his reputation as a bit of a dreamer.

But in the years since he had left town, no one could deny that Edward Green had made his dreams come true in the most spectacular fashion. His mother, Anna, had kept the town well informed of Edward’s progress, his business