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of wealth. And because Williams, in essence, was Chemical National Bank, his insistence on comportment infiltrated every layer of the bank. “It is the invariable rule of the Chemical National Bank that every employee, from the humblest clerk to the highest official, shall be courteous to everyone,” he said. This philosophy created a welcoming atmosphere for Hetty that went above and beyond merely stroking a major depositor. The employees at Chemical went out of their way to accommodate Hetty, and to avoid raising eyebrows at her unorthodox habits. They made no issue about her old clothes, or about her ways of economizing, which at times included arriving at the bank with a metal pail containing dry oatmeal, to be mixed with water and heated on a radiator for lunch, so as to avoid a restaurant tab.

The employees of the bank created a protective environment for Hetty. At times she used an office, but she declined offers for permanent office space for fear that the tax collectors would try to pin her to New York for tax purposes. Often she sat at a desk in the back and the tellers created a sort of shield for her from the prying eyes of the public and from reporters who more and more frequently came around in hopes of finding a story.

The bank also supplied Hetty with assistants to help with everything from clipping coupons as they came due, to supporting her in negotiations over securities, to simply keeping tabs on her ever-expanding holdings.

And this was important, for Hetty’s wealth was rapidly becoming a financial empire. In addition to her heavy holdings in government bonds and railroads, she was becoming a real estate owner of epic proportions. She owned dozens of buildings in block after block in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston. Some of the property had come to her through her father’s estate, but most she acquired through foreclosures on mortgages she held. This was a direct result of Hetty’s large cash holdings, and her ability to act as a one-woman private bank. She rarely, if ever, bought a property outright on the open market. Once she owned a property, she held on to it. She rarely improved vacant lots with buildings, or improved buildings by renovating them. To do so would only add to her tax exposure, not to mention the cost of construction. It made more sense from her perspective to leave a property alone and wait for development to grow around it.

In Chicago, she owned property from the Loop to the northern suburbs, from the shores of Lake Michigan to undeveloped land southwest of the city. She owned the Howland Block at the southwest corner of Dearborn and Monroe, with nearly 200 feet fronting on Dearborn. The lone structure was a dated, five-story building, but the property was growing more valuable by the year. She also owned numbers 183 through 187 Wabash Avenue, another plot on Wabash near Harrison Street, and 80 feet of frontage on Michigan Avenue, and houses at 211 and 213 Monroe Street, and six apartment buildings on Sibley Street.

Among her largest holdings was a 480-acre tract southwest of Chicago in an area known as Gage Park. Hetty had acquired the property under foreclosure in 1877 for less than $200,000, and kept the land largely undeveloped. She leased some of it to truck farmers, who raised cabbages, cucumbers, and tomatoes for sale at local markets. Schoolboys from the area earned pocket money on vacations by helping farmers work Hetty’s fields. One of these boys, Frank Mikulecky, recalled years later that the only building on the property was a lonely brick house sticking out like a sore thumb from the scraggly fields on South Western Avenue, the eastern boundary of her land. Mikulecky, remembered Hetty living “incognito” in this forlorn house when she visited Chicago.

She owned apartment buildings in St. Louis and Boston. Hetty owned mines in several states, including the famed Central Eureka Mine in Sutter Creek, California, which by itself earned Hetty some $12 million in gold and quartz production. She held mortgages on high-grade property. In New York, she held mortgages