Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [99]
Everything else that Hetty owned went evenly to Ned and Sylvia. She gave the remainder of her father’s estate to Ned and, as a compensation to Sylvia, set up a ten-year trust using railroad and mortgage bonds worth a total of $4.2 million. No valuation was given for Edward Mott Robinson’s estate, but if Sylvia’s compensatory trust fund is any indication, the trust of Hetty’s father had barely increased in value in all those years. Hetty’s own money, meanwhile, had exploded in a literal embarrassment of riches. All of her remaining fortune was to be divided equally between Sylvia and Ned, and Ned served as sole executor of the estate.
Within days of Hetty’s death, New York and New Jersey both announced they would fight to have her declared a legal resident, entitling them to inheritance taxes that New York’s comptroller estimated at up to $5 million. But Hetty hadn’t been playing residential cat-and-mouse all those years for nothing. Lawyers for both states quickly learned the difficulty of proving that the elusive Hetty had lived anywhere, except as a transient.
As the battle wound through one courtroom after another, New Jersey flinched first, dropping its claim in March 1917. The state received as consolation around $60,000 in transfer taxes on securities Hetty held in New Jersey companies. New York, stirred by the prospect of perhaps the biggest inheritance tax windfall in state history, fought on. After three years of legal wrangling, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1919, the court sided with Hetty’s estate in declaring her a resident of Vermont, the state which, ironically, had shown the least interest in claiming her. The reason for the indifference became clear when the estate in February of 1920 doled out Vermont’s cut of just under $58,000, per the state’s lenient tax code. Defeated in the residence battle, New York turned next to Hetty’s business dealings. In May 1920, an appellate court awarded the state $1.5 million in transfer taxes, based on an estimated $38 million in investments she controlled there. In the absence of federal inheritance taxes, the estate paid out a little over $1.6 million to the three states (or, less than 2 percent of the estate), ensuring that the vast fortune Hetty had protected so jealously would pass to her children virtually intact.
With Hetty’s death, one other matter was to be cleared up at long, long last—disposition of Aunt Sylvia’s trust fund. Now the descendants of Gideon Howland would receive their share of the fortune. The original would-be recipients had, of course, long since died, and their descendants were scattered across the map. Instead of the several dozen relatives, mainly concentrated in southeastern Massachusetts, there were now 439 descendants in line to receive a share of a pie that had scarcely increased in value in the fifty-one years since Aunt Sylvia’s death. Descendants lived in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and Rochester, New York; in El Paso, Texas, and Paris, France; in Englewood, New Jersey, and Saginaw, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia, and Jet, Oklahoma. As the appointed genealogists set about to determine the rightful heirs, anticipation built among both legitimate recipients and schemers. Letters arrived from around the world from people claiming Howland blood. Some people, misinterpreting the source of the money, wrote to the trustees claiming relationship with the Green family of Bellows Falls. A woman from Chile sent a picture of herself, claiming her face showed the stern lines of the Yankee Howlands, and she