Richard Thornton Wilson was a multimillionaire American investment banker known for being the father of five children who all married into prominent families during the Gilded Age of New York.
Early life
Wilson was born in Habersham County, Georgia near Gainesville, in about 1829, to William Wilson and Rachel Wilson, a Scottish tanner and shoemaker.
Career
After the death of his father in 1849, he needed to find employment, so he went to Dalton, Georgia and began working as a clerk in a store owned by Levi Brotherton, a Methodist clergyman and missionary. After saving his money, he started a "general merchandise" business with W. R. High, taking his business on the road. He would buy items in Atlanta and then sell them or trade them for cotton. During this period, he met the Orme brothers, who both worked for the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad. After heading towards Knoxville, Tennessee, and finding himself exhausted in Loudon, Tennessee, he slept on the doorstep of the town's mercantile store, owned by Ebenezer Johnston. Johnston, a South Carolina native, owned 712 acres of farmland, a large manor house and slave quarters. After Johnston saw Wilson's work, he agreed allow Wilson to marry his daughter in 1852 and to finance business ventures for Wilson. They stayed in Loudon until late 1860, when he moved his growing family to Nashville, Tennessee.
Civil War
During the American Civil War, the family moved to Macon, Georgia and Wilson served on the staff of Lucius B. Northrop, the Commissary-General of the Confederate States of America. Later Wilson was appointed Commissary General by Jefferson Davis, and in this capacity, he was sent to London by the Confederate Government to dispose of the cotton crop. At the end of the war, he was said to have come out of it $500,000 richer.
Post-Civil War
After the war ended, Wilson began buying up defunct railroads. He moved to New York City and purchased a mansion at 511 5th Avenue that was the former home of Boss Tweed. The Wilsons lived in New York, spending summers at their cottage, "Beaulieu," in Newport, Rhode Island, for the remainder of their lives. Richard opened the banking firm of Wilson Galloway & Co., which would later become R. T. Wilson & Co., the company first to take up the question of the New York Subway System. Wilson served as a director of the American Cotton Oil Co., the Fourth National Bank, the Manhattan Trust Co., Castner Electrolytic Alkali Co., the National Surety Co., Union Trust Co., the United States Casualty Co. and the Mathheson Alkali Works. He retired from business around 1906.
Personal life
On December 23, 1852, he married Melissa Clementine Johnston, the eldest daughter of Ebenezer Johnston. Together, they were the parents of five children. Through his wife's connections, she was able to enter and become intimate with "old New York society". Because of their children's advantageous marriages, the Wilsons were known in New York and Newport society as the "marrying Wilsons."
