Robert Habersham Coleman

Timeline

• 1877, graduated Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
• 1879, recently married, he took over managing control of the family's holdings.
• The death of his young bride, Lillie, soon followed.
• By 1881 he embarked on opening technically advanced anthracite furnaces to supplant older facilities.
• 1883, he shut down the obsolete Cornwall Furnace.
• 1883-1893: his "glorious decade."
• * He modernized production and marketing on the family's thousands of farm acres in Lancaster, Lebanon, and York Counties.
• * He obtained controlling interest in a bank in Lebanon and opened a rolling mill.
• * 1889, he created the summer colony of Mount Gretna, a pleasure stop on his Cornwall and Lebanon Railroad.
• * He built houses, schools, and a church for his workers and their families.
• * By his second wife, Edith Johnstone of Baltimore, he had five children.
• * In Florida, he acquired a railroad construction company and a fifty-mile stretch of the Jacksonville to Palatka Railroad.
• * He is noted for philanthropy to Trinity College, St. Anthony Hall, and his Episcopal parish in Lancaster, PA.
• Decline
• * Before 1891, he lost a lawsuit against the Grubb family, which had been taking ore without compensating the Colemans.
• * 1891, he lost another suit, to the Pennsylvania Trust Company. The award was a staggering one and a half million dollars.
• * He was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
• * 1893, stock market investors panicked over low gold reserves, Coleman fortune vanished.
• * At the age of thirty-seven, Coleman and his family left Lebanon County for Saranac Lake in New York's Adirondacks, where he lived as a recluse until he died in 1930.