Alexander Turney Stewart

Published Sep 18, 2023, 1:00 PM

Alexander Turney Stewart is known as the creator of the department store. He make a fortune in business, but the most interesting parts of his life story come at the end – including after he died. 

Research:

  • “Act of Congress Establishing the Treasury Department.” U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://home.treasury.gov/history/act-of-congress-establishing-the-treasury-department
  • “A.T. Stewart’s Body.” New York Daily News. Aug. 17, 1879. https://www.newspapers.com/image/329793880/?terms=%22Alexander%20T.%20Stewart%22&match=1
  • “Alexander T. Stewart.” New York Times. April 11, 1876. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1876/04/11/80328682.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
  • Asbury, Herbert. “The Gangs of New York.” Wisehouse Classics. 2023 edition.
  • Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Alexander Turney Stewart". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Apr. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Turney-Stewart
  • Brockett, L. P. “Men of our day; or, Biographical sketches of patriots, orators, statesmen, generals, reformers, financiers and merch, including ants, now on the stage of action: including Those who in military, political, business, and social life are the prominent leaders of the time in this country.” Ziegler & McCurdy. Philadelphia. 1872.
  • DeRiggi, Mildred Murphy. “Alexander Turney Stewart.” Irish Lives in America. Royal Irish Academy. 2021.
  • “The Decision in the Stewart Will Case.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Dec. 28, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/50424282/?terms=%22Alexander%20T.%20Stewart%22&match=1
  • Fischler, Marcelle S. “An Immigrant's Vision Created Garden City.” New York Times. Nov. 15, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/15/nyregion/an-immigrant-s-vision-created-garden-city.html
  • Hubbard, Elbert. “Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen, Volume 11.” New York. 1916. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23595/23595-h/23595-h.htm#A_T_STEWART
  • Lenoir, Andrew. “The Nearly Solved Mystery Behind the Missing Corpse of One of the Richest Men Ever.” Atlas Obscura. Oct. 27, 2016. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-nearlysolved-mystery-behind-the-missing-corpse-of-one-of-the-richest-men-ever
  • Resseguie, Harry E. “FEDERAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: THE A. T. STEWART CASE: A Century-Old Episode With Current Implications.” New York History, vol. 47, no. 3, 1966, pp. 271–301. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23162709
  • Resseguie, Harry E. “Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823-1876.” The Business History Review, vol. 39, no. 3, 1965, pp. 301–22. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3112143
  • “The Stewart Will Suit.” Boston Globe. June 26, 1878. https://www.newspapers.com/image/428231391/?terms=%22Alexander%20T.%20Stewart%22&match=1
  • “Stewart’s Body Sought.” New York Times. August 21, 1881. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1881/08/21/102756034.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
  • Walling, George Washington. “Recollections of a New York Chief of Police.” Caxton Book Concern. New York. 1887. (Kindle edition)

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Alexander Turney Stewart is known as the creator of the department store. He started his business in New York when he was kind of a small time immigrant merchant in one little storefront, and then he grew this into a massive firm and made himself a huge fortune in the process. But in my opinion, the most interesting parts of his life story come at the end, and this one has some twists, including one that took place after Alexander died. So Alexander Tourney Stewart was born in Lisbonne, County Antrim, Ireland on October twelfth, eighteen oh three. After Irish partition, this became part of Northern Ireland. His parents were Alexander Stuart and Margaret Turney Stuart, and by the time the younger Alexander Stewart was born, his father had already died. He grew up in Belfast, being raised by his grandfather, John Tourney, and that was after his mother remarried and left Ireland with her new husband to live in the United States. It isn't totally clear like why he lived with his grandfather instead of going with his mother, but we do know that his grandfather wanted Alexander to join the clergy. I will say, particularly related to these very early years of his life, you will read a lot of different biographies that very confidently say things that all contradict each other. So this is definitely the amalgamation of pattern recognition of like, Okay, these things do all seem to crop up in all of them. There are like some versions, for example, to say his father died when he was a toddler versus before he was born. Mysteries will abound. Probably Alexander attended Belfast Academical Institute and then moved on to Trinity College, and that is where he was studying when his grandfather died, and at that point his formal education ended, although he had gained a very solid foundation and would value the arts, literature, and philosophy for the remainder of his life. He had apparently an appointed guardian who was a Quaker and who seems to have been receptive to Alexander's non clergy ambitions to travel to the US to try to make his fortune there. This Guardian is mentioned but not named, in the book Men of Our Day or biographical sketches of patriots, orators, statesman, general's reformers, financers and merchants now in the stage of action, including those who in military, political, business, and social life are the prominent leaders of this time in this country. That's all one title. That book was written by LP. Brockett and published in eighteen seventy two. Yewort was still alive at that time, and it includes a biography of him, which does offer more details than are found in other places. There's not a lot of sourcing information for those details. It did indicate that this nameless Quaker guardian had enough connections through the Quakers to get letters of introduction for Alexander so that he could present himself to various merchants in New York when he arrived there in eighteen eighteen. When Alexander Stewart got to New York City, he started looking for career opportunities and in the meantime taught classics to make ends meet. He left teaching when he formed a partnership with a merchant to learn the trade from, but then that fell through and he briefly returned to Ireland. This was also in part so he could convert his inheritance that his father left him into cash. This was something that he inherited on his twenty first birthday. According to an account written by Elbert Hubbard in nineteen sixteen, Stuart intended to use use some of that money to pay for his last two years at Trinity, but when he got there, he found that life in New York had changed him to a degree that now the school felt quaint, his schoolmates seemed much younger. He kind of lost his interest in rolling again. Yeah, there's one story that other students had just kind of automatically started calling him sir as though he were an adult test compared to them still being college kids, and he just was like, I don't belong here anymore. Instead, he used that money from his windfall to purchase fine Irish laces, primarily from Belfast, as well as linens and poplins, and several thousand dollars worth of it. Stuart then traveled with those goods back to New York and started a dry goods business in eighteen twenty three at two eighty three Broadway. In one telling of this story Alexander had first trusted a man that he met on the crossing from Ireland back to New York to sell those goods, and the man did make sales, but then he used the money to buy himself and his friends a great many drinks. And so Stuart realized he really couldn't count on anyone but himself to sell his wares, and he started running the shop. He was essentially the one employee who was handling bookkeeping, administration, stocking, sales, etc. He also placed a notice in the New York Daily Advertiser which read, at Stewart just arrived from Belfast offers for sale to the ladies of New York a choice selection of fresh dry goods at two hundred and eighty three Broadway. In the moment he opened that shop, he had customers. He was very good with women customers because he was polite and respectful, but he was also very friendly. He would also throw little extras in with their purchases, like a card of buttons, or some thread or a little bit of braid trim, and he made friends with them essentially and made a very loyal cut customer base. He greeted every single customer personally and That was a practice that he maintained for more than a decade before his business had simply grown too large to continue doing that. Soon he had moved to a larger space at two sixty two Broadway that had a parlor on the second floor with a dressing room, and according to some versions of his story, he also had the first full length mirrors in the US. For this new, slightly larger shop, he also started having regular sales and on occasion, having sidewalk sales, where he would open a case of goods right on the sidewalk in front of the store and then sell whatever was in it to the first interested customer. This got him in a little bit of trouble. The business next door complained and police arrived and told Stuart that he had to keep the sidewalk clear. Stuart turned this into a sales opportunity, and he advertised that his shop had too much stock to fit inside of it and they were having a cost sale so that their neighbor would not be inconvenienced any longer. That same year that he started his business, the twenty year old Alexander also got married to a young woman named Cornelia Mitchell Clinch. Cornelia's father was a merchant who dealt in supplies for ships. The couple had children. The number of children is not known. They all sadly died soon after being born. Alexander and Cornelia seemed to be genuinely devoted to one another. Yeah, that devotion will manifest later on. From the start, it seems like Alexander Stewart had very strong feelings about how his business should be run. For example, one of his salesmen quit the first week because Stuart didn't want him making any false claims about their fabrics just to make a sale. That salesman told him that everyone did business that way, and Stuart was very clear that he did not want that to be his reputation. But Stuart was right, and he was a really good businessman, intuiting moves in the market and capitalizing them. That eighteen seventy two Brocket biography includes the following description of his business savvy quote. Mister Stewart early began to survey the political field, and when he foresaw a storm ahead, there would be a silent purchase of all of certain goods in the market, which would be sure to rise in a certain contingency At other times he was the first to foresee a falling market and to put his goods before the public with such swiftness and address that he cleared his shelves with the least loss, while his slower friends were carried under the current. There was a time during the war when mister Stewart held more cotton goods than all the other dry goods firms put together. There was also a time when he was the first to sell at the reduced price. He also was said to have just been so good at knowing the market values of things and memorizing them that even in his later life, he could recite what the average prices of various staple items had been in each year of the preceding several decades. There are a number of big drivers of Stuart's success in the dry goods business. One was that from that very first purchase of laces in Belfast, he always paid cash in full for any of his merchandise. He said to have never bought anything on credit, so in times when the market had a dip, he wasn't suddenly on the hook to pay off stock that was sitting on the shelves going unpurchased. He was also said to have never speculated with even a penny on the flip side of this policy, though he did offer his customer's credit accounts for another thing. He had set prices so prior to this, the customary business approach to sales involved a lot of haggling. A customer made inquire about the asking price of an item, and then both the seller and the buyer would try to get the best deal for their own interests. But Stuart thought this was inefficient, and also as someone who was running a massive operation over time with so many salespeople, it meant that he wasn't able to control every transaction. So a set price meant that no time was spent negotiating prices, and everyone from the customer on up to Stuart himself knew the retail price of any given item. He also allowed customers the chance to return or exchange purchases, which was not customary at this time, and he understood that stock that wasn't moving was bad for business. It made the retail space look dated, and so he would sell the less popular merchandise below cost just to get it out so he wouldn't have this outdated stock sitting around, and this worked. He was known to always have fresh items, and then that kept customers returning regularly, so at Stuart and Company was always profitable. The other way that Stuart excelled in business also involved streamlining, but this was not great for his employees. He sounds like a hard person to work for. He established a set wage for everyone who worked for him, which sounds fairly fair at a time when a lot of people were working on commission. That money was consistent, but it was also kind of a low rate of pay, and employees were financially on the hook for their performance, meaning that if they underperformed, Stuart would find them. He was also said to have fired a carpenter for something as small as losing a nail. He had this reputation for being really, really miserly when it came to dealing with his employees. But there's this contradictory thing, which is that he also had employees who were with him from early on in his business that stayed until the day he died and beyond. We're talking decades, so there seems to have been at least some level of loyalty to him among his workers, which makes it a little harder to parse out whether he was a rough boss or a good one. Yeah, I've I've worked at places that I thought had like really legitimate problems that coworkers of mine were there for years and years and years, and it was like the things that they liked about the job just kind of outweighed the rest of it. Coming up, we'll talk about some of the big moments of growth for at Stewart and Company, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. In eighteen forty six, after twenty three years in business, Stewart's enterprise was so successful that he built a huge new facility to house it. This building was nicknamed the Marble Palace because it had a marble facade and it was the first purpose built retail space in New York City. Like not a building that could be used for retail was only intended for retail. Teen fifty he was reportedly selling ten thousand dollars worth of goods a day. The Civil War was a lucrative time for Stuart. When this started, he became the supplier of the uniforms to the Union troops. He was an active supporter of the Union, and his work would come back with efforts to honor him later on right in the middle of the war in eighteen sixty two, he had to expand, so he built another facility, this time a huge retail store on Broadway that's believed to have been the largest retail store in the world at the time. Once this massive space, which was dubbed the Iron Palace, was up and running, he was doing a reported fifty thousand dollars in sales every day. Yeah, we always talk about how it's very hard to like make equivalencies of money over time, but one of the ones I read was like, this is like one point five million dollars a day that his business was doing, so trying you like more than ten million dollars or around ten million dollars a week, which is a lot. With the building of the Iron Palace, Stuart is often cited as the inventor of the departments tour because he had over time diversified his offerings from things like fabric and trim to adding in ready made garments from Europe as well as anything a person might need for their home, and they were set up in different departments. He had also managed to shift the nature of shopping from simply being a necessary errand to kind of being a leisure activity. From the early days of his small shop, he had always focused on the shopper's experience, and that methodology carried through to his company's largest iterations. In eighteen sixty eight, you'lyss assessed. Grant was elected president, and because of the work that Stuart had done with the Union Defense Committee, he was offered a position in the new president's cabinet. That was as Secretary of the Treasury. It turned out though he could not take that role. The seventeen eighty nine Act of Congress establishing the Treasury Department, which was signed into law by President George Washington, included language that specifically excluded someone like Alexander T. Stewart because he was a merchant. The specific language is in section eight of the Act, and it reads quote that no person appointed to any office instituted by the Act shall directly or indirectly be concerned or interested in carrying on the business of trade or commerce, or be the owner, in whole or in part of any sea vessel or purchased by himself or another in trust for him, any public lands or public property, or be concerned in the purchase or disposal of any public securities of any State or of the United States, or take or apply to his own use any emolument or gain for negotiating or transacting any business in the said department, other than what shall be allowed by law. Grant wanted Stuart to be Secretary of the Treasury so badly that he asked Congress to override that part of the Act. Congress did not do that, though. No there's some political issues that were involved in why it got shut down, but it was not going to happen. The year after the cabinet position was offered and then retracted, Stuart began work on his Manhattan mansion on the corner of thirty fourth and Fifth Avenue. This was one of the very first such luxury homes on Fifth Avenue. It was three floors plus an attic, and like his first big store, it had a marble facade. Though he was incredibly successful and had more money than anyone could likely need, Stuart always had an eye on expanding his business and his wealth. After years of buying from textile mills to resell the stock at retail, he decided to gain a financial foothold in the manufacturing side himself. He purchased controlling interest in several mills to further add who was business. Stuart next expanded internationally. Ireland, England, France, Scotland, Germany and Switzerland were all homes to Stuart offices. Some of those countries also had warehouses where purchased goods were stored before being shipped to his US retail operation. The stability of Stuart's business and its huge growth led to accusations that he was purposely trying to put smaller goods dealers out of business, and he made a number of statements on this matter that are kind of open to interpretation, which is how a lot of his life is. He was adamant that he adhered to his business principles and that anyone who didn't was doomed to fail. Things like his refusal to buy stock on credit were part of those principles. That sounds great on paper, but it would of course exclude anyone who had not had the good fortune to inherit a sum of money to start a business. Additionally, he made statements that explain that some of his expansions were just necessary to prevent logistical issues, things like one building having been too small to put an entire department on one floor. So he had to build a new space so that he could make that not a big train wreck. He also told an interviewer once that he had been pressured to start selling specific products in one of his stores by customers, but that quote, the moment we throw open that department for retail trade, a great many smaller deals in the vicinity will suffer. The advantages we possess are so superior that competition of small dealers is out of the question. And the moment they feel the pressure, they cry out against monopoly and attribute all kinds of vindictiveness to the firm. But he then went on to say that the public would really benefit from his ability to both manufacture and sell because that cut down costs. While Stuart was shrewd in business, he could also be generous. During the Irish famine, he raised money to send to Ireland for aid. When things became particle, particularly dire for mill workers, he chartered a ship and sent it to the area where he'd grown up that was filled with food for the workers there. And there was also an offer that came with the ship, which was that anyone who wished could board it and return with it to the United States. This is often cited as Stuart's big philanthropic effort as though it was the only such grand gesture, but there were actually others. For example, in the wake of the Franco German War, he similarly sent a boat to France, this time it was loaded with flour, but that did not, however, have the same offer to take people back to the US. In North America, he gave very generously to Chicago to rebuild after the eighteen seventy one fire. All of this falls in line with the ideal that he mentioned in a letter to Ulyss Assess Grant during his presidency quote, the merchant of the future will not only be an economist and an industrial leader, he will also be a teacher and a humanitarian. Stuart also started buying up real estate in New York, which we have talked about many people on the show that have done this and that being kind of a big keystone to their wealth growth. He acquired two hotels, the Metropolitan and the Grand Union, and two theaters, the Globe and Niblo's Garden, And then in eighteen sixty nine he purchased a twelve mile tract of land on Long Island known as the Hempstead Plains. He paid fifty five dollars an acre for that plot of land, and then acquired an additional fifteen hundred acres from the surrounding residents. On this vast expanse, he intended to build his own city, which he named Garden City. Today, it is recognized as one of the first planned communities in the United States. He mapped out residential and commercial spaces and even set up a brickyard so that construction could be localized as much as possible. By eighteen seventy six, Alexander Stewart had created something true, truly remarkable. There were roads, there was green space. There was infrastructure, including a state of the art waterworks and a railroad for commuters. There was a hotel, the Garden City Hotel, which was adjacent to the railroad station. There were these lovely, brand new Victorian houses that people could rent for one hundred dollars a month, but there weren't many residents yet. And then, with this project still not completed, Stuart died on April tenth, eighteen seventy six, at the age of seventy two. In a moment, we'll talk about what happened after his death, including a rather surprising turn of events. But first we'll take a quick break and hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. Stuart was the third richest man in New York when he died, and the only one in the top three who had not inherited his wealth. Estimates of Stuart's net worth at the time of his death ranged from forty million to fifty million dollars that is not adjusted. Throughout his life as a successful businessman, Alexander T. Stewart received a steady stream of letters from people claiming to be relatives and asking, of course, for money. When he died. This stream continued, now addressed to his widow in the hope of gaining some of the fortune they claimed they were owed as next of kin, and this escalated and dragged out for years. In eighteen seventy eight, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote of the problem, quote, mister Stewart died under the impression that his relatives were few and quickly enumerated. Upon his death, the number who sprang up in all parts of the country claiming kinship and rights under the will was astonishing. Suits were begun in large numbers by all sorts of people. Stuart had left money to a variety of people in varying amounts, but as he and Cornelia had not had any children live past infancy, he had no primary heir. He also had not set aside any kind of charitable trust for the bulk of his money, and his is considered to be a great fortune lost through a steady trickle to things like legal fees and a little bit to ransom. That's because on November seventh, eighteen seventy eight, so two and a half years after Alexander Stewart died, his remains were stolen out of their grave at Saint Mark's Church in the Bowery. There was evidence that whoever had taken Stuart's body had unceremoniously dragged it out of the churchyard and over a fence, although it seemed as though they had entered through the padlocked gate using a key. A reward was offered in the New York Times by Stuart's right hand man and executor, Henry Hilton, but that caused massive confusion as people came out of the woodwork with all kinds of claims of knowing the location and the body of the body. And what had happened, only for those claims to run cold. This is unsurprising given what happens when rewards are offered. Yes, exactly. If you have wondered about folks like Burke and Hare and people that were known for grave ropping for medical purposes, a lot of them were like, yes, I know where it is, and then it was like you're not going to get the reward, and they were like forget it. Then, well, most of the people that were stealing bodies for medical purposes, it was not two and a half years later. No, this would not have really been a viable body to you. No, although those were folks that were known for those crimes, were the first to be investigated. No, I think because it was like who else Rob's graves? It's weird. The strongest lead in the case came in early eighteen seventy nine, so just a few a couple of months after he'd vanished, when the Postmaster of New York, Paul Henry Jones, was contacted by someone named Romayne who said he had the remains, which did sound like a funny turn of phrase to me, and who provided the name plate, which had also been stolen from the casket as proof. But this whole thing only cast suspicion on Jones when he claimed to have been contacted with the lead and nothing came of it. In eighteen eighty one, authorities received a tip that the body was in Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn. That site was excavated, but Stuart's remains were not found. Cornelius Stuart, undoubtedly frustrated that neither the police nor the private investigators that Hilton had hired were making any headway, is said to have taken matters into her own hands and started communicating with the purported grave robbers. She traded twenty thousand dollars for a map to a meeting point and a designated time. Her nephew made the trade in a late night meeting and returned with a bag of bones and a piece of the velvet that headlined Stuart's coffin. At least that's how things played out, according to the account of George Washington Walling, who had been chief of the NYPD when Stuart's body was stolen. He wrote a book titled Recollections of a New York Chief of Police in eighteen eighty seven, in which he included this story. He also relayed the detail that the Stuart tomb had been broken into a month before the theft, although nothing had been taken. His version also indicated that Hilton didn't want to give the grave robbers anything on principle, but that Cornelia wanted her husband's remains desperately. Whether or not the remains that Cornelia got back were Alexander's, that's a matter of debate. And then to explain what happened to them next, we have to go back to the Garden City project. Cornelia Stuart had after her husband's death, really become the stewart of Alexander's plan for Garden City, including allocating one million dollars for a cathedral to be built in his memory. She also managed to get the Diocese of the Episcopal Church to move its main offices to Garden City they had been in Brooklyn. She also spearheaded the building of schools and other key elements to turn Garden City into a viable community, and people started to move there. When Alexander Turney Stuart, or at least what his wife believed to be him, was buried the second time, it was in the Cathedral of Incarnation in Garden City. When she died two years later, she was buried by his side, And an interesting bit of coincidental timing, when Alexander's body was stolen from the grave in Manhattan, it was scheduled to be moved just days later to be reinterred in Garden City. Yeah, there are a lot of theories that that whole thing was like an inside job by somebody that knew this plan, and they were like, it's going to be moved anyway, it'll be ready. We don't know. One of the tragedies of the flailing nature of the Stuart Fece fortune was that their house on Fifth Avenue was demolished in nineteen oh one, and when the mansion was destroyed, so were most of Alexander's in Cornelia's papers, so there's little record of their day to day lives. Even in his own time, he was seen in contradictory terms by some as a miser, by others as a generous benefactor, as a moral man in business, and as a cutthroat who would crush the little guy. As the years have passed, exactly where he falls on any spectrum of measure of his character gets blurrier and blurrier and more open to interpretation. We do have a quote from Stuart given during an interview, which seems to sum up his business ideology and to some degree who he was as a person. Quote. People come to me and ask me for my secret of success. Why I have no secret? I tell them My business has been a matter of principle from the start. That's all there is about it. If the Golden rule can be incorporated into purely mercantile affairs, it has been done in this establishment. And you must have noticed, if you have observed closely, that the customers are treated precisely as the seller himself would like to be treated were he in their place. That is to say, nothing is misrepresented. The price is fixed once and for all at the lowest possible figure, and the circumstances of the buyer are not suffered to influence the salesman in his conduct. In the smallest particular. I think you will find the same principle of justice throughout the larger transactions of the house, and especially in its dealings with employees. I do not speak of it as deserving of praise. We find it absolutely necessary. What we cannot afford is violation of principle so if nothing else, he was the man of principle. That's Alexander T. Stewart, who I find to be quite a fascinating gent. Do you have some listener mail for us? I do. I'm going to read two because there's short ish. Both of them are about our William Morgan episodes. She got a good bit of mail about this. One is from our listener, Shane. Shane, get ready to play this for your class, Holly and Dracy. I am a longtime listener who really enjoyed your two part episode on William Morgan. I teach advanced placement US history, and my students have always found this incident fascinating. Sidebar, Shane, thank you for being an educator. Okay, back to the letter. You added much more depth to what I knew and will make that lesson even better. The political consequences of the Anti Masonic Party is probably more impactful to what we are studying. They were the first party to have a nominating convention. But I wanted to add a fun fact. All three candidates for president in eighteen thirty two, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Wirt were in fact Mason's This is particularly odd since William whort was running as the anti Mason candidate, I have read everything from that he was a non practicing Mason who grew weary of them, to the idea that he was a player in the party who just ironically got nominated. Either way, it's an interesting twist. You make my commute far more interesting. Two mornings each week, I sent you this email from the city of Sandusky, one of the few towns in the United States laid out upon its founding on the Masonic symbols of a square and compass. It helps explain some odd five way intersections and sharp turns now. Sandusky is much more well known for its amazing theme park, Cedar Point roller coaster Capital of the World, and it's beautiful revitalized downtown waterfront. Ps. If you happen to mention this feedback in a future episode, I can use it to prove to my students that I am still a history nerd, which I find to be a compliment. I mean, you want your history teacher to nerd out over history. I got a shout out in a twenty ten episode and unearthed in twenty ten five historical fines and to that effect, and I play it in class every single year. Well, Shane, now you can do it again. Thank you again for listening all this while, and again for being an educator. We sure do appreciate it. And then I have one more that is a little shorty about the Morgan affair. This is from our listener Eric, who said I've enjoyed your excellent broadcast about freemasonry and the Morgan affair. I'm a member of an Albany, New York Lodge, and our district Masonic burial plot is in Albany Rural Cemetery. It was consecrated on September twenty fifth, eighteen eighty eight, and is located very near the grave of Thurlow Weed, who was laid to rest in eighteen eighty two. Every time I visit our plot for a memorial service, I look at the classical broken column marking it symbolizing life cut short, and can't help but picture it as a rebuke to Weed. For my pet tax, I attach a picture of my eleven year old boy, Trevor, the best cat ever. Trevor is so cute and looks a little like you might be trouble in the best way. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that Eric Thurlough Weed i s you'll recall featured somewhat prominently in that episode. So if you would like to write us with you or insights on such things, or just to say hi, you don't have to have any kind of comment on an episode. If you don't want, just like email, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media and you can listen to the show and subscribe anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,440 clip(s)