Thomas Mellon and His Times

In 1885, at the age of seventy-two and “in the evening of life,” Thomas Mellon published his autobiography in a limited edition exclusively for his family. He was a distinguished and highly successful Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker, and his descendants would play major roles in American business, art, and philanthropy. Two of his sons, Andrew William and Richard Beatty, were to join Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller as the four wealthiest men in the United States. Thomas Mellon was an anomaly among the great American capitalists of his time. Highly literate and intelligent, astute and deadly honest about his own life and financial success, and an excellent narrative writer with a chilly but genuine sense of humor, he wrote a perspective and self-revealing book that remains to this day a major autobiography and an important source for American social and business history. That it has found very few readers in the 114 year since its publication is due to the author himself. Warning his descendants in the preface that the book should never “be for sale in the bookstore, nor any new edition published,” because it contains “nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted,” Thomas in effect buried a masterpiece. Nor in later years has it ever been generally available. An abridged version was prepared solely for the Mellon family in 1968, and the book also appeared years ago in an obscure fascimile. Until the University of Pittsburgh Press edition, Thomas Mellon and His Times has been virtually unobtainable. Born in Ulster with a Scotch-Irish heritage, Thomas Mellon immigrated to the United States in 1818 at the age of five. He was raised by his parents on a small, hilly farm at Poverty Point, about twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. When he was nine, he walked to Pittsburgh and, awe-struck, viewed the mansion and steam mill of the Negley family, “impressed . . . with an idea of wealth and magnificence I had befor