Long Island’s estate country was settled top-down by Gilded Age industrial partnerships.

Evidence

South of the Pratts, around Westbury in the Wheatley Hills, the bolt of the scissors that made Long Island beautiful, there established himself Henry Phipps, full partner of Andrew Carnegie, a man who, while Carnegie drove men to ordeals of sweat, grime and injury in the roaring steel mills of western Pennsylvania, obtained the cash to let Carnegie build more mills by using a talent “for keeping a check in the air as long as any man.” … To the west of the Phippses’ lands, also in Wheatley, lay “Harbor Hill,” the 480-acre holding of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, president, board chairman and major stockholder of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, precursor of Western Union, who had, during World War I, defied President Wilson’s attempts to put the telegraph to use in America’s service. North of Mackay lay the principality of Childs Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, baron of coal and coke, who had gained his legendary wealth during the Panic of 1873 by purchasing for a pittance the land of desperate farmers without telling them that it contained coal, the raw material of the coke essential to steelmaking, then by crushing other rivals in the field and, with a virtual monopoly of the fuel in his hands, by quintupling its price. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 653

Categorization

• CANDY: The Frick detail — buying starving farmers’ land for pennies without disclosing the coal beneath, then quintupling coke prices via monopoly — is a vivid, self-contained greed anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 654; Long Island’s North Shore robber barons staged parties of legendary extravagance — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 657

Broader Connections

• Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth #corroborates (0.90) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 654
• Long Island’s North Shore robber barons staged parties of legendary extravagance #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 657