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When visitors enter the grounds of The Breakers, many are overwhelmed—the place more than hints at wealth and power. Maybe that is because it looks like what it is, a product of three generations of Vanderbilt fortune-building. When "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877—a man who parlayed a boyhood Staten Island ferry business into a multi-million-dollar steam-ship line and later consolidated the New York Central and Hudson Railroads—he left an estate of $100 million, at the time the largest pile ever made in America. When his oldest son and heir, William Henry, died in 1885 he left $200 million—having doubled the family fortune in just eight years. At that point, William Henry's oldest boy, Cornelius II, became chairman of the board of the family railroad empire, Head of the House of Vanderbilt, and personal inheritor of a $67 million piece of the family pie.
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When visitors enter the grounds of The Breakers, many are overwhelmed—the place more than hints at wealth and power. Maybe that is because it looks like what it is, a product of three generations of Vanderbilt fortune-building. When "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877—a man who parlayed a boyhood Staten Island ferry business into a multi-million-dollar steam-ship line and later consolidated the New York Central and Hudson Railroads—he left an estate of $100 million, at the time the largest pile ever made in America. When his oldest son and heir, William Henry, died in 1885 he left $200 million—having doubled the family fortune in just eight years. At that point, William Henry's oldest boy, Cornelius II, became chairman of the board of the family railroad empire, Head of the House of Vanderbilt, and personal inheritor of a $67 million piece of the family pie.