buying railroads. By 1869 he would own the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, controlling much of the lucrative transport between New York City and the Great Lakes.
Business for Vanderbilt was war. He once wrote to an enemy promising that “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you.” Such was Vanderbilt’s reputation that rivals in a shipping venture to Nicaragua paid him $50,000 a month for his promise to stay out of the market.
Vanderbilt, in short, embodied the characteristics of the Gilded Age in which Grinnell lived. As a Vanderbilt biographer described him, he was “simply the most conspicuous and terrifying exponent of his era,” an era “of ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of private rights, of contempt for law and Legislatures, and yet of vast and beneficial achievement.” Vanderbilt would die with a fortune estimated at $100 million, though not before cutting several sons out of his will.2
Securing financing for Vanderbilt’s railroads would be the culminating professional achievement of Grinnell’s father, and for a while, Grinnell appeared likely to follow in his father’s footsteps.
It was Lucy Audubon, ultimately, who would put him on a different track. She taught him a philosophy startling in the degree to which it ran counter to the prevailing ethics of the day, a discipline that leading men of Grinnell’s generation were more likely to scorn than to follow. It was a value system that stemmed from the central narrative of her life.
Born Lucy Bakewell in England in 1787, she was the daughter of a country gentleman of modest wealth. Lucy received top-flight schooling for a girl of her generation. Her father believed that girls should be educated, if only to make them better and more engaging wives. Lucy was tutored from a young age and later attended boarding school, where she studied French, dance, and needlepoint. Her formal education was supplemented by tutors and long hours of reading in her father’s extensive library. Her father also taught her to ride, and Lucy loved the outdoors from an early age.3
Lucy Audubon: The creed of Grinnell’s boyhood tutor, “self-denial,” flew in the face of the conspicuous consumption of Gilded Age America.
Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
In 1801, when Lucy was 14, she moved with her family to America, eventually settling in a Pennsylvania country estate with the bounteous name of Fatland Ford. They lived a half mile from the estate of a well-to-do French family, the Audubons. Overcoming a residue of British–French antipathy, Lucy’s father became a hunting partner of John James, the Audubon’s dashing, long-haired son. When the young Audubon first met Lucy, he recorded in his diary that he was smitten by her “je ne sais quoi” (an attribute not so readily apparent in her photos as the quintessential old widow). The two married in 1808 and moved to Kentucky, where John James began a decade-long series of financial misadventures. By 1819, the Audubons were bankrupt, and for a brief time, John James was even jailed for his debts. There would be other, even greater tragedies—the Audubons lost two infant daughters to sickness. Two sons, Gifford and Woodhouse, would survive childhood—though they would not outlive their mother.4
Having failed at business, Audubon was determined to make a living in the field that fueled his passion—painting. He scraped by—drawing portraits at $5 a head, teaching art at two girls’ schools, and working as a taxidermist in a museum. Since a young age, though, Audubon had loved to paint birds, and it was toward this endeavor that he increasingly turned. He began to travel in search of new subjects, eventually building a portfolio detailing hundreds of species. But it would be decades before he achieved any kind of financial reprieve. In the meantime, John James was often away from home for long periods of time, sometimes years, as he traveled the American West and later toured Europe in an effort to secure patrons and a publisher.5
Lucy Audubon, meanwhile, who had grown up in a life of privilege and wealth, became the breadwinner for herself and her two young sons. One of the few professions open to women was teaching, and Lucy began to conduct classes out of her home. Later she and her children took up residence with a wealthy plantation owner in Louisiana, teaching the local children in exchange for a place to live and a small salary. For two decades, she faced constant fears about putting food on the table, the indignities of asking for credit, and the struggle of single parenthood. It was a time of remarkable sacrifice—of subordinating her own needs and desires in favor of her family. Indeed self-sacrifice became the creed by which she lived, a way of putting her life into a broader context. While Audubon struggled for recognition and financial success, Lucy supported him, encouraged him, guided him, and advised him with a sound judgment that the artist lacked. And she held the family together.
For John James Audubon, recognition would come long before financial success. With Lucy’s encouragement, Audubon in 1826 took his collection to England. In Europe, Audubon would earn fame as both an artist and a naturalist. But not until the publication of Birds of America in the late 1830s did the Audubon family achieve its first semblance of financial security. In 1841, when Lucy was 54 years old, Audubon bought the tract of land along the Hudson River that would become Audubon Park. In 1842 he completed construction of a grand house, proud finally to have provided the home that he felt his wife deserved. He called it Minniesland, a reference to his pet name for Lucy.
For a few years at Minniesland, Lucy enjoyed a short interlude of repose. Her decades of hard work, it appeared, had come to fruition. With his two sons assisting him (and living in their own houses at Audubon Park), John James labored on the last of his great works, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Lucy took pleasure in her home, the company of her sons, and a growing brood of grandchildren. But it would not last.
In 1844, Audubon’s eyesight began to fail him. Soon he could no longer paint the exacting details that defined his work. In 1847, Audubon suffered a stroke that crippled his mind. He spent the last years of his life in a desperate fog of senility, dying in 1851 at the age of 65. Lucy had known tragedy before, but still worse events lay ahead. In 1856, her son Gifford suffered a fall that left him an invalid. Lucy rented out the house she loved and moved in with Gifford and his family, helping to care for him.
In 1857—the same year that George Bird Grinnell and his family moved to Audubon Park—Lucy began teaching again to supplement the family income. Grinnell would later write that Grandma Audubon “seemed to be doing for her sons and their families something like what she had been doing for her husband during much of the time of their marriage, earning the bread for the family.”6 She began to sell off pieces of Audubon Park, including the property purchased by Grinnell’s father. Young George accompanied his father to the closing, and he was struck by Grandma Audubon’s “great relief, satisfaction, and even gratitude.” The scene moved him, “though for years afterward I did not understand its meaning.”7 Even with her land, Lucy’s assets could provide no protection against the next waves of calamity to strike her family.
The sons of John James Audubon apparently inherited their father’s weakness in matters financial. In Grinnell’s words, “neither he nor his sons were businessmen.” In 1859, Woodhouse Audubon invested a large sum in the publication of a new edition of his father’s Birds of America. The new book was sold to subscribers, most of whom happened to reside in the South. When the Civil War broke out, the investment turned into a near complete loss. Creditors placed liens on Audubon Park.
Gifford, meanwhile, having languished since his accident, died in 1860, Lucy at his side. Lucy would soon watch the death of Woodhouse too. Devastated by the death of his brother and the pressure of his financial losses, Woodhouse fell ill. He died in 1862. The next year, to stave off her sons’ creditors, Lucy sold her remaining property at Audubon Park and moved in with a granddaughter in Washington Heights. Over the years, she sold off paintings from her husband’s collection,
