Samuel Spencer.
In the executive feature of railroad operation Samuel Spencer is a prominent national figure. From an humble position in the ranks, a combination of native ability, splendid equipment and consistent application has resulted in his promotion to the presidency of six large roads, while he is in addition a member of the board of directors of nearly a score of others and of nearly a dozen of the country’s most representative banking and other corporations.
SAMUEL SPENCER.
A native of Georgia, where he was born at Columbus, in 1847, Mr. Spencer entered the Confederate army, serving the last two years and with much credit, after which he graduated from the University of Georgia with A.B., and subsequently from the University of Virginia with his engineering degree.
Since leaving college in 1869 Mr. Spencer has devoted his energies uniformly to his ambition to rise to the highest round of the railroad ladder, with the result that he is now president of the Southern, the Mobile and Ohio, the Alabama and Great Southern, the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific, the Georgia Southern and Florida, and the Northern Alabama, aggregating a mileage of over nine thousand miles and employing more than forty thousand men.
Besides innumerable other roads, in the management of which Mr. Spencer is director, he is also a director of the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Old Dominion Steamship Company, three large New York Trust companies, the Hanover National Bank of New York, and one of Boston’s large street railway systems.
Mr. Spencer is identified with the American Society of Civil Engineers and other representative political, scientific and forestry associations, and is socially very much of a cosmopolite, being a member of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta and Macon clubs, besides that wealthy sportsman’s paradise, the Jekyl Island Club.
One of the very few Southerners who have advanced into the circles of millionairedom, Mr. Spencer resides principally in New York and Washington, but is much in the South and is still in feeling and sentiment very much a Southerner.