A Portrait of Old George Town

by Grace Dunlop Peter

I think the aftermath of this story (which is the reason I have given it in detail) is most encouraging to this generation, struggling in the grip of the present depression, for the young man of twenty-five, after giving up four or five years to taking care of the business of his father, who was growing old, finally became connected with the Bank of Columbia, and in 1837 began a brokerage business in Washington in a little store 10 x 16 feet on Pennsylvania Avenue near 15th Street. He was so successful that he eventually took into partnership George W. Riggs, also of Georgetown, and changed the name to Corcoran and Riggs. In 1845 this firm purchased the old United States Bank on the corner of 15th Street and New York Avenue. And so the Riggs National Bank, today one of the strongest banks in the United States, was born. A little later George W. Riggs retired and Elisha, his brother, was made a junior partner.

In 1847 Mr. Corcoran sent to all people to whom he had been able to pay only 50% in his failure of 1823, the full amount due them, with interest, amounting to about forty-six thousand dollars, to their great surprise, as evidenced by letters I have read from them to him. Of all his great benefactions, this seems to me to have been the very finest thing he ever did.

He must have been a man of very remarkable personality, witness his going to Europe, the first of the very, very many trips he made in his life, on one day's notice, and against much discouragement, persuading Thomas Baring of the great London banking firm of Baring Brothers, to assist him in a sale of five millions of government bonds. At that time the firm of Corcoran and Riggs took, on its own account, nearly all the loans made by the United States.

On his return to New York he was greeted by everyone with enthusiasm, as this was the first sale of American securities abroad since 1837—eleven years.

In April, 1854, Mr. Corcoran withdrew from the firm, thinking he had made enough money, and spent the rest of his long life of ninety years—forty-five years more—spending his money in a manner unknown before that time.

Apropos of his money-making faculty, I have often been told by my aunt how her father, Henry Dunlop, when a boy, was walking along the street with young Corcoran, just his own age, when Henry, whose family was rather well-off in those days, seeing a penny lying on the pavement, kicked it ahead of him in his stride, as boys will do, but young Corcoran, stooping down, put it in his pocket saying, "Henry, you will never be a rich man." That prophecy came true, for Henry spent his life in farming, and you know what that means!

Among Mr. Corcoran's very first benefactions were gifts to the town of his birth. First of all a fund of $10,000 to be spent for firewood, etc., for the poor. It was left to the town authorities, but was administered by the Benevolent Society.

In 1849 he gave beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery, lying along the northern limit of the town. To me no other cemetery that I have ever seen in this country or abroad has the same natural beauty of slopes and trees—in the spring bedecked like a bride in flowering white shrubs; in the fall its towering oak trees aflame with shades of crimson.

I suppose what impressed on him the need of a cemetery for Georgetown so deeply was the death of his beloved wife in 1840. It had been a very romantic marriage. She was Louise Morris, the daughter of Commodore Charles Morris. Mr. Corcoran met his wife when she was sixteen and he was thirty-six. On the 23rd of December, 1835, they eloped, accompanied by Mr. Corcoran's sister-in-law, Mrs. James Corcoran, who later became the second wife of John Marbury, senior, and to the day of her death was greatly beloved by Mr. Corcoran. When she was lying in her coffin on 14th Street, he came there and although somewhat lamed by paralysis and nearly ninety years of age, he insisted upon climbing the long flight of stairs to the room where she lay, saying over and over as he toiled up the many steps: "I must see Harriet once more!" I suppose in his mind he was living over the great event in his life when she helped to secure for him the only love of his life. And so pitifully short a time he had her, for only five years afterwards, when she was twenty-one, she died of tuberculosis. In those short years she had had three children, Harriet Louise, Louise Morris, and Charles Morris. Of these the middle child, Louise, was the only one to grow up.

Although Commodore Morris had greatly disapproved of his daughter's marriage, which was very natural as at that time he was one of the most eminent officers of the United States Navy, and Mr. Corcoran had not then entered on the career which eventually made him the most distinguished private citizen of the capital of the nation, he grew to greatly admire and respect his son-in-law. For there are preserved in A Grandfather's Legacy, a collection of letters received by Mr. Corcoran, and compiled by him before his death, several letters from Charles Morris, showing the deepest trust and affection.