Part IThe Story
The tunnel under the lawn
Most of The Elms was never meant for the Berwinds.
The house rises off Bellevue Avenue in Newport in white stone, symmetrical and serene. It was completed in 1901 and modeled on the Château d'Asnières, which had been built in 1750 for the Marquis de Voyer. Its 60,000 square feet hold marble brought across the Atlantic, gilt bronze, eighteenth-century French and Venetian paintings, Oriental jades, Renaissance ceramics, and canvases by Boucher, Drouais, and Watteau. The gardens carry sculpture that once stood at the château of Madame de Pompadour. The house was a summer cottage, in the period's deadpan usage, occupied for about six weeks a year. And most of its square footage, as the curators who now run it will tell you, served the domestic workers rather than the family. The architect, Horace Trumbauer, made sure you would never know it.
Seen from the north, the building presents itself as two stories. Inside that same wall run eight flights of stairs, steep because they are hidden inside the body of the house. They climb from the basement, where most of the work happened, to the kitchen, to a butler's pantry feeding the breakfast and dining rooms, to a second, two-story butler's pantry on the mezzanine, to the maid's room beside Mrs. Berwind's bedroom, and finally to the servants' quarters under the roof. Nearly every great room has a support room beside it, built so the house could run, in one curator's phrase, "like magic." There is no servants' wing, because a servants' wing would have been visible.
Underneath all of it, below the white gravel and the clipped lindens and the Pompadour bronzes, ran a tunnel. Coal came in through it.
— Architectural Digest, 'Inside History'The Elms was designed to conceal the labor that made it run and perform at one of the highest levels during the Gilded Age.
Edward Julius Berwind did not go out of his way to explain himself, so the house has to do some of the explaining. He was at various times called the largest individual owner of bituminous coal properties in the United States, the dominant supplier of steaming coal to the United States Navy, a monopolist, a robber baron, a colleague of J. Pierpont Morgan, a director of roughly fifty corporations, and a man whose say-so you needed, for a while, to do business with a coal-burning steamship in the harbors of New York or Philadelphia. He was also the son of a German immigrant in the Philadelphia piano trade. Caroline Astor kept him and his wife off her list of the Four Hundred. He had no children. He left almost no words.
What he left were things that ran. The coal came up from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and McDowell County, West Virginia, and Las Animas County, Colorado. It rode in hopper cars stenciled with his company's reporting mark to piers in Jersey City. From there it went into the bunkers of ships, the fireboxes of locomotives, and the boilers that drove the trains of New York's first subway. Some of it went down a tunnel in Newport so that a ballroom upstairs could stay warm and nobody in it would have to think about where the warmth came from.
A name, turned inside out
The town of Windber, Pennsylvania, got its name in the late 1890s, when the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company was opening the first of what would become thirteen mines in Somerset County. Edward Berwind made the recommendation himself. He suggested they take his surname and swap its two syllables.
It is a strange instinct, and a revealing one. It is not quite modesty, since the name is still his name, only reversed. It is not quite vanity either, since the reversal partly hides the signature. Anyone who knew would know. Anyone who didn't would see a coal town with a slightly Germanic, slightly Welsh name in the Allegheny ridges. The same habit of marking things recurred across the map. A Colorado camp called Road Canyon in Las Animas County became Berwind. A coal community in McDowell County, West Virginia, became Berwind too, and later lent the name to Berwind Lake. The Kentucky operation was the Kyber Coal Company, which is not a reversal but is plainly a cousin to one. A four-masted schooner built in Camden in 1894 was christened Edward J. Berwind, and so were a harbor tug and a 595-foot Great Lakes freighter. A Navy patrol boat in 1917 was named Berwind, and so was a cargo ship sunk in 1918.
He put his name on a great many hulls and townships. He put it on very few sentences.
The family that produced him had come from Germany with no such reach. John Paulus Berwind, born in 1813, sold pianos in Philadelphia through the Pretien and Berwind Piano Company. His wife, Augusta Guldenferring, born in 1821, gave him five sons and a daughter who would outlive all of them. Edward was born on June 17, 1848, the second son. The first, Charles Frederick, born April 1, 1846, would be the one who got the family into coal. The daughter, Julia, would spend the last decades of her brother's life as the hostess of his houses and would die in 1961, a quarter century after him, as a figure of New York and Newport society known for welfare work.
The piano business gets a single line in the record. Still, it is tempting to notice that the father sold instruments built to sit in parlors, finely veneered over iron frames and felted hammers, meant to be heard but not opened up. The son would spend his life on the other side of the parlor wall, among the frames and the hammers.
By the Numbers
The Berwind Reach
13Coal mines opened by Berwind-White in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1897
~50Corporate directorships held across coal, rail, banking, and steamship companies
105,000Acres of coal land reported under Berwind-White by 1903
32–54%Range of wage reductions imposed on Berwind miners in the 1922 strike
60,000 sq ftSize of The Elms, most of it devoted to concealed service space
$34M+Net worth at his death in August 1936
$3B+Berwind real estate investments by 2007, decades after the company quit mining
Fuel for the fleet
The business Edward Berwind ran for forty years was simple in its product and almost architectural in its structure.
The product was bituminous coal: soft, smoky, high in energy, the fuel of steam. The structure was what a Philadelphia historian later called J. P. Morgan's model for integrated business, applied to coal "from mining through distribution." Berwind-White did more than dig. It bought land, opened mines, built the towns to house the men who worked the mines, ran its own rolling stock, and controlled the waterfront where the coal met the ships. The company's piers in Jersey City were the hinge of the system. There the coal of the Pennsylvania ridges crossed into the hulls of transatlantic liners, coastal steamers, and warships.
The contracts tell the story most clearly. Berwind negotiated agreements to sell Berwind-White coal to the Pennsylvania Railroad and to international shipping lines. He became the leading supplier of coal to the United States Navy. One account of his Fifth Avenue house says his company "supplied most of the coal used by the US Navy at the time," along with most of the East Coast railroads and the trains of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Contemporaries considered the combination a monopoly. The Observer, looking back in 2015, put it more gently: for a time, it was difficult to transact business involving coal-powered steamships in the harbors of Philadelphia or New York without Berwind's say-so.
The monopoly was not built only underground. It was built in boardrooms. Berwind sat on the board of the Erie Railway and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. He sat on the boards of the New York and Long Island Traction Company and the New York and Queens County Railway. He sat on the board of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, whose subway cars ran on power from his coal. "Not coincidentally," the architectural historian John Tauranac wrote, Berwind served on the board of the IRT. With his fellow Philadelphian Peter A. B. Widener he helped establish the New York subway system. With Widener he also sat on the board of the International Mercantile Marine Company, the Morgan shipping combine that owned the White Star Line and, in time, the Titanic. He was a director of the Clyde Steamship Company and of the Atlantic, Gulf and West Indies Steamship Lines. He was a director of the Girard Trust and of the Berwind National Bank, which bore his name in the ordinary, unreversed way. He held stock in the syndicate Morgan assembled to buy the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company for U.S. Steel. He was president of six coal companies and a director of four others.
The pattern is easy to see once you lay it out. Berwind sat on the boards of companies that bought coal. He sat on the boards of companies that carried coal. He sat on the boards of banks that financed the companies that bought and carried coal. Fifty directorships are a lot of meetings for one man. They also make a kind of net, and coal does not fall through it.
The land underneath the net was handled with the same care. In Somerset County, Berwind-White bought large tracts and then split them horizontally. The Babcock Lumber Company was brought in to harvest the timber on the surface, while Berwind-White kept the mineral rights below. The surface could be used up. The mineral rights were what lasted. A century later this distinction would turn out to be the most valuable decision in the company's history, though no one in 1897 could have known it.
The numbers from the early years come mostly from secondhand sources and should be read with appropriate squinting. By 1903, according to one account, the company was selling more than 2.5 million tons of coal a year from 105,000 acres and earning a yield of about $8 million. Its hopper fleet, preserved in loving detail by railroad historians, gives a more precise picture of the machine. There were fifty-ton steel hoppers built by the Pressed Steel Car Company in 1902. More came from Cambria Steel in 1905, 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1913. In 1940 and 1941 the company's own shops built 160 more. In 1964, nearly 1,500 of them passed to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the reporting mark was shortened from BWCX to BWC.
The Supreme Court's records preserve the company's ordinary frictions with its carriers. In Berwind-White Coal Mining Co. v. Chicago and Erie Railroad Co., argued December 3, 1914, and decided eleven days later, a unanimous Court took up a dispute over demurrage, the fee for holding a railroad car too long. The opinion came from Chief Justice Edward D. White, no relation to the company's founding partner. The Court held that filing rates with the Interstate Commerce Commission gave all the notice the law required, and that the point of reconsignment was clear from the company's "usual practice for many years." In other words, the company's own long habits were evidence against it. A second case, McGoldrick v. Berwind-White, reached the Court in 1940. By then the company had been a fixture of American commerce long enough to show up in the case law the way a landmark shows up on a survey map.
A midshipman's education
You cannot understand the Navy contracts without understanding the Navy.
The record says Edward Berwind was appointed to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in July 1865 by Abraham Lincoln. That would have been a neat trick, since Lincoln had been dead since April. Presumably the nomination outlived the president, as paperwork does. Either way, the son of the piano salesman entered the Academy in the summer the Civil War ended, at the moment the federal government was the largest and most self-confident institution in the country. He graduated as a midshipman in June 1869. He became an ensign in July 1870 and a master, roughly a modern lieutenant junior grade, in March 1872.
What the Navy gave him was not mainly seamanship. It was a set of acquaintances and an understanding of how a navy buys things.
He served in European waters during the Franco-Prussian War. As a young ensign he met the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, and the two became lifelong friends. That is an extraordinary thing to write about a German-American boy from Philadelphia, and none of the surviving sources explains how it happened. Under Ulysses S. Grant he served as a naval aide at the White House. He would therefore have learned at first hand who in Washington decided which ships got built, which stations got coaled, and which suppliers got the contracts.
He was placed on the Retired List in May 1875, apparently because of an injury. The Observer would later credit him with "some 20 years in the navy," and some sources also list service in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The dates support something closer to ten years, counting Annapolis. The later war is harder to place for a man then running a coal empire, unless his service consisted of the coal itself, which in a sense it did. A fleet in 1898 moved on bituminous coal. Whoever controlled the bunkers was part of the war, whatever his rank.
Then there is the beard. It survives in a diary.
In the spring of 1876 a young woman in New York named Susie kept a journal, much of it written in a private code, as though she feared being read. She was engaged to a man she called only "J." On March 6 she wrote: "I have said 'Yes' to J and Berwind thinks I love him above all others." Three days later she came home and found "E.J.B. in the parlor. He had come at five and waited for me."
— Susie's journal, March 9, 1876My picture, he says has been the greatest comfort to him.
He had been away and was glad to be home. He had grown a beard, which Susie thought made him "look too old" and resolved to ask him to shave. They urged him to stay for dinner, but he had already arranged to dine at Delmonico's with friends. He promised to come back as soon as he could. Her friend Baby Thomsen, who saw what was going on, told her flatly: "It is a sin my dear to make poor Berwind love you for you know my dear that you love someone else."
Susie married neither of them. She later married Bolton Hall. When her descendant transcribed the journals in 2000, she read the name as "Bernid." Only in 2013 did a search engine suggest, "Did you mean Edward J. Berwind, Philadelphia?" and the stranger in the parlor resolved into the coal baron.
It is the only scene in the record where Edward Berwind waits for anyone. Afterward, people waited for him.
The elder brother's ledger
The company bore Edward's name, but Charles built the road to it.
Charles Frederick Berwind left the Philadelphia public schools in 1861, at fifteen, to become an office boy at R. H. Powel and Company. Two years later, when the firm organized the Powelton Coal and Iron Company, he was assistant to the president. When he turned twenty-one, he was made vice president. In 1869, the year his younger brother graduated from Annapolis, Charles formed his own firm, Berwind and Bradley, and took over the Powelton coal business. In 1874 he joined White and Lingle. That brought him into partnership with Allison White, a former congressman and a judge, the kind of man whose name opened doors at a county courthouse.
While Edward studied gunnery and stood watches near Europe, Charles learned coal the way it was learned in that era: invoices, freight rates, land titles, men who could be trusted with a mine and men who couldn't. One brother had the relationships and the other had the trade. Sometime around 1876, one account says, Edward began directing the New York offices of the family's coal business. In January 1886 the three men, Charles, Edward, and White, formally founded what was incorporated as Berwind-White. Its first mine opened at Houtzdale, in Clearfield County. White died within months, and the firm kept his name, as firms often keep the names of the dead.
Charles was the first president. He also served as president of the Pennsylvania and Northwestern Railroad and as a director of the Girard Life Insurance Company and the Girard National Bank. On December 4, 1890, at forty-four, he died of Bright's disease at his home in Philadelphia. Edward became sole manager. He would hold the company for the next forty years.
The marriages the two brothers made point in very different directions.
Charles married Anita Hickman, born in 1852 in Río Cuarto, Argentina. Her family had fled there after her father, Cheyney Hickman, a government director of the Bank of the United States, committed financial fraud. She was a banker's daughter born in exile, and her four daughters spent their lives climbing back across the Atlantic toward respectability, and then past it into titles. Anita married Robert Early Strawbridge, the Philadelphia department-store heir, in 1895. Gertrude married a German baron, Ruprecht Boecklin von Boecklinsau, in 1900. Edith married Baron von Kleist of Geneva. Frederica married Charles Gilpin III in 1903, divorced him in January 1911, and married Henry Herman Harjes, the head of the Morgan banking house in Paris, a month later. Harjes died in 1926 after a fall from a polo pony at Deauville. Frederica then married Seton Porter. Two of Charles's daughters ended up in European aristocracy, and one of them came to grief there.
In November 1918, A. Mitchell Palmer, then the Alien Property Custodian, began seizing the property of American women who had married Germans and Austrians. Gertrude, Baroness von Boecklin of Rust, in Baden, lost more than $300,000 in trust from her father's estate. The New York Times headline grouped her with Gladys Vanderbilt, Countess Széchenyi, whose $9 million topped the list, and noted: "Berwind Estate Affected." In 1920 Gertrude divorced her baron. She was called "the first American woman to renounce a foreign marriage after the World War." She died in Geneva in 1929. Her estate of $1,190,652 went, without a will, to her son, Baron Ruprecht von Boecklin, who lived at 277 Park Avenue.
During those same war years, her uncle was consulted by the United States Fuel Administration. The family name was German, the war was against Germany, and a German surname could get your property confiscated. It could also get you a seat in the room where the government decided how to fuel the war. It depended on which side of the transaction you stood on.
Edward married too. In 1886, the year of the company's founding, he married Sarah Vesta Herminie Torrey in Leghorn, Italy, where her father, Franklin Torrey, was the American consular agent. She was born in 1856 and shared his enthusiasm for French decorative art. They had no children. That one plain fact shaped everything that came after, especially the question of who would inherit the machine.
Colorado, briefly
Nothing in the record matches the confidence of the Pennsylvania years so much as the exception to them.
In 1888, two years after the founding of Berwind-White and two years before his brother's death, Edward Berwind was named president of the Colorado Coal and Iron Company. He was brought in because things were going badly. Investors and stockholders, one historian writes, had forced a change in management, and they wanted a man with Pennsylvania experience. What the new administration found in southern Colorado was neglect. The Walsenburg mines were in the worst condition the general superintendent had ever seen. "The machinery and everything," in the account that survives, "was worn out."
The response was the one Berwind would always reach for: housing. The company owned thirty-eight houses at the Walsen mines and fifty-four at El Moro. It began building twenty-five more houses at Walsen and twenty-eight double houses at the camp that had been Road Canyon and was now Berwind. Three boarding houses were recommended for Berwind. The logic, as a Colorado local historian describes it, was simple and double-edged. Company houses near the mine meant a dependable workforce and a stream of rent. Only workers in good standing could live in them. A man who struck or quit could expect his family to be out within days.
The new camp at Berwind sat in Las Animas County, near a place called Ludlow.
The turnaround did not take. Finances failed to improve enough, and after four years Berwind was removed as president. The company was later folded, through consolidation, into the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which some sources say Berwind went on to chair. It is the only firing in the record. It is also the only place in the record where his method, which was to buy the land, house the men, and hold the line, met ground that would not take it. The Rockies were not the Alleghenies. A distressed company is not a growing one. Some playbooks transfer and some don't, and Colorado suggests he learned this the expensive way.
In the end Colorado gave him a namesake town and a reputation for housing his miners. The Huerfano County Historical Society, looking back, could not resist the comparison. In 1901, the same years he was overseeing double houses in Las Animas County, Berwind spent $1.4 million, land included, on a summer cottage in Newport with ten acres of gardens. "It is worth noting," the local historian adds, "that at the time, skilled laborers were making $3 a day."
The open shop
Edward Berwind refused to bargain with his employees.
The record states it that plainly, and there isn't much to add except what it cost and who paid. His mines were among the last open shops in the American coal fields. The miners of Windber, Berwind, and Kyber worked without a union contract long after much of the industry had signed one. The company towns made the refusal stick. The firm built brick houses for its managers and frame houses for its miners. The difference was visible in every street, and every frame house carried an unwritten condition.
The bill came due in 1922. That year, during the national coal strike, Berwind's companies cut wages by 32 to 54 percent. Workers who struck were given five days to vacate their company houses. Tent towns went up around the mining towns, canvas on the hillsides outside Windber, families living within sight of the frame houses they had been evicted from.
Mildred Allen Beik's The Miners of Windber tells that story from below, from the immigrant households, Slovak and Hungarian and Italian, that filled those frame houses. It is the necessary counterweight to every account of gilt and Watteau. Jeff Goodell's Big Coal picks up the Berwind name nearly a century later, inside an industry that still runs on many of the same instincts.
Berwind's politics were Republican and, in the era of Theodore Roosevelt, plainly felt. On January 13, 1903, the President wrote to thank him for a gift: a copy of La Vie Intense, the French translation of Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life. It is a perfect Gilded Age gesture. An American coal baron sends an American president an American book, but by way of Paris, in the language of the château.
Four years later the tone had changed. In March 1907, Roosevelt wrote to the editor St. Clair McKelway that he did not wish to initiate a meeting with the financier Edward J. Berwind. He would be more than happy to meet Berwind if Berwind proposed it. It is a pointedly precise distinction, and it tells you who Roosevelt thought should come asking. A week later, on March 27, Hamilton Fish reported that two men who wanted to discuss the President's corporation policy, the railroad lawyer Edward R. Bacon and Berwind, were "among the most vehement in their denunciations of" those policies.
That is about as close as the surviving record gets to hearing his voice raised. Even then it comes through someone else, in a letter between two other men. Fourteen years later his name appears on a list of possible participants at a dinner conference on January 14, 1921, preserved among the papers of Jane Addams. The great reformer of Hull House and the last holdout of the open shop show up on the same sheet of paper. Whether he came, the list does not say.
His sister Julia, who would host his dinners for the last fourteen years of his life, was remembered by The New York Times as a society leader who "did welfare work." It is a small, unresolved fact, and it sits beside the five-day eviction notices without explaining them.
The wrong side of Bellevue Avenue
The Four Hundred was, legend has it, the number of people who fit in Caroline Astor's Fifth Avenue ballroom. It was also the number of people who mattered. Edward and Herminie Berwind were not among them. Mrs. Astor thought their money too new.
So they built their own ballrooms.
The first was in Manhattan, at 2 East 64th Street, which is also 828 Fifth Avenue, depending on what impression you wanted to make. The records disagree about when it went up. One standard reference says 1886, the year of the marriage and the company. The New York Times says 1896. Its architect, Nathan Clark Mellen, is remembered for almost nothing else. Tauranac's description of his role is the best line ever written about the building: "If, as Le Corbusier maintained, a house is a machine for living, Mellen designed a machine for decorating." He built the structure and the facade, then handed the interiors to Jules Allard and Sons of Paris, the firm behind Richard Morris Hunt's Marble House and The Breakers in Newport, and to the sculptor Louis Ardisson.
The house was organized as carefully as a coal operation. The first two floors were ceremonial. A formal staircase greeted visitors entering from 64th Street. The landings served as foyers, with east and west wings stretching along the side street. The ground floor held a library and dining room to the east and, in the bowed front over Fifth Avenue, a reception room that doubled as a picture gallery. The second floor held essentially two rooms, a ballroom and a sitting room overlooking Central Park. The family's private quarters were "safely sequestered," in Tauranac's words, on the third floor. Servants lived on the floors above. A sidewalk moat ran along 64th Street.
The second house was The Elms. In 1888, the year he went to Colorado, Berwind began spending summers in an Italianate cottage on Bellevue Avenue in Newport. By 1899 he had decided to replace it. Trumbauer, a Philadelphian, supplied the French château. Allard supplied the interiors once again. In 1901 The New York Times called it "one of the most beautiful [homes] in Newport." Vogue gave it a feature in July 1911. It might reasonably, the Observer later said, "have housed a small liberal arts college." And it stood, by the reckoning of the people whose reckoning counted, on the "wrong side" of Bellevue Avenue.
Of all the details in the record, that one may be the most telling. He bought the land, imported the château, hung the Watteau, put the Pompadour statuary in the garden, and made the service invisible down to the coal. He built the best house that money and a dozen craftsmen could deliver, and it was still across the street from where it was supposed to be.
The Berwinds entertained the Vanderbilts and the Astors at The Elms anyway, during those six weeks a year. The house was built to tell guests, as one curator puts it, "what a Gilded Age interior should, and could be." It was a time of enormous wealth, she added, but also enormous disparity of wealth. The house had been designed so that the second half of that sentence stayed in the basement.
"He did not need it"
Herminie Berwind died in January 1922, the year of the wage cuts and the tent towns.
Her will was reported in the Times in December. It ran to $479,719. She left her husband her entire jewel collection, appraised at $376,944. She left him no cash, on the stated ground that "he did not need it." The bulk of the remainder went to her brother, Charles Franklin Torrey. There were two charitable bequests of $5,000 each.
It is almost the only sentence in the entire record that seems to speak about Edward Berwind from inside his household. It is dry, accurate, and faintly comic. A wife of thirty-six years settles her estate with an audit: he has everything, so he gets the stones. Somewhere in that line are a marriage, a sense of humor, and a verdict, and there is no way now to know in what proportions.
After 1922 his sister Julia ran the houses. She was in her late fifties, unmarried, and devoted to good causes. She received his guests on Fifth Avenue and in Newport. The house on 64th Street, which at his death would be called one of the grandest private interiors in New York, comparable to the main reading room of the New York Public Library, was occupied by an elderly widower and his sister, with the family quarters still sequestered on the third floor.
Succession had been settled, with naval tidiness, years before. On January 5, 1930, the Times reported that E. J. Berwind was retiring as president of Berwind-White to become chairman. His successor was Charles E. Dunlap, a nephew. The man who had inherited the presidency at his brother's sickbed in 1890 handed it over while he was still alive and still on the board, and he kept his title and his office. That same year the family founded the Wilmore Steamship Company. Its ships would sail in the merchant marine of the next war.
The Great Lakes freighter that bore his full name had been launched in 1924 at the Great Lakes Engineering Works at River Rouge, Michigan: 595.5 feet, 8,318 gross tons, a steel hull carrying ore and coal. On June 11, 1936, sixteen miles west of Long Point on Lake Erie, the Edward J. Berwind collided with the Canadian steamer Ayecliffe Hall and sank her.
Sixty-eight days later, on August 18, 1936, Edward Berwind died in the house on 64th Street, at eighty-eight. His estate was valued at more than $34 million. The funeral was held at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. He was not buried in New York. He was carried home to Philadelphia, to West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, and laid beside Herminie in a mausoleum Horace Trumbauer had designed after the Tower of the Winds in Athens.
It is a remarkable choice of model for a man named Berwind who named a town Windber. The tomb's carved figures are classical goddesses. A local scholar of the city's neoclassical monuments allowed himself one dry sentence about them:
— Classicizing Philadelphia, on the Berwind MausoleumEdward Berwind himself might have been happier if the goddesses had held battleships, coal breakers, or Davy lamps.
His principal heirs were Julia and Charles E. Dunlap.
The crocodile on Fifth Avenue
The great houses of the Gilded Age did not, by and large, survive the century that followed. Cornelius Vanderbilt II's mansion on 57th Street, by some estimates the largest single-family house ever built in the city, came down in the 1920s for Bergdorf Goodman. The Vanderbilt Triple Palace at 51st Street went too. The Frick and the Warburg houses became museums, beautiful but, as the Observer put it, with "the quality of finely made taxidermy." If those houses were tyrannosaurs, the same writer argued, the Berwind house was a crocodile: "resilient through the ages with limited alterations to form."
Julia inherited it and sold it in 1945 to the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences. The coal king's ballroom passed to the aviators. In 1967 it was sold again, for offices of the New York Heart Association. In 1978 it was converted back into homes: two floor-through apartments, two duplexes, four smaller units in the old servants' rooms, and a new penthouse on top. The disco singer Donna Summer lived for a few years on the main floor. In 1999, Tauranac found the residents almost devout in their restraint. "No dropped ceilings, thank you." The gold-trimmed ballroom had become a sitting room. Michael Simon, the architect restoring the second floor, said simply: "It's about as grand as it gets in New York residences." A broker called it, quite literally, incomparable.
— John Tauranac, architectural historian, quoted in the Observer, 2015It has absolutely no bearing on 21st-century American life.
He may be right about the house. The company is another matter.
The company has outlived nearly all of its peers among the great coal combinations, and it has done so by the same means as the house. It kept the structure and changed the occupants. In 1962 the family stopped producing coal directly. It began leasing its properties, the surface and mineral rights kept since the Babcock timber deals, and buying other businesses. Colorcon, which makes coatings for pharmaceutical tablets, came in 1978. CRC Industries, chemical lubricants and cleaners, came in 1981. In November 2002, a Berwind subsidiary offered $12.50 a share in cash for the Hunt Corporation, maker of X-Acto knives, Boston pencil sharpeners, and Bienfang art paper. At the time, Berwind described itself as a privately owned group of 3,500 employees, about $1 billion in revenue, about $2 billion in real estate, and about $250 million in funds under management. Hunt's adviser on the deal was J.P. Morgan Securities. The Morgan name turns up again, ninety years on, on the other side of the table.
By 2007 the real estate alone exceeded $3 billion. Maxcess, industrial web-handling automation, was acquired in 2018. Medbio, medical contract manufacturing, in 2021. There is Oliver Healthcare Packaging, Caplugs, and the TASI Group. There is Berwind Natural Resources Corporation, which still manages the land. The company now calls itself a sixth-generation family enterprise, with more than 10,000 employees at more than 150 locations. Its website states the fact the founder would have understood best in a single line: Berwind Maintains 100% Ownership.
It has never gone public. It has never needed to explain itself to anyone outside the family. Its operating companies, by its own description, get "broad strategic and operating autonomy" and steady capital. The machinery runs, and the family stays on the third floor.
The freighter outlived its namesake by half a century, under other names. In 1963, when the M. A. Hanna Company had her, she became the Matthew Andrews. In 1974 she was the Blanche Hindman, under Canadian registry. In 1979, the Lac Ste. Anne. She ran aground below the Soo Locks in 1965 and in the St. Clair River in 1977, and in the winter of 1985–86 she was cut up for scrap at Port Colborne, Ontario. The schooner had gone earlier. In February 1908, in a hurricane off the Carolinas, Captain Frank Lacey of Milton, Delaware, and his crew pumped for five days and nights before the British steamer Mercedes de Larrinaga took them off and carried them to Liverpool. Another ship later set the waterlogged hull on fire, so it would not drift into the shipping lanes.
The name came off the hulls one at a time. It stayed on the land.
In 1962, the same year the family company dug its last coal and turned landlord, the Preservation Society of Newport County bought The Elms and opened it to anyone who paid for a ticket. Visitors now walk the steep hidden stairs, eight flights inside a wall that looks from outside like two stories. They are shown the butler's pantries and the maid's room and the servants' quarters under the roof. They are shown the tunnel.
Nothing comes down it anymore.
Part IIThe Playbook
Edward Berwind is not a comfortable model, and nothing that follows pretends otherwise. His labor practices produced tent cities. His monopoly was built on boardroom seats at the companies that bought his product. His refusal to bargain is a warning, not a technique. And yet the institution he shaped is one of the oldest privately held industrial fortunes in America, and it is still compounding nearly a century after his death. What follows separates the durable mechanisms from the destructive ones. Some principles are worth copying. Several are worth studying precisely so you don't repeat them.
The principles
- 1.Sell to the customer who cannot leave.
- 2.Sit on the other side of your own transactions.
- 3.Split the asset horizontally: lease the surface, own the seam.
- 4.Your first career is a customer list.
- 5.Pair the relationship partner with the trade partner.
- 6.Design the service stairs before the ballroom.
- 7.Hand off the presidency while you still hold the chair.
- 8.Know which playbooks don't cross the mountains.
- 9.Control is a liability with a delayed invoice.
- 10.Build structures that can change tenants.
- 11.Exit the commodity, keep the ground.
- 12.Stay private and stay quiet.
Principle 1
Sell to the customer who cannot leave
Berwind's revenue concentrated on buyers for whom fuel was existential: the United States Navy, the Pennsylvania Railroad, transatlantic shipping lines, and the New York subway. None of these customers could stop buying coal, and switching suppliers in the middle of an operation carried real costs. A warship cannot run short of fuel. A subway cannot pause for a procurement review. What looks like a monopoly from outside was, in its mechanics, a portfolio of customers with near-zero tolerance for supply disruption, served by the one supplier who had integrated every link from mine to pier.
The lesson is not "find big customers." It is "find customers for whom your product is a precondition of their mission, where the cost of failure dwarfs the cost of the product." Those relationships tolerate price, reward reliability, and calcify over time. They become what the Supreme Court in 1914 called a "usual practice for many years," a habit so settled it carries legal weight.
Tactic: Rank your customers by how catastrophic a supply failure would be to them, not by revenue, and build your reliability infrastructure around the top of that list.
Principle 2
Sit on the other side of your own transactions
The roughly fifty directorships were not decoration. Berwind sat on the boards of the railroads that hauled his coal (Erie, Santa Fe), the transit systems that burned it (the IRT and the Queens and Long Island traction companies), the shipping lines that bunkered it (International Mercantile Marine, Clyde), and the banks that financed all of them (Girard Trust, Berwind National Bank). Tauranac's "not coincidentally" covers a lot.
Much of this would be illegal or tightly regulated today, and it should be. The structural insight survives in legitimate forms, though. Advisory relationships, standards bodies, customer councils, and joint ventures give a supplier visibility into the buyer's planning cycle before procurement decisions harden. Berwind knew what the subway needed before the subway's purchasing department did.
B
The Berwind Web
How directorships mapped onto the coal value chain.
| Link in the chain | Berwind position | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Extraction | President of six coal companies; director of four more | Supply |
| Rail haulage | Erie Railway; Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe | Logistics |
| Urban consumption | Interborough Rapid Transit; NY and Queens County Railway | Demand |
| Maritime consumption | International Mercantile Marine; Clyde Steamship | Demand |
| Finance | Girard Trust; Berwind National Bank | Capital |
| Consolidation | Shareholder in Morgan's TC and I purchase for U.S. Steel | Leverage |
Tactic: Secure a formal, disclosed seat, such as an advisory board, a standards committee, or a customer council, inside the planning process of your two most important buyers.
Principle 3
Split the asset horizontally: lease the surface, own the seam
In Somerset County, Berwind-White bought land and then divided it by depth. The Babcock Lumber Company took the timber. Berwind-White kept the mineral rights. The surface asset was harvested once and was gone. The subsurface rights were permanent, and they became the foundation of the 1962 pivot, when the company stopped mining and started leasing. That pivot led to real estate holdings of $2 billion by 2002 and more than $3 billion by 2007.
The principle generalizes. Most assets have layers with very different lifespans: brand and product, platform and application, land and building, data and interface. Rent or partner away the layer that depreciates. Keep, at nearly any price, the layer that compounds.
Tactic: For every major asset you control, identify which layer is consumable and which is permanent, then structure deals so partners consume the former while you retain title to the latter.
Principle 4
Your first career is a customer list
Berwind's ten years in the Navy, from Annapolis in 1865 to the Retired List in 1875, look on paper like a detour before his real career. They were the real career's foundation. As a White House naval aide under Grant he learned how the federal government's largest fuel buyer made decisions. As an ensign in European waters he met the future Edward VII. When he went into coal, he was not cold-calling the Navy. He was calling men he had stood watches with.
Founders often treat a prior career as sunk cost. Berwind treated his as a map of a market. The most valuable thing he carried out of the service was not discipline, though sources say he kept that too. It was a precise understanding of how one enormous institution procured what it needed.
Tactic: Write down every institution you know from the inside, and for each one, list what it buys, who signs, and on what cycle.
Principle 5
Pair the relationship partner with the trade partner
Charles Berwind was the trade. He started as an office boy in 1861 and was vice president of Powelton Coal and Iron by twenty-one. He ran his own coal firm by 1869 and was partnered with Allison White by 1874. Edward was the relationships: Annapolis, the White House, the Prince of Wales. Allison White, a former congressman and judge, added political standing. The 1886 partnership combined operating competence, procurement access, and civic legitimacy in three people.
The arrangement also absorbed shocks. White died within months of the founding, and Charles died in 1890. Edward, who had spent years running the New York offices, could take over the whole firm. The partnership was set up so that its knowledge did not live in one head.
Tactic: When forming a founding team, deliberately assign the "how to make it" and "who will buy it" roles to different people, and make each learn enough of the other's job to step in.
Principle 6
Design the service stairs before the ballroom
The Elms is a 60,000-square-foot argument that the most important engineering in a system is the part guests never see. Eight flights of stairs are hidden in a wall that reads as two stories. There are butler's pantries stacked two levels high and a coal tunnel underground. The house could "operate like magic" because its operations had been designed as carefully as its gilding.
Berwind-White ran the same way. The hopper fleet, the Jersey City piers, the company shops that rebuilt cars from old bodies and new underframes as late as 1953: these were the service stairs of an enterprise whose public face was a Navy contract. The 2002 description of the modern company, with autonomous operating companies backed by steady capital investment, is the same design at corporate scale. The holding company is the basement. The operating companies are the rooms upstairs.
The ethical shadow should be named. Concealed labor is efficient, and it also lets the people upstairs forget the people downstairs, which is how the 1922 evictions became thinkable. Design the stairs well, but make sure someone in the ballroom is required to walk them.
Tactic: Map your organization's "service stairs," the invisible processes that make visible outcomes possible, and staff and fund them before you spend on anything customer-facing.
Principle 7
Hand off the presidency while you still hold the chair
Berwind inherited command in 1890 at a deathbed. That transition was forced, sudden, and only survivable because he already knew the business. He did not leave his own succession to chance. On January 5, 1930, at eighty-one, he stepped down as president, made himself chairman, and installed his nephew Charles E. Dunlap. He then lived six more years, watching the new arrangement run.
Childless founders face the succession problem in its starkest form, and the Berwind solution, a family heir trained and installed during the founder's lifetime, is one reason the company now calls itself a sixth-generation enterprise. The other reason is structural. By keeping 100% ownership private, the family never had to win a proxy fight to protect a succession plan.
T
The Long Arc of Berwind-White
From piano-trade immigrants to a sixth-generation holding company.
1848
Edward Julius Berwind born in Philadelphia, June 17, to German immigrants.
1865
Appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy.
1875
Placed on the Navy's Retired List; enters the family coal trade.
1886
Berwind-White founded with brother Charles and Allison White; first mine at Houtzdale.
1888
Named president of Colorado Coal and Iron; removed after four years.
1890
Charles dies; Edward becomes sole manager.
1897
First of 13 Somerset County mines; Windber laid out.
1901
The Elms completed in Newport.
1922
Herminie Berwind dies; wages cut 32 to 54 percent in the coal strike.
1930
Steps up to chairman; nephew Charles E. Dunlap becomes president.
1936
Dies at 88 in New York, August 18.
1962
Company exits direct coal production; The Elms opens to the public.
1978
Colorcon acquired; diversification begins in earnest.
2002
Offer for Hunt Corporation at $12.50 per share.
2018
Maxcess acquired.
Tactic: Name and install your successor in the operating role while you still hold a governance role, so you can correct the handoff instead of haunting it.
Principle 8
Know which playbooks don't cross the mountains
In 1888, Berwind brought his Pennsylvania method to the Colorado Coal and Iron Company: housing near the mine, rents, and tight control over who could stay. He found machinery "worn out," built houses and boarding houses, and was removed after four years when finances did not improve. It is the clearest failure in his record. The likely reason is that his method was designed for growth on land he owned outright, not for turning around a neglected company answerable to impatient shareholders.
A method that works in one setting carries hidden assumptions about capital, ownership, and time. Berwind's Pennsylvania model assumed patient family control. Colorado gave him neither patience nor control.
Tactic: Before applying a proven playbook to a new situation, list the conditions it quietly depended on, such as ownership structure, time horizon, and asset quality, and check each one.
Principle 9
Control is a liability with a delayed invoice
The open shop, the company houses, the five-day eviction notices, and the 1922 wage cuts of up to 54 percent bought Berwind short-term control of labor costs. The price was paid in installments over decades. There were the tent towns. There was the "robber baron" label, which still headlines popular histories. There was a President who would meet him only if Berwind asked first. And there is Beik's The Miners of Windber, which preserves the view from the frame houses for every reader who comes after.
The mechanism is not sentimental. Coercive control pushes costs onto reputation, regulation, and future labor markets, and those costs compound out of sight until they come due. Berwind lived long enough to keep his open shop. He did not live long enough to see what the arrangement cost the coal industry he helped define.
!
Copy or Avoid
Separating durable mechanisms from destructive ones.
| Berwind practice | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retaining mineral rights while leasing the surface | Copy | Created the base for a century of compounding |
| Mission-critical anchor customers | Copy | Reliability earns durable, sticky revenue |
| Board seats at buyers | Adapt | Insight is valuable; undisclosed conflicts are not |
| Living succession at age 81 | Copy | Lets the founder fix the handoff |
| Company housing as labor leverage | Avoid | Turns employer and landlord into one coercive party |
| Refusal to bargain; 1922 wage cuts | Avoid | Short-term savings, permanent reputational debt |
| Exporting a model to Colorado | Study | A case of context mismatch |
Tactic: For any policy that increases your control over people who depend on you, estimate its cost to your reputation and future labor supply over ten years, not just its savings this year.
Principle 10
Build structures that can change tenants
The Observer called the Berwind house a crocodile among dinosaurs. Its neighbors were demolished or turned into museums. It went from coal baron to aeronautical institute to heart association to co-op apartments, and it is still a private residence. Its strength was not ornament. It was structure. Mellen built "a machine for decorating," a strong, adaptable shell that could hold whatever its owners put inside it.
The company did the same thing. Berwind-White was organized as land, capital, and family governance, with coal as only the first occupant. Pharmaceutical coatings, chemical lubricants, X-Acto knives, web-handling automation, and medical packaging followed. The shell outlasted every business that lived in it.
Tactic: Design your holding structure, whether legal entity, capital base, or governance, to outlast your first product, and assume the first product will eventually be replaced.
Principle 11
Exit the commodity, keep the ground
In 1962 the family stopped digging coal. It did not sell the land. It turned the land into a leasing business and used the cash flow to buy companies with no connection to coal. Colorcon followed in 1978 and CRC in 1981. Most of the great coal combinations of Berwind's era either went down with the industry or were absorbed into larger firms. Berwind stepped out of the commodity decades before the decline was obvious and kept the one thing about the commodity that held its value: title to the ground.
The year matters. 1962 was also the year The Elms opened to the public. The private symbol of the coal fortune and the coal business itself were both handed off in the same year, and the family held on to what still produced income.
Tactic: Decide now what you would keep if your core product disappeared tomorrow, and start converting that asset into a source of income independent of the product.
Principle 12
Stay private and stay quiet
Edward Berwind left almost no quotations. His feelings appear only in a young woman's coded diary. His politics appear only in other men's letters. His marriage appears only in a will. The company he shaped says little more today: "Berwind Maintains 100% Ownership." There is no public stock, no quarterly call, no founder myth to keep up.
Silence of this kind is a strategy. It shields decisions from outside scrutiny, removes the pressure to perform for markets, and lets an institution make fifty-year decisions on a fifty-year clock. It has costs. Berwind's silence left others to tell his story, and they told it from the tent towns. For an enterprise that wants to compound across generations, though, the record suggests that being unknown is often an advantage.
Tactic: Before taking outside capital or a public profile, write down which long-horizon decisions you would no longer be free to make, and weigh them as a real cost.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
Edward Berwind left remarkably few words of his own. The most revealing ones survive secondhand: in the diary of a woman he courted, in the letters of men who distrusted him, in his wife's will, and in the plain language of the company that outlived him.
— Susie's journal, March 6, 1876I have said 'Yes' to J and Berwind thinks I love him above all others.
— Baby Thomsen, as recorded in Susie's journal, March 9, 1876It is a sin my dear to make poor Berwind love you for you know my dear that you love someone else.
— Hamilton Fish to Theodore Roosevelt, March 27, 1907, describing Berwind and Edward R. Baconamong the most vehement in their denunciations of [the President's policies]
— Berwind press release on the Hunt Corporation acquisition, November 12, 2002Berwind's approach is to give management at its operating companies broad strategic and operating autonomy as well as supporting their efforts through ongoing capital investment.
Maxims
- Sell where failure is unthinkable. The best customers are those for whom a supply disruption would be a catastrophe, not an inconvenience.
- Lease the timber, keep the seam. Give partners the layer that wears out and keep the layer that lasts.
- Your past institutions are your market map. Every organization you served from the inside is one whose buying process you already understand.
- The service stairs carry the house. Invisible operations decide whether the visible product can work at all.
- Hand over the title while you can still watch. A succession run during the founder's lifetime can be corrected; one run after it can only be mourned.
- Check a playbook's hidden assumptions. What worked on owned Pennsylvania ground failed in a neglected Colorado turnaround.
- Coercion borrows against the future. Control bought with eviction notices is repaid in reputation, with interest.
- Build the shell, not the ornament. Structures that can take new occupants outlast those built around a single use.
- Leave the commodity before it leaves you. Keep the land and let the product go.
- Silence compounds. An institution that answers only to itself can make decisions on a generational clock.
