Billy Grace (1832-1904), Prince of Peru, Mayor of New York

 See here for more tales of the Irish diaspora

‘A man’s mind is his kingdom’ – W. R. Grace.

Billy Grace. Illustration: Derry Dillon.

New York, 1 January 1881. Even as he was being sworn in as New York’s first Catholic mayor, Billy Grace’s attention must have occasionally wandered 3,650 miles south to Peru. The land where he had made his fortune was already under siege from the Chilean army. Despite Billy’s best efforts to persuade the US government to back the Peruvians, the game was up. His younger brother Michael had wisely abandoned Lima, the Peruvian capital, which would fall to the Chileans on 17 January. Billy would spend the next twelve months focusing on his mayoral duties in New York. One wonders could he have foreseen that Peru’s defeat would ultimately provide the basis for a fortune that would seal the Grace brother’s position as two of the richest men in the world.

William Russell Grace was born at Riverstown, near Glanmire, County Cork, in 1832. James Grace, his father, descended from Raymond Le Gros, an Anglo-Norman knight who settled in Ireland in the late 12th century. A branch of this Catholic family settled between Ballylynan and Arles on the Laois-Kildare border where they lived in a once splendid mansion, Gracefield. Billy liked to say of his ancestors, ‘they’re like potatoes – the best of them underground.’ His father, being the descendant of a younger son, was not an especially wealthy man. He leased a 250-acre farm on the Weldon estate, near Gracefield, which included a lime kiln, a defunct quarry and an abandoned cotton mill. Horses and cattle predominated on the farm.

James, who also spoke Irish, earned additional income as an inland revenue supervisor. Billy was the third of his seven children by his wife Ellen Russell. In his formative years, the blue-eyed, tawny-haired Billy loved reading his father’s newspaper, The Nation, which advocated a nationalist future for Ireland. In later life, Billy would help fund a monument to the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell on what is now O’Connell Street in Dublin.

The Stowaway

Billy’s childhood dream was to join the Royal Navy but his father would not permit such a career. In 1846, the thirteen-year-old ran away from home and boarded a merchant ship bound for America. He spent the next two years in New York, initially as a cobbler’s apprentice and later working for a printer and as a clerk.

Two years later, the prodigal son returned on a ship laden with Cuban sugar only to find his homeland devastated by disease and hunger. His family were by then living in Dublin at Brooklawn, a large house on Donore Avenue. Welcomed back into their fold, Billy was sent to the Jesuit school at nearby Belvedere House, now Belvedere College. Unsurprisingly school was not for him. By 1850, the eighteen-year-old had moved to Liverpool and opened a passage broker business, William Russell Grace & Co., selling tickets for the US-bound packet ships.

Guano Genius

A dense breeding colony of seabirds, mainly guano‑producing species such as Peruvian boobies, guanay cormorants and pelicans, covering the island surface, with the bare rock islets visible offshore in the background.

One of the Chincha Islands, transformed into an enormous stepped guano mound and cut into terraces where workers quarried and loaded the guano. The whole “hill” is accumulated bird droppings!

In early 1851, his father led a group of 180 men, women and children to establish an Irish colony in Peru. Billy closed his Liverpool business to join the venture. When it failed, he moved to the port city of Callao where he found work with John Bryce & Co, a ship’s chandler that supplied maritime provisions to American and European whalers, as well as the clipper ships engaged in the guano trade.

Peru was the predominant global supplier of guano, aka dried bird or bat poo, one of the key ingredients in both gunpowder and fertilizer on account of exceptionally high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen.[1] In 1855, Billy ingeniously equipped an old store ship and had it towed out to the Chincha Islands, the epicentre of Peru’s guano bonanza. From this floating warehouse, he made a fortune selling ropes, sails, masts, turpentine, tar, hardware, salt pork and other supplies to the hundreds of clippers and square-riggers that arrived every week.

I am reminded of Levi Strauss, who arrived in New York in 1847, as an 18-year-old Jewish Bavarian, along with his mother and two sisters. He went to work pedalling kettles, blankets and sewing goods on behalf of his older brothers, who ran a dry goods business in Manhattan. By 1854, he had opened his own store in San Francisco, called Levi Strauss & Co, from which he sold goldminers everything from clothing, bedding and combs to tents, purses, and handkerchiefs. In 1871, he teamed up with a Jewish-Latvian tailor named Jacob Davis who made denim jeans, with copper rivets to reinforce the stitching. They dyed the jeans blue and changed the world.

The Chincha store ship was a lively party spot and the claret-swilling Billy Grace became renowned as an excellent host. Among his guests on board was George W. Gilchrest, a ship’s builder from Thomaston, Maine, whose beautiful, fun-loving daughter Lillius took a shine to the affable Irishman. She and Billy were married on 11 September 1859; their first child, Alice, was born on the store ship exactly nine months later.

In 1862, Billy brought his wife and three daughters to visit his Irish homeland where, whenever opportunity knocked, he urged any young people that he met to emigrate to South America, assuring them they would find employment there. He expended some of his new-found wealth on improving the lot of his siblings in Ballylynan, but the trip was tragically marred by the illness and death of their baby daughter, Lillius Clementina. She is said to have been buried in the family mausoleum in Arles. [2]

Mayor of New York

Billy Grace was the mayor of New York who formally received the Statue of Liberty.

Back in Peru, Lilius soon tired of the earthquakes and the constant stench of guano. A case of dysentery tipped Billy over the edge and, by the end of 1866, the family had relocated to New York where Billy established the US offices of Grace Brothers & Company. The ‘Brothers’ in the name referred to his youngest brother, Michael, who had now joined the business. Michael henceforth ran the Peruvian operations from Lima where he and his wife Margarita were amongst the leading lights of society during the 1870s.[3]

A flourishing trade in fertilizer, machinery, rubber, fabric and other products saw the Grace’s profits soar, while Billy also moved into real estate in New York. He acquired a 144-acre farm at Great Neck, Long Island, which he renamed Gracefield after the ancestral estate in Ireland. It was a haven of swimming pools, tennis courts and polo playing fields to which Billy imported driving horses, saddle ponies, cows and sheep from Ireland. Pat Delaney, manager of the farm at Ballylynan, oversaw the transport of the animals and was then placed in charge of another Grace farm in Connecticut.

In 1880 Billy was persuaded to stand as a Democratic candidate in New York’s mayoral race by Honest John Kelly, the infamous boss of Tammany Hall. Billy’s reputation amongst the city’s considerable Irish community was first-rate at this time as, following a particularly harsh winter in Ireland in 1879-1880, he commissioned the USS Constellation, an American steamer, to sail from New York to Ireland with 3,315 barrels of flour, potatoes, oatmeal and corn, as well as children’s clothing and other relief supplies.

Having triumphed at the election by nearly 3000 votes, Billy was sworn in as New York’s first Roman Catholic Mayor on New Year’s Day 1881. He devoted his term to stamping out organised crime, reforming the police’s corrupt street-cleaning department, breaking up the Louisiana lottery and lowering taxes. However, his refusal to accept one of Kelly’s men as a deputy set him on a warpath with Tammany Hall. ‘No one can dictate to me, Mr Kelly,’ he shouted, shortly before Honest John stormed out of City Hall.

Billy did not stand for re-election but he did develop a friendship with young Theodore Roosevelt over the coming years. In 1884, with Roosevelt’s support, Billy stood as an independent for a second mayoral term. Tammany Hall tried to take him down and failed miserably; he won by 10,000 votes. The highlight of this term was his acceptance of the Statue of Liberty from France on behalf of the American people. He also led New York’s successful campaign to hold Grant’s Tomb, the final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, after the president’s death in 1885.

The Grace Brothers’ Conquest of Peru

William Russell Grace, aka Billy Grace.

Billy’s focus was never far from Peru where Michael Grace was now a major power broker. By the time the guano bonanza petered out in the early 1870s, the Graces had already diversified so that, for instance, they were supplying all the ordnance material for the Peruvian navy and most of the pine lumber and iron for the state’s railway projects.[4] Indeed, the railroads of both Peru and Costa Rica were primarily built with timber supplied by the Graces. Supported by Baring Brothers, the London bankers, the Graces were also creditors of various guano, nitrate and sugar enterprises in Peru.

As Peru’s financial agent in both New York and San Francisco, Billy developed a fruitful relationship with the political elite. He was private commercial creditor to General Manuel Prado, Peru’s liberal president from 1876-1879, overseeing the purchase of the pure-bred horses that the general raced at the Peruvian Jockey Club.

In October 1879, a feud over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert triggered the War of the Pacific, pitching Peru and Bolivia against the marginally superior might of neighbouring Chile. The four-year long war was a disaster for Peru. Although Chile’s military and naval infrastructure was second-rate, Peru still lagged far behind. Indeed, the Peruvian navy’s warships were largely manned by Chilean sailors who had to be dismissed when the war began. Moreover, the Chileans had much stronger international support.

Prado commissioned the Graces to arm and equip Peru’s army and navy with torpedoes, torpedo boats, rifles, carbines and ammunition, all bought from US manufacturers.  Meanwhile, Billy’s media empire, and his substantial networking base, began lobbying US diplomats and congressmen to back Peru. His motivation was further fuelled by the fact that Michael had lately secured the contract to distribute Peruvian nitrates to the US.

Michael Grace also developed a close friendship with Nicolás de Piérola who, having ousted Prado in a coup, also bought large consignments of weapons and munitions from the Graces, some of which transpired to be defective.[5] It certainly wasn’t good enough to stop the Chilean conquest of Lima in 1881, after which the corrupt Piérola was deposed and fled to Paris. Michael Grace subsidised Piérola in exile, correctly predicting that this ‘valuable friend’ would return to power one day. Hedging his bets, Michael also oiled his friendship with the victorious Chileans and opened a branch in Valaparaiso.[6]

The war left Peru in debt by over £32 million to the London-based Committee of Foreign Bondholders. In the mid-1880s, Michael Grace and a ‘charming’ red-haired Irish aristocrat, John Hely-Hutchinson, 5th Earl of Donoughmore began buying up these bonds. Michael then offered his services as a broker to negotiate a settlement. His motive may have been to protect the firm’s railway and mining interests but, either way, he secures an extraordinary deal that made Grace Bros & Co. Latin America’s first bona-fide multinational, with 15,000 employees in Peru alone.

Under the terms of the Grace-Donoughmore Contract, ratified in January 1890, the Grace brothers and Lord Donoughmore took over Peru’s national debt.  The payback for them was immense. They secured control of the lucrative silver mines of La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco. They won the lease on all of Peru’s railroads for 66 years, on condition that they complete the lines, 160km in total, for which they would be paid separately; they also won the contract to supply of iron and timber for the line, as well as food for the construction workers, and to extend it to the silver mines. They were entitled to hold one of Peru’s major roads ‘in perpetuity’; its’ construction was to be heavily subsidised. They were granted five million acres, including the oil and mineral rich Perené Valley, and the rights to up to 2,000,000 tons of guano, which was effectively Peru’s entire harvest.

The contract was signed in the face of widespread opposition from Peruvian nationalists, as well as miners and landowners who understandably interpreted this ‘monstrous’ scheme as a geopolitical move by an American firm seeking to monopolise Peru’s trade and enterprise. To get it over the line, Billy Grace met with US President Grover Cleveland (having donated to both his successful White House campaigns) and reworked some of the finer terms. Perhaps more importantly, the brothers also handed out at least 19 gold watches to borderline opponents.

To cap it all, Michael Grace took home his brokerage fee, as well as a three per cent commission on the shares of the new corporation, which were distributed to the original bondholders. In 1901, his daughter Elena Maria Grace married Lord Donoughmore’s son and heir. Another daughter Elisa married the Hon. Hubert Beaumont, a Liberal Member of Parliament in Westminster; their son Michael bought the old La Touche home of Harristown House, County Kildare, after the Second World War and served as Master of the Kildare Hunt from 1948 to 1958. Another of the Grace daughters, Margarita, married John Shaffer Phipps, the American philanthropist and steel magnate.

Steamships and the Grace Insitute

An advertisement for the Grace Line.

Key to the original Grace Institute at 149–155 West 60th Street, New York, founded in 1897.

In 1891, the Grace brothers established the New York and Pacific Steamship Company, which duly became the Grace Steamship Company. It was the first steamship line to run between New York and the west coast of South America, via the Strait of Magellan. Five years later, the Grace’s interests were combined under a single American charter with the creation of William R. Grace & Company. John Grace, Billy and Michael’s brother, joined it as a vice-president. The company now had offices in every Latin American country. [8]  By the close of the century, they controlled light, traction and power in Chile, as well as significant stakes in the country’s sodium, nitrate, cotton and sugar industries. Billy was also involved with a failed attempt to build a canal in Nicaragua. [9]

In 1897, Billy, Lillius and Michael Grace co-founded the Grace Institute at 155-149 West 60th Street in Manhattan, New York. Explicitly endowed as a memorial to their parents, James and Ellen Grace, this was (and is) a non‑sectarian vocational school where immigrant and low‑income women (mostly Irish) were trained in dressmaking, stenography, typewriting, book-keeping and domestic science. The mansion on Tenth Avenue and West 60th Street formerly belonged to James Moore, an Irish immigrant who arrived in New York in the 1820s and made a fortune in west‑side property speculation. (Moore commanded the Montgomery Horse Troops, a mounted militia unit that helped suppress the deadly Astor Place Riots in 1849. When Moore died in 1888, he left his massive fortune to his eight children; his daughter Julia A. Moore later donated a major altar to nearby St Paul the Apostle in his memory.)

The Grace Institute was staffed for decades by the Sisters of Charity of New York. Over the course of the 20th century, it trained thousands of women for office work as typewriters, clerks and secretaries, later updating to modern administrative and patient‑services roles. In the 1960s, it moved to a new building on Second Avenue (64th–65th Street). Since 2015 it has operated from 40 Rector Street in Lower Manhattan, where it continues to offer free workplace training and job‑placement support for women of multiple backgrounds and ethnicities.

When Billy was debilitated by a stroke in 1898, his brother Michael took charge of the firm, along with their Dublin-born kinsman, Edward Eyre. In December 1903, Billy was assailed by pneumonia but he continued to transact business from his bed. At the time of his death on 21 March 1904, the 71-year-old tycoon was actively promoting the America-led construction of the Panama Canal. When it opened a decade later, a Grace steamer was one of the first ships to pass through.

Six of Billy’s eleven children predeceased him, but he was survived by his wife, two sons and three daughters. [10] Michael also lived on, passing away at his home in Battle Abbey, Sussex, in 1920.  In 1945, Billy’s grandson J. Peter Grace became chairman of W. R. Grace and Company. Over the course of his 47-year term, Peter Grace – who was also head of the Knights of Malta – built the firm up into a multi-billion-dollar corporation. [11] As well as its fleet and fertilizer business, it boasted an airline (Panagra), two massive sugar plantations, a paper mill, a chemical works, three textile mills, a candy factory, numerous import and export companies and major interests in everything from packaging and fishmeal production to banking, mining and industry. Based in Columbia, Maryland, the company continues today as one of the world’s biggest specialty chemical businesses.

Further Reading

• 

  This six‑shooter is a presentation Colt Frontier revolver that once belonged to Billy Grace. Made as a deluxe, factory‑engraved version of Colt’s famous .44‑40 Single Action Army, it was supplied cased, with accessories, and later auctioned as a notable piece of 19th‑century Americana linked to New York’s first Catholic mayor. See here for more.

  Clayton, Lawrence, Grace: W. R. Grace – The Formative Years, 1850-1930 (Ottawa, Il, Jameson Books, 1985)

• Hollett, Dave, ‘More Precious Than Gold: The Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade’ (Associated University Presse, 2008)
• James, Marquis, ‘Merchant Adventurer: The Story of W.R. Grace’ (Wilmington, 1993) here.
• Quiroz, Alfonso W., ‘Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru’ (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008)
• Whittemore, Henry, ‘Long Island historic homes, ancient and modern : including a history of their founders and builders online’ (Lewis Publishing Company, New York, 1901)
• Details of Billy Grace’s will were published in the New York Times on 26 March 1904

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Seán Murray, for going beyond the call to trace the Grace Mausoleum in Arles, and Thomas Carolan.

End-Notes

[1] It has been argued that the blight which killed the potatoes in Ireland and Western Europe arrived in guano-based fertilizer from Peru.

[2] The claim that two daughters died is made in Marquis James’s book. The Grace Family Mausoleum at Sacred Heart Church in Arles contains the remains of various members of the Grace Family of nearby Gracefield who had died since it was built in 1818. . However, during the period of W.R. Grace’s visit, it seems only one child died, namely Lilius Clemintina Grace, born in South America, Oct. 24, 1864; died in Ireland, June 26, 1866. Lilius was likely buried within the Mausoleum as it is said she died in Ireland. However, it is unlikely that her sister Florence Ellen Grace, who died in 1861, six days after her birth in in Peru, was buried at the Family Mausoleum. Thanks to Sean Murray.

[3] Michael Grace and his wife hosted a dance at their home in Lima in July 1872 attended by a hundred guests, including Meige.

[4] The guano bonanza ended in 1870 when saltpetre, or sodium nitrate, from neighbouring Chile emerged as an alternative resource. Michael Grace was the principal broker for the indebted Peruvian navy and also supplied much of the pine lumber and iron for railway projects initiated by American entrepreneur Henry Meiggs. They also bought strategic rights for the trans-Andean railway line between Lima and Chicla, by which they essentially gained control over a vital transportation artery that was key to Peru’s mining economy and export trade during the 1890s debt settlement. This became the Ferrocarril Central del Perú (Central Railway of Peru), one of the world’s most remarkable engineering feats.

[5] Early in the war, Prado took the catastrophic decision to leave the country for Europe, allegedly to purchase more military equipment but possibly to escape an assassination attempt. In his absence, Nicolás de Piérola launched a coup and declared himself ‘Supreme Commander in Chief’ on 23 December 1879. Michael Grace ingeniously stayed on side with the new president during his year-long dictatorship and the two men became close friends.

[6] The Graces also found favour with the government of Miguel Iglesias, an ally of Piérola, who became president in 1883. Desperate for funds, Iglesias made a deal with Grace in February 1885 by which the brothers secured the right to extend the railway line from Callao to the silver mines of La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco, as well as the draining contract for the latter.  Although Iglesias was ousted later that year, the contract formed the basis for the Grace-Donoughmore Contract. Like Piérola, Iglesias became part of Michael Grace’s circle when he went into exile in Paris.

[8] Its Argentina offices opened in 1900. In 1915, the Grace National Bank of New York was formed to carry on the various banking activities in Latin America that had been entrusted to W. R. Grace & Co.

[9] The Grace’s fleet was traditionally comprised of sailing ships, largely because of Billy’s love of sails. In 1890, he bought the New York and Pacific Steamship Company, which duly became the Grace Steamship Company. It was the first steamship line to run between New York and the west coast of South America.

[10] Billy left an estate worth $10 million. When he died, The New York Daily News applauded the ‘romantic life story of an Irish lad who ran away from home to be a Robinson Crusoe [and] who twice became Mayor of New York and died a multi-millionaire’. Billy Grace’s story may not have been quite as rags-to-riches as the media made out but the story of this self-made man is certainly dramatic.

[11] Peter Grace was in the class of 1945 at Canterbury School, New Milford, Connecticut. So too was his lifelong friend, Dick Kerrigan, known to my friend Michael Kerrigan, his nephew, as “Uncle BB.” Dick later worked for W.R. Grace in New York City and became assistant treasurer of the company. He married Adelaide Ryan, the then VP of Industrial Relations at W.R. Grace, who Michael also knew well. They lived on 57th Street in NYC and dined in the legend that was Jimmy Neary’s Pub every night. Dick died in 2001.

The founders of Canterbury School were Henry O. Havermeyer and his friend, Clarence H. Mackay, President of the Postal Telegraph Company. Clarence’s Dublin-born father was the Bonanza King, James William Mackay, who made his fortune with silver from the Comstock Load in Colorado. Clarence Mackay lived in New York City and on Long Island. His daughter, Ellin, married the Russian-born composer Irving Berlin – her father did not approve but later relented and wrote her back into his will.  Ellin Berlin wrote a charming memoir, ‘Silver Platter’, about her grandparents and parents’ lives.