Samuel Mather
Samuel Mather was, at his death in 1931, the wealthiest man in Ohio. His fortune was made in iron ore — specifically in Pickands Mather & Company, the ore-brokerage and Great Lakes shipping firm he co-founded in 1883. For nearly half a century, Pickands Mather was the central ore-trading operation of the Great Lakes steel industry, handling the feedstock for much of Carnegie, Bethlehem, and US Steel's production.
His significance to Cleveland is measured less by the fortune than by its disposition. Mather gave away, in his lifetime and through his estate, an amount equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in today's dollars — much of it to institutions that still bear his influence: University Hospitals, Trinity Cathedral, Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Born into the Ore Trade
Samuel Mather was born in Cleveland on July 13, 1851, to one of the city's founding business families. His father, Samuel Livingston Mather, had been a founding investor in the Cleveland Iron Mining Company in 1847 — the first major iron-ore mining operation on the Marquette Range of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The elder Mather's company became Cleveland-Cliffs, which still operates today.
The younger Mather was sent to Harvard but withdrew after a serious accident at a Marquette mine in 1869 left him with a permanent limp. He returned to Cleveland and joined the family business, learning the Great Lakes ore trade from his father through the 1870s.
Pickands Mather & Company
In 1883, Mather entered into partnership with James Pickands and Jay Morse, forming Pickands Mather & Company. The firm's business was ore brokerage and Great Lakes shipping: buying iron ore from the Lake Superior ranges (Marquette, Gogebic, Mesabi), chartering the lake carriers to haul it down the Great Lakes, and selling it to the steel mills of Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. By 1910 Pickands Mather was handling a substantial share of all iron ore moving through the Great Lakes — millions of tons per year.
Mather's fortune came from the ore trade itself, from ownership stakes in the mines and the carrier fleets, and from the long boom of American steelmaking between 1880 and 1929. The flagship of the Pickands Mather fleet, the 1925 Steamship William G. Mather, was named for Samuel's cousin and is now preserved as a museum ship at Cleveland's North Coast Harbor.
Philanthropy as Civic Strategy
Mather's philanthropy was systematic rather than flashy. Over his lifetime he funded or substantially supported the construction of Trinity Cathedral (the Episcopal mother church of northeast Ohio, completed 1907); the consolidation and Cleveland relocation of University Hospitals; a major expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Cleveland Orchestra's founding subscription; and extensive building campaigns at Case Western Reserve University, including Mather House (the undergraduate women's college of Western Reserve, named for his mother).
The couple's Euclid Avenue home — "Shoreby," an 1890s limestone mansion built as part of Millionaires' Row — was demolished in 1940, five years after Flora's death. Their Bratenahl summer estate became the Shoreby Club, still operating as a lakefront private club.
1931
Mather died on October 18, 1931, age 80. His will disposed of what remained of his fortune largely to the Cleveland institutions he had supported for a half-century. The timing was difficult — the Depression had eroded values substantially — but the bequests were nonetheless among the largest single gifts any American city had received to that point. Mather's is the kind of name that survives in Cleveland not because it is often spoken, but because so many of the foundational civic institutions still bear the imprint of his giving.
Life Timeline
- Born in Cleveland1851
July 13 to Samuel Livingston Mather. - Mine Accident1869
Permanent limp; withdraws from Harvard. - Marries Flora Stone1881
Amasa Stone's daughter. - Pickands Mather Founded1883
With James Pickands and Jay Morse. - Trinity Cathedral1907
Completion; principal benefactor. - CMA Expansion1916
Major contributor to the art museum's endowment. - Dies1931
October 18, age 80. Wealthiest man in Ohio at death.