(3 of 6)
founded Union Trust Co. to take care of
Pittsburghers' estates. He backed his young nephew, William Larimer
Mellon, in the oil business. John D. Rockefeller was driving all rivals
to the wall. The Mellons planned, then built in haste a pipe line from
their wells in Western Pennsylvania across the Alleghenies to the Delaware
River. Rockefeller, who had stopped others, could not stop this
swift, calculated move. Two years later the Mellons sold their
pipe-line which had cost $2,500,000 to Standard Oil for $4,500,000. All
this happened by 1895 when Andrew was 40. The next decade, the decade
of the Spanish War, was greater for Andrew. In the war boom he turned
promoter on a grand scale. He merged coal properties around Pittsburgh
(many of them Mellon owned) into two great companies and sold their
stock to the public. He merged the Pittsburgh traction companies (many
of them Mellon owned). T. Mellon & Sons private bank became Mellon
National. Andrew and Frick got an option on Carnegie Steel Co. for
$160,000,000. Mellon agreed to raise $80,000,000 of the price and
asked J. P. Morgan (the elder — the present J. P. Morgan was still in
his financial nonage) to take the other half. Morgan refused, said the
price was outrageous — and a year or two later paid Carnegie
$492,000,000 when buying the company to found U. S. Steel. Mellon and
Frick lost $1,170,000, the price they had paid Carnegie for the option.
Angered, they started Union Steel Co. which promptly began to expand,
bought or built blast furnaces, bar, wire, tube, plate mills; went to
Mesabi for ore. Mellon provided customers for Union Steel: he started
New York Shipbuilding Co. (see p. 41) at Camden and Standard Steel
Car. He backed two young men and took a 60% interest in
McClintic-Marshall Construction Co. Meantime U. S. Steel had been
formed. When Union Steel announced plans for building a rail mill and a
new railroad to Pittsburgh, U. S. Steel came around to bargain, bought
Union Steel at a huge profit to Mellon and Frick. While all this was
going on, one morning in 1901 a Jugoslav mining engineer punched a
hole in a salt dome on the Texas plains and a huge fountain of oil such
as man had never seen before spouted into the air. That well at
Spindletop was to turn out more oil in the first three years than all
the wells of Pennsylvania combined. It remade the oil business.
Unable to cope with a financial find of such magnitude the Jugoslav
and his backer called in Colonel Guffey of Pittsburgh. Guffey soon
called in the Mellons. Andrew Mellon bought out the discoverer for
$400,000. The $15,000,000 Guffey Petroleum Co. (later Gulf Oil) was
founded—40% Mellon owned to begin with—more as time went on. In the
midst of these busy times, Andrew Mellon, aged 45, finally married.
His wife was Nora McMullen, daughter of a Dublin distiller, whom Mellon
met while she was visiting in Pittsburgh. Donora, Union Steel's new
works, was named after the bride and W. H. Donner, Union Steel's
president (first father-in-law of Elliott Roosevelt). Considering the
other projects which Andrew Mellon had afoot in those years her later
complaint that he devoted too much time to business, too little to her,
sounds genuine. The marriage lasted only ten years. The divorce was
bitterly but privately fought in the courts. Through his friend Boies
Penrose, Andrew Mellon had special laws enacted to keep the trial from,
becoming
