Name Thomas Lawson | Role Businessman | |
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Died February 8, 1925, Boston, Massachusetts, United States Books Frenzied Finance: The Crim, Friday - the Thirteenth, The Lawson History of, High cost living, Friday the 13th: A Novel | ||
Thomas w lawson history scituate ma history
Thomas William Lawson (February 26, 1857 – February 8, 1925) was an American businessman and author. A highly controversial Boston stock promoter, he is known for both his efforts to promote reforms in the stock markets and the fortune he amassed for himself through highly dubious stock manipulations.
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Early life
Thomas William Lawson was born February 26, 1857 at Charlestown, Massachusetts. He was the son of Thomas and Anna Maria (née Loring) Lawson. Lawson's father, a carpenter, died when he was a young boy and just eight years old.
Career
At 12 years old, Lawson ran away from home to become a clerk in a Boston bank, and soon began speculating in stocks. He was a principal mover in the promotion of companies trying to establish the small town of Grand Rivers, Kentucky as a major steel-producing city. Lawson specialized in shares of copper-mining companies, which were then a staple of the Boston stock market, and became a multimillionaire during the copper boom of the late 1890s. He built the lavish estate called Dreamworld in Scituate, Massachusetts at a cost of $6,000,000.
In 1899, he joined Henry H. Rogers and William Rockefeller in forming Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, a company that combined several copper mining companies, mostly in Butte, Montana, and which tried to dominate the copper market. Amalgamated Copper was the subject of much criticism then and for years afterward. Amalgamated later became Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1915. However, Lawson later broke with the financial backers of Amalgamated, and became an advocate for financial reform.
Lawson was an independent candidate for the United States Senate in 1918. He finished a distant third with 5.26% of the vote.
Lawson authored several books, the most famous of which was Frenzied Finance: the Crime of Amalgamated, his controversial account of the formation of the Amalgamated Copper Company.
Personal life
Lawson married Jeannie Augusta Goodwillie (1857–1906) in 1878, and the couple had six children, including:
Though once a very wealthy man, Lawson died in poverty in February 1925. He was buried beside his wife.
His grandson Thomas Lawson McCall (1913–1983), the son of his daughter Dorothy, served as governor of Oregon.
Legacy and honors
The Thomas W. Lawson, the only seven-masted schooner ever built, was named after him. As an odd coincidence, Lawson, who was intensely superstitious, wrote the novel Friday the Thirteenth in which a broker picks that day on which to bring down Wall Street; the Thomas W. Lawson, in which he had invested heavily, was wrecked off the Isles of Scilly at 2:30 am GMT on Saturday 14 December 1907, but to Lawson, at home in Boston, it was at that time still Friday the 13th.
Lawson is believed to have been the inspiration for the protagonist of David Graham Phillips' 1905 novel The Deluge.
He is generally credited in the U.S. with the Lawson sofa, made for him at the turn of the 20th century. It was a square, overstuffed sofa on a generous scale with loose seat cushions and pillows.
The Scituate, Massachusetts Historical Society proclaimed 2007 the "Year of Thomas W. Lawson" in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of Lawson's birth.
The Lawson Tower, originally part of his private Dreamworld estate, still stands. It is also called "Grampy's Tower" by local children. The structure is a water tower with a shingled outer shell and observatory which offers views of the area from an observation deck.