Eugene Kelly was an American banker, businessman, and philanthropist.
Background
Eugene Kelly was born on November 25, 1808 in County Tyrone, Ireland, of an ancient rebel family. As an active participant in the Rebellion of 1798, his father, Thomas Boye O'Kelly of Mullaghmore, was ruined in fortune and sought safety in the common name of Kelly which made legal identification more difficult.
Education
Eugene Kelly was trained in a local hedge school and apprenticed to the draper's business.
Career
With £100 in his pocket, Eugene emigrated to New York in the thirties and found employment with Donnelly & Company, then the city's leading dry-goods concern. Soon he married the proprietor's sister and amassed a small fortune in the dry-goods business in Maysville, Kentucky. Selling his merchandise, he traveled to St. Louis which was becoming a Mecca for Irish immigrants attracted by steamboating, fur trading, and overland freighting. Here again, he was doing well when he contracted the gold fever and set forth for California with a train of mules under the guidance of Aubrey, "White Cloud of the Prairies. "
He arrived in San Francisco in 1850 and thus much to his later regret missed being a "Forty-niner. " In San Francisco Kelly founded, along with Adam Grant, Joseph A. Donohoe, and Daniel T. Murphy, Murphy, Grant & Company, which later became the chief dry-goods firm on the coast, and Donohoe, Ralston & Company, a banking house which after 1864 was known as Donohoe, Kelly & Company. Eugene Kelly & Company, founded in 1856, was its New York branch. In 1891 the San Francisco house became a joint-stock company under the firm name of Donohoe-Kelly Banking Company.
Around 1857 he made his home in New York. His private banking and brokerage house made him a multimillionaire. He was influential in ecclesiastical, Irish, and Democratic circles. In Reconstruction days, he was heavily interested in the rehabilitation of Southern railroads and was a founder of the Southern Bank of Georgia in Savannah. He was also a director of the Bank of New York, the Emigrant Savings Bank, the National Park Bank, and of the Equitable Life Assurance Society.
In civic affairs, he was known as chairman of the Electoral Committee of the State of New York (1884), a member of the Board of Education for thirteen years, a trustee and patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an active member of the committees on the Washington Arch and Bartholdi Statue. A sturdy Irish nationalist and friend of John Dillon, he served as treasurer of the Irish Parliamentary Fund and as president of the National Federation of America. He contributed to Catholic charities, to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and to Seton Hall College, of which he was a trustee, and is regarded as one of the founders and benefactors of the Catholic University of America in Washington which he served as treasurer and financial consultant from its establishment (1887) until his death.
Achievements
Connections
Kelly's first wife died in 1848 and in 1857 he was married to Margaret Hughes, niece of Archbishop John Hughes.