Edward was born on February 26, 1849 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the second son and third of four children of Thomas P. and Martha (Parker) Stotesbury. His great-grandfather had brought the Stotesbury name to America from Ireland early in the eighteenth century. His father was a Philadelphia business man; his mother was a Quaker, who named him Edward Townsend after a prominent member of the Friends' Meeting in Philadelphia.
After attending public elementary schools and the Friends' Central School in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1865, Stotesbury acquired a business education in the newly established Peirce Business College.
After a few months as a clerk in a wholesale grocery firm, he went to work at his father's firm of Harris and Stotesbury, sugar refiners. Harris and Stotesbury was doing considerable business with the great Philadelphia banking house of Drexel & Co. , of which Anthony J. Drexel was then senior partner, and after a year young Stotesbury - still only seventeen - became a clerk at Drexel & Co. He advanced rapidly through the different departments of the establishment.
He was given an interest in the business in 1875 and on January 1, 1883, became a partner.
In 1904 he became a partner in Drexel & Co. , Stotesbury also became a partner in its New York City affiliate, Drexel, Morgan & Co. , which had been formed in 1871.
After the death of Anthony J. Drexel in 1893 the New York firm took the more familiar name of J. P. Morgan & Co. , but the two firms continued in partnership until 1940, and Stotesbury remained until his death a member of both. For many years a major part of the Drexel-Morgan business was in foreign exchange, but Drexel & Co. also had important domestic concerns. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century the firm led the way in the financial reorganization of the American railway system that was characteristic of that period, a development in which Stotesbury played an important part.
As senior partner he helped to work out new and more comprehensive plans of financing to meet the railroads' growing needs, and he shared as well in the field of securities underwriting. In the early twentieth century Drexel & Co. , under the leadership of J. Pierpont Morgan and Stotesbury, carried its share of the responsibility for the formation of the United States Steel Corporation. In international finance Stotesbury assisted in the flotation by an international syndicate of the Mexican loan of 1899 and, in 1909, in the financing and flotation of the international Chinese loan.
In World War I the firm also took part in financing the longer-time, as well as the short-time, commercial needs of the European allied governments. In his office Stotesbury appeared stern and austere, and he was exacting in his requirements of his employees, though he held them in affectionate regard. He took an interest in the activities of children: the Boy Scouts and the Starr Garden Recreation Center in Philadelphia were among his favorite charities.
Though he slackened his pace of work, Stotesbury never retired. On the day of his death, in his ninetieth year, he had gone as usual to his office at Drexel & Co. and had visited the offices of the Reading Railroad, of which he was chairman of the executive committee. That afternoon he was stricken on his way home, and he died that evening, apparently of a heart attack, in his Chestnut Hill mansion, Whitemarsh Hall.
Edward Townsend Stotesbury was for many years a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded him an honorary LL. D. degree. He was involved in the financing of many railroads. He also served as the President of Philadelphia's Art Jury and Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art). Stotesbury, West Virginia, a coal mining town in Raleigh County, is named for him, as well as his equestrian estate, the Stotesbury Club House.
A Republican in politics, he served as national treasurer of the party for the Roosevelt campaign of 1904 and the Taft campaign of 1908.
Small in stature, Stotesbury was quick in action and immaculate in dress. Unlike many men of his day and age, he learned to play as he advanced in years, and he heartily enjoyed the fancy dress balls and other events of the winter season at Palm Beach and the summer season at Bar Harbor, Maine.
By his first wife, Frances Bergman Butcher, whom he had married on April 2, 1873, he had two daughters, Edith and Frances. In 1912, some years after her death, he married Mrs. Lucretia Roberts Cromwell. He and his second wife maintained a large winter residence at Palm Beach, Florida, where they became the acknowledged social leaders.
