Background
He was born on February 10, 1806 in the parish of Old Deer, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, United Kingdom.
He was born on February 10, 1806 in the parish of Old Deer, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, United Kingdom.
There is no information about his education.
He appeared in the village of Chicago about the year 1834 and invested what little money he had in lots and wild lands. Following the boom in land values in 1835 and 1836, he had the sagacity to sell his holdings before the slump came in 1837. In 1836 he became associated with, and was in a sense the founder of, the Chicago Marine and Fire Insurance Company. The following year he went back to Scotland and organized the Scottish Illinois Land Investment Company.
On his return to America in 1839, he found that the legislature of Illinois had passed a law which suppressed the banking operations of his Chicago corporation. He therefore went to Wisconsin and prevailed upon some friends in the legislature to charter a similar organization. Following the panic of 1837, nearly all the legislatures in the Midwest were dominated by Jackson Democrats, and it was therefore necessary for Smith to obtain a bank charter by stealth. The Wisconsin Marine & Fire Insurance Company was chartered February 28, 1839. Smith made Alexander Mitchell, then a young Scotchman twenty-two years of age, secretary of the company.
In 1853 the Wisconsin Marine & Fire Insurance Company became a state bank. Under the Wisconsin law no bank could issue notes in excess of its capital stock. Smith soon saw that this provision would deprive him of the enormous profits he had made under the old charter, and in 1854 he sold his stock to Alexander Mitchell, and proceeded to Georgia. Here he obtained from the state a charter incorporating a bank of issue located at Atlanta, a rather inaccessible place at that time. He had hoped to make his Chicago institution and Mitchell's bank at Milwaukee the fountainhead of his Atlanta bank. In 1856 he closed out his banking business.
Between that date and the outbreak of the Civil War he made several trips to Scotland. On his last return to America in 1860 he invested his huge fortune in Chicago real estate and the securities of the Rock Island, Northwestern, and St. Paul railroads, which at the time were greatly depreciated, and retired from active business life.
His investments were wisely chosen, for at his death in 1899 estimates of his fortune ran as high as $100, 000, 000. None was lower than $50, 000, 000. From 1860 to his death, he divided his time between his castle in the Scottish Highlands and the Reform Club of London.
He died at the Reform Club in London.
He never married and had no close relatives.