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Levi Ziegler Leiter was a descendant of James Van Leiter, a Dutch Calvinist who came from Amsterdam to Baltimore in 1760. In the village of Leitersburg on the tract which his ancestor had purchased from Lord Craven in Western Maryland, Levi Leiter was born, the son of Joseph and Anne (Zeigler) Leiter.
Leiter served his mercantile apprenticeship as clerk in the village store, until he was twenty years of age. Filled with the "Greeley spirit, " he started West in 1854, worked for a year in the store of Peter Murray at Springfield, Ohio, and the following year arrived in Chicago, where he found employment as a clerk in the firm of Downs & Van Wyck. In 1856 he took a similar position with Cooley, Wadsworth & Company, wholesale dry-goods merchants. At the same time Marshall Field also joined the firm as a clerk and salesman and a strong friendship developed between the two young men. Later, both became partners in the concern.
Potter Palmer had already established himself as a dry-goods merchant on Lake Street, and, being desirous of retiring from this business, he interested Field and Leiter in the purchase of a controlling interest. Selling their interest in Cooley, Wadsworth & Company, to John V. Farwell in 1865, they established the firm of Field, Palmer & Leiter. At the end of two years Palmer withdrew. The others carried on the business for fourteen years, Field as merchant, Leiter as credit manager.
Leiter was a prodigious worker, with sound judgment and unquestioned integrity. He led the way in reducing the credit period for the purchase of goods at wholesale from four months to sixty days. Under Field's leadership, with a credit policy that greatly decreased losses, the firm prospered remarkably. Leiter did not have Field's vision nor his boldness in projecting new plans. Furthermore, he had become interested in real estate, and in 1881 retired from the firm, already a very wealthy man.
His good judgment and his faith in the future of Chicago induced him to risk his fortune on the city's continued growth, and as a result he greatly increased his already large fortune. To his credit it must be said that his success was in large part the consequence of his constructive leadership in aiding the recovery of the city from the consequences of the disastrous fire of 1871. As a director he induced the Liverpool & London & Globe Insurance Company to locate its office in the city and thus encouraged the return of other insurance companies. He had early given his support to the Chicago Art Institute, becoming its second president. In 1877 he took the lead in providing a new building for the Chicago Historical Society, which had suffered greatly in the fire. The founding of the Chicago Public Library had his financial support. As director of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society (1874 - 1880), he was active in the work of philanthropy. He was a leader in his own group of business men and first president of the Chicago Commercial Club.
He lived in his latter years at Washington, where he collected a valuable library of early American history and literature and busied himself with art, literature, and foreign travel. He died of heart disease at the Vanderbilt family cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine.
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In October 1866 Leiter married Mary Theresa Carver, the daughter of Benjamin Carver of Chicago, by whom he had four children. One of them, Mary, married Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, and the family became socially prominent in England. Joseph, Leiter's one son, brought about the most dramatic episode in his father's life, when in 1897-1898, he tried to "corner" the wheat market. The "corner" was unsuccessful and the older Leiter, who stood behind his son, is said to have lost $9, 750, 000.
