Background
Amasa was born on April 27, 1818 on a farm in Charlton, Massachussets, United States, the son of Amasa and Esther (Boyden) Stone, and a descendant of Simon Stone who settled in Watertown, Massachussets, in 1635.
builder capitalist philanthropist
Amasa was born on April 27, 1818 on a farm in Charlton, Massachussets, United States, the son of Amasa and Esther (Boyden) Stone, and a descendant of Simon Stone who settled in Watertown, Massachussets, in 1635.
Amasa's education was confined to that afforded by the local town school. At seventeen he began to learn the carpenter's trade in Charlton and three years later moved to Worcester.
His was a non-technical non-scientific age and he progressed rapidly from carpentry into the fields of the contractor and the bridge-builder. In 1840 with his brother-in-law, William Howe, inventor of a wooden truss, he secured the contract to build the first railroad bridge over the Connecticut River at Springfield.
Two years later, the firm of Boody, Stone & Company, contractors, acquired the patent rights to the Howe truss and entered upon a notable record of bridge building.
In 1844 he became superintendent of the New Haven, Hartford & Springfield Railroad. Opportunities in Ohio, where dependence on canals and turnpikes was holding back development, lured him to the new West.
In 1849, with Stillman Witt and Frederick Harbach, he contracted to build the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad, first unit of the Big Four, and after its completion he became successively superintendent and president, with his home in Cleveland.
An industrial empire was in the making south of the Great Lakes; Cleveland was one of its centers; and Amasa Stone was one of the empire builders. He obtained the contract to build the Chicago & Milwaukee Railroad as well as the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad. Of the latter he was president for thirteen years before it was merged in the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, January 1, 1869. For a time he was managing director of the new system. His interests expanded to include mines, iron and steel, banking and communications.
As an officer of the Lake Shore Railroad, Stone recognized the South Improvement Company's system of rebates for a privileged list of oil refining companies, thereby saving the oil refining industry in Cleveland, but at the expense and embitterment of those producers less fortunate.
The Lake Shore Railroad was his pride, but it was also his undoing. As president in 1863 he had insisted on using the Howe truss, with iron rather than wooden timbers, in designing the long bridge at Ashtabula, though warned by engineers that such a bridge would not be safe. After eleven years of service the bridge collapsed, carrying to destruction a train-load of people. He was blamed for an experiment "which ought never to have been tried".
Under the weight of charges - many of them unfair - and the strain of sleepless nights, his health broke, and five and a half years later he ended his own life. Shortly before the end he made his greatest benefaction.
He became interested in the project of moving Western Reserve College from Hudson to Cleveland and transforming it into an urban university, and for that purpose gave a half-million dollars.
He died in 1883.
Stone was a Presbyterian and an active member of the First Presbyterian (Old Stone) Church on Public Square in downtown Cleveland.
Republican Party politics was Stone's interest.
In business Stone was never able to endure a subordinate position. His friends saw a man of strong physique, courteous, kindly, unassuming, but when he passed beyond the fireside he became the dominant, even domineering, type of the business world. A life of struggle, achievement, and command made him so.
On January 13, 1842, Stone married Julia Ann Gleason of Springfield. The Stone's first child, Adelbert Barnes, was born on July 28, 1844. He attended Yale University, where he studied for a degree in geology. Adelbert drowned in the Connecticut River on June 27, 1865, after suffering a cramp while swimming.
The couple's second child, Clara Louise, was born on December 29, 1849. The couple's third child, Flora Amelia, was born on April 6, 1852.