Background
Robert Richard Randall, son of Thomas and Gertrude (Crooke) Randall, is supposed to have been born in New Jersey about 1750. He followed his father, a prosperous privateer, on the sea and became a shipmaster at an early age.
Robert Richard Randall, son of Thomas and Gertrude (Crooke) Randall, is supposed to have been born in New Jersey about 1750. He followed his father, a prosperous privateer, on the sea and became a shipmaster at an early age.
On April 8, 1771, he became a member of the Marine Society in New York which his father had helped to found for the relief of indigent and distressed seamen and seamen's widows and orphans.
During the Revolution Randall volunteered his services to the Provincial Congress of New York. His offer was not accepted, possibly because of his greater value to the cause as an experienced privateer. Near the close of the war he became his father's partner and they carried on their business under the firm name of Randall, Son & Stewart. On April 1, 1788, he became a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce of which his father had been one of the founders twenty years before. In the years following the war, the Randalls bought several pieces of land in different parts of New York City, the most famous being the Minto farm which Robert Randall purchased in 1790 from Frederick Charles Hans Bruno Poelnitz, a German baron with horticultural interests. This purchase included a part of the old Peter Stuyvesant farm and extended from "the Bouwerie" west to "Minite Water" and approximately from what is now East Tenth Street south to Waverly Place. In his father's will, however, the property was treated as a bequest to Robert who resided on the farm from the time of the purchase until he died.
On June 1, 1801, Randall made his will, and sometime between that date and July 10, when the will was probated, he died, probably on June 5. Tradition has it that the will was drawn up by Alexander Hamilton who was undoubtedly a friend of the Randall family. In it, after bequeathing certain small sums to relatives and friends and quaintly disposing of his watch, shoe buckles, and silver buttons to friends and retainers, he left the rest of his property, which consisted of the farm, four lots in the first ward of the city, and certain stocks, bonds, and cash, in trust to provide an asylum and hospital for aged, decrepit, and worn-out seamen which should be called the Sailors' Snug Harbor.
The property was put in the hands of an automatically self-perpetuating group of trustees who were to take charge of the property until the income from it warranted the establishment of an asylum which could accommodate fifty seamen. In spite of efforts to break the will on the part of certain of Randall's relatives on his mother's side, the courts allowed it to stand, and the Randall fortune acquired at sea became the foundation of the seamen's charity. In 1884, a statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, representing Randall, was placed on the grounds of the Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island.
