executive politician statesman
William Lawrence was born on July 2, 1828 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, the son of Robert James and Mary Ann (Lewis) Scott, and a grandson of Gustavus Scott. His father died about 1835; with three other children William was brought up by his mother at Fortress Monroe.
William Lawrence Scott attended the common schools and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He attended the academy at Hampden, Virginia.
From 1840 to 1846 Scott was a page in the House of Representatives, continuing his schooling when Congress was not in session. After learning the coal-forwarding business as a shipping clerk under Charles M. Reed of Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1850 he formed a partnership in the same trade with Morrow B. Lowry and a year later became a partner in the coal firm of John Hearn and Company. This marked the beginning of his prosperity.
His holdings in coal and iron came to be extensive and important; he manufactured iron in Pennsylvania and Missouri and controlled coal lands in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, and coal distributing companies in Pennsylvania and the Middle West. The W. L. Scott Company, formed after Hearn's death in 1871. Well before this time he had reached out to the allied field of railways.
In 1861 he began operations with the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad, then not completed; by 1866 he and his associates had completed the road and linked it with the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, and Chicago Railway, and shortly afterward he became president of the Erie and Pittsburgh, which bought and closed a canal that competed with it by tapping the Pennsylvania bituminous coal fields.
With John F. Tracy, his brother-in-law, president of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific, he promoted the extension of that road from central Iowa to the Missouri River, a work completed in 1869. His other business interests included banking and real estate. He also acquired farm lands in Erie County and in Virginia, where he bred shorthorn cattle and race horses, but he is said to have been unable to bear defeat and sold out his racing stable a number of times.
Politics, though a side issue with him, was a subject in which he was intensely interested. He was mayor of Erie in 1866 and again in 1871, and his business talent secured for the city the best "waterworks" system known to the times. Three times a delegate to the National Democratic Convention, in 1884 and 1886 he was elected to Congress from a normally Republican district.
Scott died from heart failure on September 19, 1891 in Newport, Rhode Island.
William Lawrence Scott served as president of a number of railroad companies, first of all, The W. L. Scott Company, one of the largest producing and shipping coal firms in the United States, including the New York, Pennsylvania, and Norfolk Railroad and the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad. He was one of the builders of the first elevated railroad in New York City. Scott was elected mayor of Erie twice, was the wealthiest member of the House of Representatives at the time.
As a conservative Democrat Scott supported a low tariff and the gold standard and sponsored the Chinese exclusion bill. He was a warm admirer of Samuel Jones Tilden and a friend of Cleveland.
Scott was typical of the public-spirited but highly individualistic capitalists of the second half of the nineteenth century: a heavy investor in United States bonds during the darkest days of the Civil War, a citizen charitable and humane to the poor of Erie, but an alleged exploiter of the miners who worked for him and an object of bitter enmity on the part of labor unionists.
He exhibited the tenacity of purpose and the talent for administration that could make effective use of them.
By his marriage, September 19, 1853, to Mary Matilda Tracy of Erie, Scott had joined himself with a wealthy family prominent in railroading. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.
