STF,WART, ALEXANDER TURNEY, 1802-76; b. Ireland; educated at Belfast, and at Trinity college. Dublin; came to New York about 1823, and was usher in a private school, but in 1824 engaged in the dry-goods business. In 1841 he married Miss Cornelia M. Clinch; and in 1848-49 erected the magnificent store corner of Broadway and Cham bers street, having purchased the property for $62,000. His business, which was already enormous, continued to extend until it dwarfed all others in the same line in the country; and in 1862 Mr. Stewart found it necessary to follow the tendency toward the upper part of the island, and erected the building corner of Broadway and Tenth street, at a cost of $2,755.000. To this structure he removed his retail business, confin ing the lower store to wholesale transactions, In the mean time Mr. Stewart's business comprised agencies in Glasgow, Manchester, Belfast, Paris. Berlin, and Lyons; and mills in the United States at Holyoke, Mass.; New Hartford, N. Y.; Catskill, N. Y.; and in New Jersey. At the time of Mr. Stewart's death, April 10, 1876, his trans.c Lions were estimated to exceed $65,000,000 per annum. He also owned much real estate, including Garden City, L. I., a settlement on Hempstead plains, which has grown to a considerable town; the Metropolitan hotel and Niblo's garden, the Globe theater; the Park Avenue (formerly the Women's) hotel, cor. 32d street; and many other buildings and lots in New York; the Grand Union hotel, Saratoga, etc. Mr. Stewart's resident, corner of Fifth avenue and Thirty-fourth street, contained perhaps the finest privz.ar
gallery of paintings in the country. Mr. Stewart gave considerable sums in chariti during his life-time, including aid to the Irish during the famine of 1847; a ship-loaif of flour sent to Havre, after the Franco-Ger:min war; $50,000 to Chicago on the occa sion of the great fire in 1871; ,$100.000_to the U. S. sanitary commission during the ,war; $10,000 to the Lancashire, England, operatives who were sufferers by the denciency of American cotton during the same period; and the Women's lodging-house in Park avenue; designed by him to be a hotel for working-women, at low prices, but diverted after his death to the ordinary business of a public hotel, with ordinary rates. Mr. Stewart was buried in the family fault in St. Mark's church-yard, April 13, 1876. The grave was afterward robbed of its contents for the purpose of obtaining a ransom. It is not at this writing positively known whether or not the body was ever restored to the family; but it is generally believed to have been so restored, and to lie at present in the mausoleum at Garden City (q.v.). Mr. Stewart bequeathed the sum of $1,0e0,000 to ex-judge Henry Hilton, his confidential law adviser; who, with that sum, purchased from the widow her interest in the dry-goods business of A. T. Stewart and Co., which he still controls. In 1869 Mr. Stewart was nominated to the position of secretary of the treasury by president Grant, but the existence of an old law against an importer holding that position prevented his confirmation.