GOULD, JAY (1836-92) . An American cap italist, born in Roxbury, Delaware County, N. Y. He passed his boyhood on his father's farm, and was educated at Hobart Academy. In 1852 he entered a hardware store which his father had established, but although he did not neglect the business, his evenings were devoted to the study of surveying, at which he spent the years from 1852 to 1856, preparing and publishing maps of Albany and Delaware counties, of vari ous counties in Ohio and Michigan, and of a proposed railway from Newburg to Syracuse. In 1856 he published a History of Delaware County. In the same year he engaged in the lumber and tanning business in western New York, selling out just before the panic of 1857, and removing to Stroudsburg, Pa., where he became the controlling director in a small bank. It was shortly after this that he first became in terested in railroading. In the great financial depression following the panic of 1857 he dis posed of his bank stock and bought a controlling interest in the Rutland and Vashington Railroad running from Troy, N. Y., to Rutland, Vt., for 10 cents on the dollar. Of this company he became president, treasurer, and general manager, and subsequently brought about a consolidation of his road and the Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad. In 1859 he sold out his stock in the consolidated roads at 120, and removed to New York, where he embarked in the brokerage business. He made a special study of railway stocks, and set out to obtain control of the Erie Railroad, then in finan• eial straits, and the object of strife between the Drew and Vanderbilt interests. By methods new in railway speculation, Gould secured control of the road, and in 1868 was elected its president. His administration of the road may, as he as serted, have reclaimed it from bankruptcy, but it saddled it with a debt of $64,000,000, and re sulted in its paying no dividends until 1891. The
manipulation of the Erie was the first of a long series of speculations by which Gould obtained the mastery of some of the greatest railway cor porations in the country. His method of obtain ing control was the same in almost every instance: to depress the value of the stock which he sought to control, and acquire the property during the period of depression. By these methods in the next few years he obtained control of the Union Pacific, which he held from 1873 to 1883, during which time the value of its stock rose from 15 to 75, and it became for the first time a dividend paying road; of the Missouri Pacific, which under his management and by consolidation and exten sion developed from a short line 287 miles long with earnings of $280,000 a month, to an im mense system with earnings, before his death, stated at $5,100,000 a month; of the Wabash, the Texas Pacific, the Saint Louis and Northern, and the Saint Louis and San Francisco. In 1880 he controlled fully 10,000 miles of road, more than one-ninth of the mileage of the country. Gould also consolidated competing telegraph lines into the Western Union system in 1881, and obtained control of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad in the same year. What has been considered the most indefensible of all his actions was his enter ing with `Jim' Fisk, who was also his partner in some of his railroad deals, into a scheme to cor ner the gold market, which resulted in the dis astrous `Black Friday' panic of 1869.