Jay Gould

Jason Gould was born in Roxbury, New York, to Mary More (1798–1841) and John Burr Gould (1792–1866). His maternal grandfather, Alexander T. More, was a businessman, and his great-grandfather, John More, was a Scottish immigrant who founded the town of Moresville, New York. Gould grew up in poverty and had to work at his family's small dairy farm. As a young boy, he decided that he wanted nothing to do with farming, his father's occupation, so his father dropped him off at a nearby school with fifty cents and a sack of clothes. Gould studied at the Hobart Academy in Hobart, New York, paying his way by bookkeeping at a nearby blacksmith.

The blacksmith offered Gould a half-interest in the blacksmith shop, which he sold to his father during the early part of 1854. Gould devoted himself to private study, emphasizing surveying and mathematics. In 1854, he surveyed and created maps of the Ulster County, New York, area. In 1856 (having by that time shortened his first name from Jason to Jay), he published History of Delaware County, and Border Wars of New York, which he had spent several years writing. While engaged in surveying, he started a side activity financing operators making wood ash, which is used with tannin in leather making.

In 1856, Gould entered a partnership with Zadock Pratt to create a tanning business in Pennsylvania, in an area that was later named Gouldsboro. He eventually bought out Pratt, who retired. In 1856, Gould entered a partnership with Charles Mortimer Leupp, a son-in-law of Gideon Lee and one of the leading leather merchants in the United States. The partnership was successful, until the Panic of 1857. Leupp lost all his money in that financial crisis, but Gould took advantage of the depreciation in property value and bought up former partnership properties.

Gould started an ice harvesting industry on the large Gouldsboro Lake. In the winter, ice was harvested and stored in large ice houses on the lakeside. He had a railroad line installed next to the lake, and he supplied New York City with ice during the summer months.

The Gouldsboro Tannery became a disputed property after Leupp's death. Leupp's brother-in-law, David W. Lee, was also a partner in Leupp and Gould, and he took armed control of the tannery. He believed that Gould had cheated the Leupp and Lee families during the collapse of the business. Gould eventually took physical possession, but he was later forced to sell his shares in the company to Lee's brother.

Gould was a member of West Presbyterian Church at 31 West 42nd Street. It later merged with Park Presbyterian to form West-Park Presbyterian.

He married Helen "Ellie" Day Miller (1838–1889) in 1863, and they had six children. Together with his son George, Gould was a founding member of the American Yacht Club. His brownstone mansion was at 579 Fifth Avenue, New York City. In 1880, he purchased the Gothic Revival mansion Lyndhurst to use as a country house. Gould took a certain measure of pride in his reputation as “the most hated man in America.” However, his notoriety made him take significant security precautions, including reinforcing the perimeter of his estate with an around-the-clock patrol of armed guards. He owned the steam yacht Atalanta, aboard which he famously commuted from Lyndhurst to work in Manhattan.

On December 2, 1892, Gould died of tuberculosis, then referred to as consumption, in his New York mansion. He was interred in the Gould family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York. For tax purposes, his fortune was conservatively estimated at $72 million (equivalent to $2.58 billion in 2025), which he willed in its entirety to his family.

At the time of his death, Gould was a benefactor in the reconstruction of the Reformed Church of Roxbury, New York (in Delaware County, eastern end of the Southern Tier), now known as the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church. It is located within the Main Street Historic District and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. The reconstruction was completed by his daughter, Helen Miller Gould Shepard, a prominent philanthropist. She also fulfilled Gould's commitment to fund the construction of a New York University library, which would be named Gould Memorial Library.

Gould was extensively criticized during his lifetime, on the basis that he was a trader rather than a builder of businesses, and of being unscrupulous, although more recent appraisal has suggested that his business ethics were not unusual for the time.

In an 1881 letter to Nikolai Danielson, Karl Marx referred to Gould as an "Octopodus railway king and financial swindler." Financial historian Liaquat Ahamed wrote "No one better personified the cynicism and corrupting power of Wall Street in the years following the Civil War than Gould." Describing him as a man "who had all the instincts of a master criminal" and who "became especially notorious for his carefully concocted schemes to manipulate the stocks of companies."

Anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard said that Gould's business practices were unfairly maligned, because he was supposedly one of the only railroad financiers who consistently undermined the railroad cartels' proposed rate fixing by starting new railroad lines, thus driving rates down for consumers.