George I. Seney

George Ingraham Seney was born in 1826 in Newtown (now called Elmhurst, Queens) in what was then Queens County, Long Island. After studying at Wesleyan University, he completed his baccalaureate education at New York University, graduating in 1846.[1] He lived for much of his life in Brooklyn. After a career as a New York City banker, he died in 1893 in Manhattan.

Seney married Phoebe A. Mosier in 1849, and fathered ten children.[1] He is best remembered for amassing a substantial collection of pre-Impressionist 19th-century European and American paintings,[1] some of which he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The donation included works by George Inness and Francis Davis Millet.[2]

As president of the Metropolitan Bank (New York City), Seney was situated to become a financier of newly chartered railroads. Charters organized or financed by banker Seney and his Seney Syndicate included the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway and the Nickel Plate Road.[1] Seney's financial career reached its height in October 1882 when the Seney Syndicate sold the Nickel Plate to New York Central interests for $7.2 million in gold.

The Metropolitan Bank failed, however, in 1884. This permanently shadowed the remainder of Seney's life and career. He was forced to sell most of his art collection in auctions held in 1885[3] and in 1891.[4]

Seney's bank was a financial backer of the Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad, a developer of real estate in the Upper Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan, and the railroad named one of its depots after the New Yorker. The depot became the logging town and resort village of Seney, Michigan, and the regional name gave birth to the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.[5]

Seney, in 1881, endowed the construction of what is now Seney Hall at Oxford College of Emory University. In the same year he was a key founder and backer of what became the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in Park Slope.[1]