Edward Henry Harriman (February 20 1848 – September 9 1909), better known as E. H. Harriman, was a wealthy railroad executive. He was born on Long Island in New York.
The son of Orlando Harriman, an Episcopal clergyman, and Cornelia (Neilson) Harriman. His great-grandfather, William Harriman, emigrated from England in 1795 and engaged successfully in trading and commercial pursuits.
In 1879 he married Mary Williamson Averell, the daughter of William J. Averell, a banker of Ogdensburg, New York, who was president of the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain Railroad Company. This relationship aroused his interest in up-state transportation and two years later his career as a rebuilder of bankrupt railroads began with a small broken-down railroad called the Lake Ontario Southern which he renamed the Sodus Bay & Southern, reorganized, and sold with considerable profit to the Pennsylvania.
Harriman was nearly fifty years old when in 1897 he became a director of the Union Pacific Railroad. By May 1898 he was chairman of the executive committee, and from that time until his death his word was law on the Union Pacific system. In 1903 he assumed the office of president of the company.
From 1901 to 1909, Harriman was also the President of the Southern Pacific railroad. The two railroads operations wouldn't be merged for nearly another century, but the vision of a unified UP/SP railroad was planted with Harriman.
See also
Further reading
- George Kennan, E. H. Harriman: A Biography (2 vols., 1922)
- Otto H. Kahn, Edward Henry Harriman (1911), reprinted as "The Last Figure of an Epoch: Edward Henry Harriman," in Our Economic and Other Problems (1920)
- John Muir, Edward Henry Harriman (1911)
- B. H. Meyer, A Hist. of the Northern Securities Case (1906)
- "In the Matter of Consolidations and Combinations of Carriers," Interstate Commerce Commission Reports, XII (1908)
- Wm. Z. Ripley, Railroads: Finance and Organization (1915)
- George Kennan, E. H. Harriman's Far Eastern Plans (1917)
- Articles and estimates of his life and work in Cosmopolitan, Mar. 1903, July 1909; Moody's Mag., Oct. 1906, Oct. 1909; Am. Rev. of Revs., Jan. 1907, Oct. 1909; McClure's Mag., Oct. 1909, Jan. 1911; N. Y. Times and N. Y. Sun, Sept. 10, 1909; Railway World, Sept. 17, 1909.