Neptune's Needle

Founder of W. R. Grace & Co. and twice mayor of New York City.

Grace began his career as a purveyor of naval stores to the guano fleets gathered off the coast of Peru in the 1850s. Early on he showed an entrepreneurial gift that was to serve him well. The hundreds of ships that came to load guano off the Chincha Islands needed to revictual and refit for the return trip. To do so, they would go to Callao, the port serving the capital city of Lima almost a hundred miles to the north of the Chinchas. In 1854 Grace became a partner in the Callao firm of Bryce Brothers, purveyors of naval and ships stores to the guano fleets. He suggested that his firm anchor a supply ship in the midst of the fleets. It was a simple but immensely profitable idea. The Bryce-Grace storeship came to be known for providing goods and foods at a fair price. Grace learned to do business with the many American ship captains who came to load guano, the rich fertilizer that revitalized the depleted tobacco and cotton lands of the United States in the 1850s.

In 1866 Grace moved to New York, bought a home in Brooklyn Heights, and opened W. R. Grace & Co. on Wall Street in the heart of the shipping district. From 1866 until 1880, when he was elected mayor of New York, Grace, his brothers, nephews, and other young business associates expanded their trade across the Americas, moving quickly to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arose. In the 1870s Grace, from New York, and his younger brother Michael, from Lima, invested and traded in a wide variety of businesses, none more profitable than in building the railroads of Peru.

Grace established a line of ships between New York and the west coast of South America--the Merchants Line--that was the predecessor of the Grace Line that dominated trade for the first half of the twentieth century between North America and South America. He imparted to his subordinates a warm feeling for Peru and its people.

In a remarkable change of venue for Grace's energies and talents, in the 1870s he moved rapidly from political obscurity to political prominence, being elected mayor of New York in 1880--the first foreign-born Catholic to occupy that high office.

Grace presided over an increasingly diverse business enterprise at the end of the century; it almost defies categorization. From the 1870s onward--even while he was mayor--the firm's range of interests and investments reflected Grace's immense versatility. His company helped build railroads in Costa Rica, participated in the rubber boom in Brazil, introduced the first steamers from New York to the West Coast, and at the end of the century Grace became one of the principal promoters for a transisthmian canal across Nicaragua. Even when his interests lost to the Panama lobby in 1902, Grace's enthusiasm for a canal helped internationalists such as Theodore Roosevelt realize his dream in the future Panama Canal.

Grace spent many of his last years at a home he had built in Great Neck, Long Island, although he always kept a residence in Manhattan, never too far from his interests not only in city politics but also in the ships that came and went with news and men and goods of his far-flung empire.

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Peter Richards