August Belmont (New York Times)

Obituary
“August Belmont,” New York Times, November 25, 1890, p. 4: 4.
The death of Mr. AUGUST BELMONT, following at no great interval that of Mr. JOHN JACOB ASTOR, removes another of the conspicuous figures that have connected the modern city of New-York with the era of the stage coach and packet boat. Although Mr. BELMONT was not established in business in New-York until 1837, when the city was already showing the results of its first impulses of expansion and when the building and use of steam railways, even, had made progress sufficient to foreshadow to the more imaginative men of that day the future greatness of the country they were to open up to settlement and trade, Mr. BELMONT found in the city of his adoption only the small beginnings of the business and financial activities that were to grow up in his lifetime and in which he was to bear so prominent a part.

Few men have been more closely identified with the life and movement of the city during the past half century than Mr. Belmont. His position in the financial world as the head of a great banking house and the agent of the ROTHSCHILDS, his prominence in politics, his liberality as a patron of music and art, his unflagging devotion to the interests of the turf, his social standing, all made him one of the New-Yorkers whom everybody knew, if not personally, at least by wide reputation.

Puritan austerity, we doubt not, would have looked with sour-faced disapproval upon AUGUST BELMONT as a man who got out of life too much pleasure himself and gave too much to others. By persons of more joyous temperaments he will be remembered as a man who, combining solid business qualities with a noteworthy aptitude for the less serious affairs of life, contributed, certainly in as large a measure as any other of its citizens, to make the city of New-York an agreeable place of residence to those fortunate persons who can spend now and then an hour, after their shops and their souls have been cared for, in pursuits and pastimes having only an indirect relation to the weightier interests just mentioned. With Such persons, and they are clearly in the majority, it is the custom to call men like AUGUST BELMONT benefactors of their kind.
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