Estate Dispute · 1890s–1910

Albert Snell — Dissipation of Inheritance

Albert was the only son. He received his share of one of Chicago’s great fortunes. Within a decade, it was gone. He died in a rooming house with nothing to his name.

Albert Snell was the only son of Amos Jerome Snell, and by the conventions of the era, he might have been expected to be the steward of his father’s legacy. He was not. Albert had neither his father’s discipline nor his father’s instinct for business. When the estate was divided and his share came to him, he was unprepared for what to do with it.

The details of exactly how Albert lost his inheritance are not fully documented, but the trajectory is clear from the historical record. By the late 1890s, his financial situation had deteriorated badly. By 1901, the Chicago Tribune reported that Albert Snell — son of one of the city’s wealthiest men — was living in the barn on the family property, penniless and without prospects.

His decline continued. Albert was eventually committed to an insane asylum — the specific circumstances and diagnosis are not recorded in the sources available — and he spent his final years in institutional care. He died in 1910 in a rooming house, with nothing. No properties. No savings. No trace of the fortune he had inherited.

"The son of one of Chicago’s wealthiest men died in a rooming house with nothing."

Albert’s story is one of the starkest illustrations of what happened to the Snell fortune after the murder. The wealth that Amos had spent fifty years building was not preserved, invested, or passed on. It was dissipated — through legal battles, mismanagement, and in Albert’s case, through what appears to have been a complete personal collapse.