Amos Jerome Snell

Story One

From $18.50 to a $3 Million Empire

Amos Jerome Snell arrived in Chicago in 1844 with his new wife Henrietta and just eighteen dollars and fifty cents to their name. They counted it over and over — but could make the amount no larger.

Starting with a small hotel in Palatine, then a store and post office in Jefferson, Snell secured a contract supplying wood and lumber to the North-Western Railroad. He bought 2,000 acres of timber land in Wisconsin, employed large crews, and reinvested every dollar. His first Chicago lot came not from speculation — but from a trade with one of his own workers: a yoke of oxen and a wagon for a lot on Harrison Street, far out on the prairie.

By the time of his death, Snell owned more than 400 residences and commercial buildings on Chicago's West Side — a fortune estimated at $3,000,000, worth over $130 million today.

"He was a producer rather than a speculator — he made his large fortune not by trading upon the values of others, but by himself creating values."

— Biographical Dictionary, 1893

Story Two

The Man Behind the Fortune

Amos Jerome Snell was born December 28, 1823, in Little Falls, Herkimer County, New York. He had lived in Chicago and its vicinity since 1844 — the same year he and Henrietta arrived with only $18.50 between them.

By 1860, the U.S. Federal Census recorded Amos as a 34-year-old farmer in Cook County's Jefferson Township. Living with him were his wife Henrietta; their two-year-old son Albert; an eight-year-old girl named Mary Hughes — whose exact relationship to the couple was unclear, but who later became identified as their daughter Mary Snell; two farm hands; and a 23-year-old domestic from Ireland named Bridget McCambridge.

Ten years later, the 1870 census found the family — now with four children — still in Jefferson Township. Amos was no longer a farmer. He was working as a railroad contractor, with three servants now in the household.

By the time of his death, he had accumulated a fortune of at least $3,000,000 — through the ownership of at least 400 residences and commercial buildings on Chicago's West Side, large tracts of land in Jefferson, Park Ridge, and Schaumburg, and the toll road that ran through Jefferson, Illinois.

Although worth millions, he always looked after every penny as carefully as when he was worth nearly nothing. On the night of February 8, 1888, that life was cut short. More than 2,000 people attended his funeral.