PLEASE LOOK AT PHOTOS
Good Condition. This is a May 1889 letter signed by Silas B. Dutcher, then President of the Union Dime Savings Institution on Broadway, NYC. SEE INFO BELOW. Letter has been pasted down on to scrapbook page, but is clean & bright. Top natural fold is slightly torn at edges, and has been taped down at back. Measures 8.5 x 5.5". I have included an FYI ONLY image of Mr. Dutcher.
NOTES: Silas B. Dutcher (1829-1909), was one of Brooklyn’s most influential mid-19th-century movers and shakers. He came from old Dutch stock in upstate New York. He was a school teacher at one point and came to NYC in 1850. He was a very successful merchant and local politician. Dutcher was one of the founding members of the new Republican Party in New York State. He soon became president of the Kings County Republican Committee. After the Civil War he was appointed Supervisor of Internal Revenue, the city’s tax collector, a position he held from 1868-82. From 1870-77, Dutcher and two other men — former General James Jourdan, the city police commissioner, and former General Benjamin Franklin Tracy, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District — were known as the “Three Graces". They had firm control on everything that went on in Brooklyn and together were far more powerful than the mayor of the city. After retiring from government, Silas Dutcher went into banking; he became a charter trustee in the Union Dime Savings Bank of New York, and then its president in 1885. In 1891, he was made president of the Hamilton Trust Company of Brooklyn, an office he held until his death in 1909. He was also the director of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York, the director of the Garfield Safe Deposit Company, the German-American Real Estate Title Guarantee Company, and the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company. Dutcher lived in a large mansion in Crown Heights, where he died of a stroke on his 50th wedding anniversary, in 1909 at age 80. The large gala his family had planned for the evening sadly became a wake.
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