Elbert Henry Gary

Elbert Henry Gary (October 8, 1846–August 15, 1927) was an American lawyer and corporate officer. He was a key founder of the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, bringing together partners J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Charles M. Schwab. The city of Gary, Indiana, a steel town, was named for him when it was founded in 1906. When trust-busting President Theodore Roosevelt said that Gary was head of the steel trust, Gary considered it a compliment. The two men communicated in a non-confrontational way unlike Roosevelt's relationship with leaders of other trusts.

Early life and career

Elbert Gary was born near Wheaton, Illinois on October 8, 1846. He graduated first in his class from Union College of Law in 1868. The school later became the Northwestern University Law School. Gary started to practice law in Chicago in 1871 and also maintained an office in Wheaton. He was a co-founder with his uncle, Jesse Wheaton, of the Gary-Wheaton Bank that merged with Bank One in the middle 1990s.

While he was working as a young corporate attorney for railroads and other clients in the years after the Chicago fire, Gary was elected as the first mayor of Wheaton when it changed from a village to an incorporated city from 1890 to 1892.

Gary served two terms as a DuPage County judge from 1884 to 1892. For the rest of his life he was known as "Judge Gary." It was a common custom in the nineteenth century for men to be addressed by military, political, or academic titles long after those titles were current.

Corporate leader

Gary practiced law in Chicago for about twenty-five years. He was president of the Chicago Bar Association from 1893 to 1894. It was while he was hearing a case as a judge that he first became interested in the process of making steel and the economics of that business. In 1898 Gary became president of Federal Steel Corporation in Chicago that included a barb wire business. Federal and other companies merged as United States Steel in 1901.

Gary moved from Wheaton to New York in 1900 at the age of 54, where he established the headquarters of U.S. Steel. From 1906 to 1908, Gary served as president of the Illinois State Society of New York, a group of Illinois expatriates living in New York who got together for social reasons a few times each year. They held an annual Lincoln Day Dinner in February at the Waldorf Astoria hotel and a Chicago Fire Remembrance Day each October at the same Delmonico's Restaurant that still stands today in Manhattan.

There were also Illinois State Societies in San Diego and San Francisco, California and a large Illinois State Society of Washington, DC. Only the Washington, DC club remains. It celebrated 152 years of activities in 2006.

Gary served as president and chairman of the board of America's first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel, from the company's founding in 1901 until his death on August 15, 1927 in New York at the age of 82.