John Lee Pratt

He received an engineering degree from the University of Virginia, entered the ranks of American business executives in two major U.S. corporations, and later purchased and helped preserve historic Chatham Manor in Stafford County, Virginia which, upon his death, he gave to the National Park Service (as well as an adjacent bluff to the local government, which named the resulting park after him).

He was later a company Vice President and is credited with supporting the idea of holding (as opposed to selling off) what became the Frigidaire Division of GM and encouraging the development of the coolant, Freon.

[4] In 1931, he bought "Chatham Manor," an expansive Georgian, Colonial mansion on the Rappahannock River in Stafford County, VA, opposite Fredericksburg as his future retirement home.

After she died in 1947, he tired of the constant flow of visitors arriving to tour the property which, in the Colonial era, entertained George Washington and, during the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln.

After his wife died, Pratt continued to socialize with his former childhood friends in Fredericksburg, walking regularly into the city even though he could have afforded a chauffeur and any car in the GM fleet.

His rumpled appearance belied his comfortable station in life while he continued his lifelong associations and played in weekly penny-ante poker games with his friends.

Since the 1920s, encouraged by a family acquaintance, the businessman Armand Hammer, she had accumulated a large collection of Peter Carl Fabergé jewelry, including five Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs; the Revolving Miniatures, Pelican, Peter the Great, Czarevich, Red Cross with Imperial Portraits examples, as well as pins and bracelets which were being sold by the then-new government of the Soviet Union to raise capital for the Soviet state.

Pratt also willed a portion of the Chatham estate (an adjacent bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River) to the local community to be used as a park, and which was named in his honor.

[9] Pratt also gave a bequest to establish the local YMCA; and in his lifetime made major donations to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.