Hiram Bond
His family are descended from William Bond (Massachusetts politician) an early 17th-century immigrant from Bury St. Edmunds in East Anglia.
Among the other investment houses acting in collaboration with Commodore Vanderbilt and Tobin, and that Hiram Bond was acquainted with, was that of Leonard Jerome who was the grandfather of Winston Churchill.
Towards the end of the Civil War Hiram Bond acted as the Treasurer in a company First National Petroleum formed to roll up oil leases in the state of West Virginia.
On the evening of January 14, 1872, he was among local notables invited by the governor to be attendants at a ball held for Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia.
Later in the year Hiram Bond purchased a small ranch on the outskirts of the town named Villa Park, Denver, Colorado where he acted as a cattle broker.
In 1881 Judge Hiram Bond became involved with the Des Moines, Iowa, corn starch and glucose producer the New York Grape Sugar Corporation.
Among the other principals were the New York State Republican Boss Thomas C. Platt, patent lawyer Edward N. Dickerson, a Philadelphia group composed of businessmen William West Frazier of Rittenhouse Square, Frazier's brother in law William Crawford Sheldon and his son in law Alfred Craven Harrison.
William Crawford Sheldon's daughter Gertrude was later the wife of Richard Whitney President of the New York Stock Exchange.
Judge Bond helped distribute the stock exchanging some with Charles D. Arms of Youngstown, Ohio for shares in Grand Central Mining.
Between 1879 and 1887 Judge Hiram Bond was also chief officer of a firm financed by investors from Boston led by Willard T. Sears and Moses Kimball.
[1] This firm had acquired rights to construct an urban transit system under the name Kings County Elevated Railway.
Their package of rights and initial construction was eventually sold off to New York City investors led by Gen. James Jourdan due to the lack of support for the Bostonians by the local political leaders.
As a result of the ethical performance of his position being Master of Bankruptcy for Virginia he was respected there and in the South even by many former Confederates despite being a Radical Republican.
The TCI resulted from a combine of interests between a number of coal, coke and iron operations in Tennessee and Northern Alabama.
The Southerners won out in time though due to discomfort the Northerners felt over convict leasing and the poor initial performance of the stock.
At this time the Bonds also maintained a string of polo ponies among the Judge and his two sons playing at Coyote Point Park in San Mateo.
At the time of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 Santa Clara's water towers were knocked down and the community was supplied from the Bond's reservoir.
AMCC provided a suite for him and to be used as a reward for the companies salespeople and clients at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.
Among the others involved in the company were former secretary of the U.S. Treasury Charles S. Fairchild and investment banker Henry L. Horton father in law of Edward F. Hutton.
The main near term business however was refurbishing some used registers made by the NCR Corporation that users obtained title to at the end of their leases.
The Bonds owned the cabin and tent pitch overlooking Dawson City, in the Northwest Territory where Jack London had lived on a work exchange during the Fall of 1897 and part of the Spring of 1898.
There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches.
Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.
