Edward H. Harriman, on learning that the seven thousand eight hundred and sixty-three acre-(thirty-one point eighty-two square kilometer-) Parrott family estate was for sale, bought it for fifty-two thousand five hundred dollars and named it Arden (now a hamlet in Tuxedo, New York).
Over the next several years he will purchase an additional twenty thousand acres (eighty-one square kilometers) almost forty different parcels of land, and build forty miles of bridle paths to connect them all.
His one hundred thousand square foot (ninety-three hundred square meters) master home (Arden House) which sits high above the Palisades Parkway, will not be completed until early 1909, only seven months before he dies.
In the early 1900s, his sons W. Averell Harriman and E. Roland Harriman will hire landscape architect Arthur P. Kroll to work closely with the head gardener and landscape those many acres.
It is from this estate that his widow will donate ten thousand acres (orty square kilometers) to New York state to start Harriman State Park in 1910.
Harriman was born in Hempstead, New York, the son of Orlando Harriman, an Episcopal clergyman, and Cornelia Neilson.
His great-grandfather, William Harriman, had emigrated from England in 1795 and engaged successfully in trading and commercial pursuits.
As a young boy, Harriman had spent a summer working at the Greenwood Iron Furnace in the area owned by the Robert Parker Parrott family that will eventually become Harriman State Park.
He had quit school at age fourteen to take a job in New York City as an errand boy on Wall Street, where his uncle Oliver Harriman had earlier established a career.
His rise from that humble station had been meteoric.
By age twenty-two, he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange.
Mary Williamson Averell, the daughter of William J. Averell, a successful New York banker and president of the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad, had been in her late twenties when she met and married the thirty-one-year-old Harriman, a rising stockbroker and businessman, on August 10, 1879.
Mary's father had subsequently offered him a seat on his railroad's board, leading to a career in railroads and an extraordinary fortune.
By age thirty-three, Harriman had begun focusing his energies on acquiring rail lines.
He had begun reorganizing bankrupt railroads in the 1880s.
