Hetty Green was, by the reckoning of nearly every newspaper in America, the richest woman alive, and she chose to live like she had nothing at all. Born into a Quaker whaling fortune in New Bedford, she turned an inheritance into one of the largest fortunes in the country through decades of shrewd investing. She ran that empire from a desk at Chemical National Bank, arriving each morning like any other clerk. But when the workday ended, Green did not go home to a mansion. She rented cheap rooms in boarding houses across Brooklyn Heights and, later, Hoboken, so New York could never pin down where she lived. That mattered, because legal residency in New York would have meant taxes on a fortune large enough to make the bill enormous. Green wore the same black dress until it wore through, and legend holds her laundress washed only the soiled hems to save on soap. Newspapers mocked her as the Witch of Wall Street, a miser hoarding millions while sleeping in rented rooms. Yet she was also fighting a bitter legal battle over her aunt's estate, a will contest that put a mathematician on the stand to testify about the vanishing odds of a signature being genuine. The numbers he offered the court were almost meaningless in size, and Green still lost. She died in 1916, having outmaneuvered bankers and courts for most of her life. A fortune, it turns out, does not need comfort to grow, only discipline most people cannot keep up for sixty years. #History #GildedAge #WallStreet