Henry Melville Whitney (October 22, 1839 – January 25, 1923) was an American industrialist, the founder of the West End Street Railway Company of Boston, Massachusetts, and later the Dominion Coal Company Ltd. and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company Ltd. of Sydney, Nova Scotia. He was also president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, long an important transportation link between Boston and New York City.
Early life
Whitney was born on October 22, 1839, in Conway, Massachusetts to Brigadier General James Scollay Whitney (1811–1878) and Laurinda Collins. Henry's well known younger brother was the financier William Collins Whitney (1841–1904), who served as Secretary of the Navy in the first administration (1885–1889) of President Grover Cleveland. His sister Lucy Collins "Lily" Whitney married Charles T. Barney, who became the president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Another sister, Susan Collins Whitney, married Henry F. Dimock.
Whitney was educated at Williston Seminary in East Hampton, Massachusetts. Whitney was said to have been a personally pleasant and genial man who had hearing difficulties from childhood.
Family
His family was descended from Puritans including John Whitney of London, who settled in 1635 at Watertown, Massachusetts. Through his mother, he was a descendant of William Bradford (1590–1657), the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th & 12th Governor of Plymouth Colony and signer of the Mayflower Compact.
Career
He began his business career as a clerk in a bank in Conway in 1856. In 1859, he went to Boston, where he was a clerk in the Bank of Mutual Redemption. He then worked as a clerk in the office of the navy agent at the Boston Custom House in 1860–1861. Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Whitney went to New York City and engaged in the shipping business.
In 1866, Whitney returned to Boston and was appointed agent of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, of which his father was president. This concern operated steamships on the "outside line" between Boston and New York around Cape Cod.
Metropolitan Steamship Company
Upon his father's death on October 24, 1878, Whitney was elected his successor as president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, retaining the position of agent at Boston.
In June 1890 the Metropolitan Steamship Company placed the new iron steamer in service between Boston and New York. The 2,706-ton, vessel was built by William Cramp & Sons at Philadelphia. H.M. Whitney was flagship of the Metropolitan fleet until she was run down and sunk by the steamer Ottoman in Boston harbor on September 28, 1892. There were no deaths, and H.M. Whitney was later refloated and, after reconditioning, returned to service. It had another collision in 1898, with the schooner Ira D. Sturgis, and again on November 5, 1908, when she attempted to avoid a collision with a tugboat and four barges off Hallett's Point and ran aground on the east end of Ward's Island and sank. In both instances, the ship was repaired and continued on its journey.
In 1906, Charles W. Morse acquired control of the Company, placing it under the control of the Consolidated Steamship Company in January 1907. Morse crashed in the Panic of 1907, however. In 1911, the Metropolitan Steamship Company and the Maine Steamship Company (a New York City-Portland, Maine, operator) merged with the Eastern Steamship Company to form the Eastern Steamship Corporation. The line went into receivership in 1914, but emerged in 1917 as Eastern Steamship Lines. Service on Eastern's Metropolitan Line was maintained until 1941.
Whitney retired from the board of the Metropolitan Steamship Company in 1909.
West End Street Railway Company
In 1886, Whitney established the West End Street Railway Company, with himself as president, as a combination of the five street railways of the Boston area. By the next year it had consolidated ownership of a number of horse-drawn streetcar lines, composing a fleet of 7,816 horses and 1,480 rail vehicles. As the system grew, Whitney chose to deploy electric propulsion systems after visiting Frank Sprague and witnessing the Richmond, Virginia system in action. A section of track was used to test the Bentley-Knight underground power line, but it was abandoned because of failures and safety concerns (especially after the electrocution of a team of horses in 1889). After competing in operational tests with the Sprague streetcar system, the Thomson-Houston company was chosen for system-wide deployment of overhead wires.