Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Sr.

Marcellus Hartley Dodge Sr. (February 28, 1881 – December 25, 1963) was the chairman of the board of Remington Arms Company and a member of the family associated with the Phelps Dodge Corporation. He was the president or director of several companies and the president of YMCA in the United States. He was a well-known philanthropist with significant donations to many institutions and organizations and he was a major contributor to the successful efforts to protect the Great Swamp. Biography He was born on February 28, 1881, to Emma Hartley, who died from complication of childbirth on March 3, 1881, and Norman White Dodge. His paternal grandfather was William E. Dodge Sr., an abolitionist, but also a partner at Phelps, Dodge, a company that exported cotton from the deep south to Liverpool, England. Phelps, Dodge was also in the business of importing copper from England and diversified into mining and smelting. He was a promoter of the rights of Native Americans who served as the president of the National Temperance Society from 1865 to 1883, represented the New York 8th congressional district in the United States Congress for a portion of the 39th United States Congress in 1866-67, and was a founding member of YMCA in the United States. He had married Melissa Phelps (1809-1903), the daughter of Anson Greene Phelps and Olivia Egleston and in 1833, William E. Dodge and his father-in-law founded the mining firm Phelps, Dodge, and Company, one of America's foremost mining companies. His maternal grandfather was Marcellus Hartley, a merchant and financier of Manhattan. His grandfather had provided a home on Thirty-seventh Street adjoining his on Madison Avenue for his daughter, Emma, as a wedding present when she had married Norman W. Dodge on May 6, 1880. Emma died on March 3, 1881, a few days after the birth of her son. Several years after the death of his mother, his father remarried on January 5, 1897, and Marcellus was raised by his maternal grandparents. Marcellus Hartley died in 1902 and left his grandson as heir to $60 million (approximately $ today) at the age of twenty-one, while he was attending Columbia University and living with his grandmother, Frances Chester Hartley, at 282 Madison Avenue in Manhattan.