RUSSELL

See also:

• RUSSELL SAGE (1816-1906)

SAGE (1816-1906)  , American financier, was born in Verona township, Oneida county, New York, on the 4th of August 1816 . He worked as a farm-hand until he was 15, when he became an errand boy in a grocery conducted by his brother, Henry R . Sage, in Troy, New York . He had a part interest in 1837–1839 in a retail grocery in Troy, and in a whole-sale store there in 1839-1857 . He served as an alderman of Troy in 1841–1848, and as treasurer of Rensselaer county in 1845–1849 . In 1853–1857 he was a Whig representative in Congress . He became an associate of Jay Gould in the development and sale of railways; and in 1863 removed to New York City, where, besides speculating in railway stocks, he became a money-lender and a dealer in " puts " and " calls" and " privileges," and in 1874 bought a seat in the New York Stock Exchange . He gradually accumulated a fortune, which at his death was variously estimated as from $6o,000,000 to $8o,000,000 . On the 4th of December 1891 an attempt was made to assassinate him in his office by one Henry Norcross, who demanded a large sum of money, and upon being refused exploded a dynamite bomb, and was himself killed.' Sage died in New York on the 22nd of July 1906 . In 1869 he had married Miss Margaret Olivia Slocum (b . 1828), a graduate (1847) of the Troy Female Seminary (now the Emma Willard School) .