Sage, Russell
SAGE, RUSSELL (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 wholesale 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 $60,000,000 to $80,000,000. 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. 1 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). She inherited nearly all of his great fortune, and out of it she gave away a long series of liberal benefactions to various institutions SAGINAW, a city and the county-seat of Saginaw county, Michigan, U.S.A., situated on both banks of the Saginaw river, about 1 6 m. from its entrance into Saginaw Bay and about 96 m. N.W. of Detroit. Pop. (1890) 46,322, (1900) 42,345, of whom 11,435 were -foreign-born, (1910) 50,510. Saginaw is served by the Grand Trunk, seven divisions of the Pere Marquette (which has repair shops here) and four divisions of the Michigan Central railways, by interurban electric railways to Detroit and Bay City, and by steamboat lines to several of the lake ports. The city is built on level ground covering an area of about 13 sq. m. and somewhat more elevated than the surrounding country. In the city are St Vincent's Orphan Home (1875) and St Mary's Hospital (1874) under the Sisters of Charity, a Woman's Hospital (1888) and the Saginaw General Hospital 1 Mr Sage's secretary was also killed, and one of his clerks, W. R. Laidlaw, jr., was badly injured. Laidlaw afterward repeatedly sued Sage for damages, claiming that Sage had used him as a shield at the moment of the explosion, but his suits were unsuccessful.
1003 (1887); the Hoyt Library and the Public Library; a large auditorium, belonging to the city; an armoury; the Germania Institute, with a kindergarten, a gymnastic school and a German library; and a free bathhouse and manual training school (1903), a part of the public school system. There is an annual music festival in May. The city has parks, including Hoyt Park (27 acres), used for athletic sports, Rust Park (150 acres), occupying an island in the river, and Riverside Park, a pleasure resort. Saginaw is situated in a good farming region with a fertile soil, especially adapted to the culture of sugar beets; other important crops are beans, cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers, hay, apples and grains. In the vicinity of the city there are salt wells, and Saginaw county is the most productive coalfield in the state in 1907 its output was 1,047,927 tons, more than half the total for the state. The city is an important distributing centre, has a large wholesale trade (especially in groceries, hardware, boots and shoes, and dry goods), and in 1904 in the value of its factory products ($10,403,508, 20-2% more than in 1900) it ranked fifth among the cities of the state. The municipality owns and operates the water- works. The first settlement was made on the west bank of the river in 1815 and was called Saginaw City; the settlement on the east side of the river made in 1849 was called East Saginaw and was financed by Eastern capitalists. East Saginaw in 1855 was incorporated as a village. East Saginaw and Saginaw City each received a city charter in 1859, but in 1890 the two were consolidated as the city of Saginaw, and in 1897 the charter was revised.
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
