On the sixteenth of September 1924, in the great gray stone house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, Arabella Huntington died. She was seventy-one by the count of the New York Times, one more number added to a lifetime of numbers that never agreed with one another. The house around her had cost two and a half million dollars to build, and she had directed its construction herself. The Rembrandt that hung somewhere within it had come to her through the most celebrated art dealer in Paris.

She was, by the reckoning of the newspapers of her time, the richest woman in America. She was also, by every record she left behind, someone else entirely. The census takers came to her door every ten years and wrote down whatever she chose to tell them, and every ten years she came out a little different. In 1860, in Richmond, she was the nine-year-old written down as Carolina.

In 1870, in New York, she was Belle, nineteen, living beside a man of forty-five who gave his trade as banking and a baby boy three months old. By 1880, she was Belle Worsham, a widow born in Alabama, though no record has ever been found that she married the man whose name she wore. Four years after that, she married a railroad king. Twenty-nine years after that, in Paris, she married his nephew.

Her tomb says she was born in 1850 in Union Springs, Alabama. The Paris marriage register says she was born there on the first of June, 1857. A ship’s manifest from 1921 says Mobile, Alabama, on the ninth of February, 1851. The question is not which number was true.

The question is why a woman who had everything else would spend her whole life making sure nobody could find her. In the summer of 1860, a census taker climbed the steps of a boarding house in the first ward of Richmond, Virginia, and wrote down the name of the woman who kept it. The date was the twenty-sixth of June. The woman gave her name as C.

J. Yarrington, and the census taker spelled it with one r, the way census takers so often did, as if a name were only a sound and any spelling would do. She was thirty-seven, he wrote. Her occupation took two words: boarding house.

Under her name he set down her children. Eliza Paige, seventeen. Emma, fifteen. A girl he wrote as Carolina, nine.

Richard, seven. John, five. And under the children came the men who paid for their rooms and their suppers, about ten of them, most of them machinists, with a clerk among them. On the line just above the household, he had written the neighbor, F.

Wingo, sixty-seven, beer saloon. That is the first clear picture of the girl who would one day be called the richest woman in America. And even that picture may be of someone else. There is no Arabella on the page.

The genealogist who has spent the most time with these records looked at the line, Carolina, nine, and wrote a note in the margin of her transcription: Carolina B. should be Arabella D. , she suggested, and then she asked the obvious question. Is this enumerator error?

Nobody knows. The age fits. The name does not. The woman at the door that June had not always been a landlady.

She had been born Catherine Sims in Virginia, and in April of 1839 she had married a man named Richard Milton Yarrington in Richmond. He had been born in Maryland. He was a machinist, a man of the new kind of work the railroads and iron works were bringing into southern cities. Ten years before the boarding house, the census had found the Yarringtons whole.

On the third of December 1850, the household in Richmond was Richard, forty-two, machinist; his wife, Catherine, thirty-one; and four children. Eliza, eight. Emma, five. A boy named Alfred, three.

And a baby girl five months old, named Catherine after her mother. Here the records begin to argue with each other, and they never stop. One researcher has suggested that the five-month-old Catherine of 1850 is the girl in this story, born that summer, renamed somewhere along the way. The family genealogist believes that baby died before the next census and lists a separate daughter, Arabella, born two years later.

Both cannot be right. Only one thing is certain. In 1850, there was no child named Arabella in the Yarrington house. Richard Yarrington died in Richmond in 1859.

What was left by the next summer was a widow in her late thirties, five children, and a house large enough to take in strangers. There is a small arithmetic puzzle hidden in those two censuses, and it belongs to the mother, not the daughter. In 1850, Catherine Yarrington gave her age as thirty-one. In 1860, she gave it as thirty-seven.

Ten years had passed and she had grown six years older. Perhaps the census taker misheard her. Perhaps she was tired of being counted. Either way, the girl in that house grew up beside a woman whose age was never quite the same number twice, and the daughter would carry the habit much further than the mother ever did.

By the summer of 1860, the Yarrington family lived among about ten working men who were not related to them. Six people at the family table by blood, ten more paying for a bed. One woman, thirty-seven by her own account, keeping the whole of it running. The girl in the middle of it all was nine if Carolina was her, and she would never speak of any of it out loud for the rest of her life.

Richmond in those years was a working city of tobacco, iron works, and railroads, the kind of place that needed machinists and gave them somewhere to sleep. Within a year of that census, it would become the capital of the Confederacy, and it would stay the capital for four years of war. In April of 1865, the business district of the city burned. The family left no account of those years.

Nobody knows what a girl of ten or twelve or fourteen saw from the windows of a Richmond boarding house while the war went on around it. The record falls silent for most of a decade. When it speaks again, the girl is grown, and she is somewhere else entirely. On the twelfth of June 1870, another census taker knocked on another door, this time in New York, in the fifteenth ward of Manhattan.

The head of the household was written down as C. J. Yarrington, forty-five, keeping house, born in Virginia. Ten years earlier she had been thirty-seven.

Now she was forty-five. Somebody had added eight years to her in a decade, or taken a few away the first time. The census taker asked about the property and wrote down real estate worth fifteen thousand dollars. Her eldest daughter, Eliza, was there, now named Ashburn, twenty-three, and her occupation was given in a single rather wonderful word: author.

Emma was there, twenty-one. The two boys were there, one at college, one at school. And then there were three more names, written in a hand that was clearly guessing at them. Belle, nineteen, female.

John, forty-five, male, whose occupation was given as stockholder in a banking establishment, and John again, a baby three months old. The surname the census taker wrote for these three was Dwin. A later index would read it as Dennison. Read it aloud, the way a tired man with a pencil might have heard it across a crowded front room, and it comes very close to another name.

Worsham. Bel D. Worsham. It is the name she would use, sign, monogram, and live behind for the next fourteen years.

Her son had been born on the tenth of March, 1870. Where he was born, no certificate says. He was called Archer Milton Worsham, the John of the census, three months old, almost certainly written down under his father’s first name. That man was John Archer Worsham of Richmond.

According to his memorial, he ran faro gambling establishments in Richmond and in New York City. Faro was the great card game of nineteenth-century America, played against the house in back rooms all over the country. The man who ran the table and held the money was called the banker. So when John Worsham told the census taker he was a stockholder in a banking establishment, he was telling the truth, in a manner of speaking.

The same memorial records that he had served the Confederacy in the first Virginia infantry from 1862 to 1864. What makes John Worsham remarkable is where else he was that summer. On the fourteenth of July 1870, a little more than a month after the New York census taker had written him down beside Belle and the baby, another census taker in Richmond came to another door in the Jefferson ward. The head of that household was John A.

Worsham, forty-two, banker, born in Virginia. Beside him was his wife, Annette, thirty-two, keeping house, born in North Carolina. And beside them was a young man of twenty, John A. Worsham Jr.

, working as a clerk in a store. The genealogist who found both entries could only write the question down. How can he be in two different places in the 1870 census? The two households set side by side tell the story better than any letter could.

In New York, a man of forty-five, a young woman of nineteen, a baby of three months. In Richmond, a man of forty-two, a wife of thirty-two, a grown son of twenty. The twelfth of June in one city, the fourteenth of July in the other. Two ages for one man, three years apart.

Two families, one name. The record is silent on almost everything that matters here. It does not say how she met him, in Richmond at a gambling room, in her mother’s house, or somewhere else. It does not say whether she believed she was his wife, or whether her mother knew there was an Annette.

It says only that by the summer of 1870, her mother, her sisters, and her brothers were all under one New York roof with her, and that the man in the house was described as a stockholder in a banking establishment, and that the baby carried his name. Somebody’s money had moved this family a long way up in the world in a single decade, and the census does not say whose. Sometime around the summer of 1870, by one historian’s reckoning, John Worsham went home to Richmond, and Belle stayed exactly where she was. The historian is Margaret Bruscher, writing about the family many years later, and her summary is the clearest anyone has given.

When his venture failed, she wrote, he returned to his legal wife in Richmond, possibly as early as the summer of 1870. Belle, however, stayed behind, fashioning herself as the widow Worsham. Fashioning is the right word. What Belle made in the next few years was a name cut and fitted the way a dressmaker makes over a gown.

She took the cloth she had been given, a gambler’s surname and a baby, and turned it into something respectable. She was Mrs. Worsham. She was a widow.

Her husband, she would later say, had died after a year of marriage. A widow in black with a small son was a figure of sympathy in any city in America. A girl of twenty with a married man’s baby was something else, and there was no place for her in any drawing room at all. Whether there had ever been a marriage is another matter.

No record of one has ever been found. Her biographer, Shelley Bennett, found something else instead: property records from 1866, four years before the census, show John Worsham’s other wife, Annette, very much in existence. Most of the historians who have looked closely now believe that Belle and John Worsham were never legally married at all. His own memorial puts it more bluntly than any of them: never legally married to Worsham.

It says Arabella is linked here because she was so insistent on the sham connection. She signed her name Bel D. Worsham, sometimes Bella. She traveled under it.

Before long she would buy property under it. She had the letters stitched and engraved into her household things, three initials on the linens and the silver, B. D. W.

, a whole life worked into the hem of a napkin. There was one part of the life that would not stay neatly inside the name, and that was the child. In November of 1871, according to her biographer, Belle wrote a letter to a man named Collis Huntington. She asked for help to go and visit her little boy.

Archer was about twenty months old. She had sent him to live with relatives in Texas. Whatever she was to Collis Huntington by the end of 1871, she was close enough to ask him for that. How she came to know him is one of the great blanks in her story.

Some say Collis met her in Richmond, perhaps at one of the gambling rooms where Worsham dealt his cards. In one story, said to come from Archer himself, they met at her mother’s boarding house. Another suggests the connection ran through her younger brother. One modern researcher admits simply that it is difficult to say whether they met in Richmond or in New York.

That timing matters because of the question that has followed this family for a century and a half. Who was Archer’s father? The obvious answer is the man whose name the boy was given, John Worsham. A family story attributed to Archer himself held that the answer was Collis Huntington, and that the whole Worsham arrangement had been made to give him a name.

The local historian who repeats that story adds at once that there is no evidence to support it. Shelley Bennett said in an interview that she would like to see a DNA test to prove that Archer was really Collis Huntington’s son. Another historian goes further still and suggests that Belle may not have known herself who her child’s father was. No certificate records the city of his birth or his paternity.

Though he celebrated his birthday on March tenth, 1870, a boy with a birthday and nothing else. In 1872, by her biographer’s account, a woman of about twenty-two signed for a house on East Fifty-Fourth Street. The house was number 68. She leased it first, and then she owned it.

Shelley Bennett puts it in a single sentence. She began in 1872 at the age of 22 with the house she leased and then owned at 68 East 54th Street, New York. Here is where her story leaves the usual road for a kept woman and goes somewhere far more interesting. A married woman in the America of her mother’s girlhood owned almost nothing in her own right.

But a widow could deal in property far more freely than a wife could. Whatever else her widowhood was, it was useful. She went into business. According to the Huntingtons’ own account of her life, she built her wealth chiefly through real estate and securities transactions, and those dealings put her up against some of the hardest men in New York.

Among them were William H. Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. By the time she was twenty-seven, Bennett has written, she was a single mother who owned property in her own name that would be worth about six and a half million dollars today.

She was a shrewd investor, Bennett said, and the money Collis Huntington had advanced her, she paid back. In 1877 she moved up, buying a house at number four West Fifty-Fourth Street. Two years later, in 1879, she became a client of a firm of art dealers called Duveen Brothers. She was still Mrs.

Worsham. In 1881, she hired a New York firm to completely renovate her house, the whole house remade to her taste. One of those rooms survives. Her dressing room from the house on West Fifty-Fourth Street is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the museum calls it Arabella Worsham’s dressing room.

The museum, describing the room, also describes her life in that house in one plain line: her questionable status as a mistress often excluded her from elite circles. That sentence is the whole of the problem. She could buy the house. She could buy the cabinet work, the paintings, the account at Duveen.

She could trade against Vanderbilt men in property. She could not buy her way through the front doors of the women who decided who mattered in New York. One society historian writing a century later described the arrangement in a single sentence that has been repeated ever since. While passing as his niece, he wrote, she was the mistress of C.

P. Huntington for nearly fifteen years. New York society in the 1870s and 1880s was policed by a handful of women, chief among them Caroline Astor, whose list of the four hundred set out who counted. A divorced woman was not received.

A woman with an irregular past was not received. A known mistress was not received. One of the two men in her story died in Richmond, and that death is the end of a lie that had run for years. John Archer Worsham, the husband she had told New York was dead after a year of marriage, died on the twenty-sixth of May, 1878.

His wife Annette had died four years earlier, in 1874. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. So for about eight years, from the summer of 1870 until the spring of 1878, Belle Worsham had been the widow of a man who was alive and living in Richmond. When he finally died, the fiction did not end.

It simply became true a few years late. Two years later the census taker came to her door again. The year was 1880. The head of the household gave her name as Belle D.

Worsham. Her marital status was entered with a single letter, W, for widowed. Her age was twenty-eight. Her birthplace was Alabama.

And so, she said, were both her parents. Ten years earlier she had been nineteen. Now she was twenty-eight. For her occupation, she gave the same two words her mother had given the census taker ten years before: keeping house.

Then, in the autumn of 1883, the arrangement reached its turning point. Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington, Collis’s wife, died in New York on the fifth of October, 1883. Nine months after the funeral, on the twelfth of July 1884, a wedding took place in a parlor on West Fifty-Fourth Street, in a house the bride, by most accounts, had bought herself. The date is certain.

It was recorded a decade later in a book of biographies of the great men of American business. Collis Huntington, it said, had been married secondly, July 12th, 1884, to Mrs. Arabella D. Worsham of New York City.

Look closely at the name in that line. The census sheets had called her Carolina and Belle and Bell. Here, in the record of a railroad king’s marriage, she is Arabella. The ceremony itself comes down in the accounts with more color than certainty.

Several accounts say the minister was Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America. One historian repeats a story that Beecher told the groom at some point in the proceedings, Collis, I do wish you were a Mormon. A newspaper of the day reported that on the day before the wedding, a house on Park Avenue belonging to Huntington was deeded over to Mrs. Belle D.

Worsham. Collis Huntington was sixty-two. His first wife had been dead nine months, almost to the day. That same year, Collis Huntington adopted Archer.

He was fourteen, and he became Archer Milton Huntington. Whatever his true parentage, and that question would never be settled, he now had a father on paper, and the father was one of the richest men in the country. Within five years of the wedding, Mrs. Huntington had decorated five houses on two coasts.

Two in New York, at 65 Park Avenue and 5 West Fifty-First Street. One on Nob Hill in San Francisco. One in the Bronx at Throggs Neck. And the fifth at Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains.

Each one furnished and finished under her eye. But the house that mattered most was the one she built from the ground. Collis Huntington had acquired a great plot of land at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, five city lots side by side. On the second of November 1889, it was announced that excavation was beginning.

The architect was George B. Post. The house would take five years to finish, and it would cost two and a half million dollars. In 1891, while the walls were still going up, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote a sentence about her that the Huntington Library still quotes with pride.

Mrs. Huntington, he wrote, who has very good taste in such matters, is practically the responsible director of the whole enterprise. And still the doors stayed shut. One modern writer on the family puts it in a single plain sentence.

She was never received in society by the Astors or Vanderbilts. On the thirteenth of August 1900, at his camp at Pine Knot in the Adirondacks, Collis Huntington died. He was seventy-eight. By the account of a San Francisco newspaper, his last words were simple.

I am very, very ill. Then one of the most powerful railroad men in America was gone, and Arabella was a widow for the second time. This time, at least, the husband was really dead. Earlier that same year, while he was still alive, the census had reached the house on Fifty-Seventh Street.

That year, the woman of the house gave her birth as June of 1856. Her age, she said, was forty-three. Her birthplace was Alabama. The genealogist who transcribed the entry allowed herself one dry comment: Arabella appears to be fibbing about her age and birthplace.

Then came the will, and the will made her, by the reckoning of the newspapers, the richest woman in America. Arabella was bequeathed two-thirds of his Southern Pacific stock, the interest of a trust fund of three hundred thousand dollars for as long as she lived, and the residue of the estate. His nephew, Henry E. Huntington, received one-third of the Southern Pacific stock and one-half of the residue.

Archer was left the interest for life on a fund of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, a further fund of five hundred thousand after his mother’s death, and his father’s pictures and the family house on Fifty-Seventh Street, also after his mother’s death. The newspapers were happy to call her the richest woman in America. In private, the richest widow in America was not counting money. A letter dated the seventeenth of December, 1900, four months after his death, survives.

I find it very hard to realize, she wrote, that I shall never see or hear that dear face and voice again. And later, time as yet has helped me very little. She put the money to work in his name almost at once. In 1902, she gave one hundred thousand dollars to the General Memorial Hospital in New York in memory of her husband, to found what the hospital’s own history calls the first cancer research fund in the country.

The hospital would grow into Memorial Sloan Kettering. Her obituary would later list other gifts, too: large gifts to Tuskegee Institute and to Hampton, help in 1909 for the striking shirtwaist workers of New York, the land for the American Geographical Society’s building, a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. And for Archer’s Hispanic Society of America, by one account, she bought the two most expensive paintings and gave some of her own land at Audubon Terrace in upper Manhattan. Henry Edwards Huntington had been married to the family for a long time already, in a way that was anything but simple.

He was Collis’s nephew, born in 1850, close to Arabella’s own age by any of her versions of it. He had become the closest thing Collis had to a business heir, which is why the will gave him a third of the railroad stock and half of everything else. His first wife was Mary Alice Prentice, and Mary Alice Prentice was the older sister of Clara Prentice, the girl Collis and Elizabeth had adopted. So the nephew had married the sister of his uncle’s adopted daughter.

The family’s marriages folded back on themselves like the pleats of a fan. In 1906, that first marriage ended. The New York Times ran the headline: The Huntingtons divorced. Mrs.

Huntington sails for Japan after court proceedings. That same year, Archer opened his diary and wrote a sentence about his mother. My mother will doubtless marry him, he wrote. And I am not sure that it is at all for the best.

Then she went to Paris. From 1907 she lived in a great house at number two rue de Lille, once associated with the Empress, known as the Hôtel de L’Impératrice. From about 1910 she moved to another great house in the rue de Lubec. In Paris, she was simply a very rich American widow with very good taste.

There were no old Richmond families in the Paris drawing rooms, no faro dealers’ widows, no landlady’s daughters. Paris was also where the art was. In 1907 Joseph Duveen bought the collection of Rodolphe Kann of Paris, the great single coup of the art trade in that decade. Pictures from it went to Arabella.

Among them was a Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. By 1913, her statement from the firm recorded past purchases of about five and a half million dollars. Through those Paris years Henry went on pursuing her. The newspapers noticed, and for years the reports were denied.

Then, in July of 1913, the denials stopped. On the twelfth of July, 1913, twenty-nine years to the day after her first wedding, she signed a prenuptial agreement. The wedding came just four days later. There were in fact two ceremonies.

Henry described them a few days later in a letter to his sister. They were married first by the mayor, he wrote, which was the legal wedding, and then by Dr. Allan at the American church. The marriage was entered in the records of the city of Paris, and that entry has her birth in it.

She was born, according to the Paris record, in Union Springs, Alabama, on the first of June, 1857. In 1860, the girl genealogists think was her had been nine years old. If the French record was right, she would have been three. The next morning, the New York Sun ran the story on its first page under a headline that said everything New York thought about it in four words: Wedding reunites Huntington fortune.

The New York Times chose a gentler phrasing that was, if anything, sharper: Mrs. C. P. Huntington weds in the family.

Widow of financier and Henry E. Huntington, his nephew, married in Paris. Henry told his sister in words her biographer has quoted that with Arabella, all that I hoped for has come to me. Near Versailles, there was a château called Beauregard, and from 1913 the Huntingtons held it on a lease.

The two of them disagreed about where to live. Henry put his side politely in a letter. Mrs. Huntington, he wrote, is very fond of the château, but with my large and varied interests in America, I feel that I should remain there a large proportion of the time.

Arabella put her side to her son, and she did not put it politely at all. He thinks he will never come back here, she wrote. But he is mistaken. I am devoted to this place, never liked any place so well, and I won’t give it up if I can help it.

And I think I can. In Henry’s household, she left a reputation of her own. His valet, Alfonso Gomez, remembered her as the boss of the house. California, though, did something for her that New York never had.

Her biographer says that Arabella would join Henry in building a home in Southern California, where she found more acceptance. In 1915, she gave the city of San Francisco the land on Nob Hill where her house had stood until the earthquake and fire of 1906. It is a park now, and it carries her family’s name. Then in 1919, on the ranch at San Marino, came the moment that changes the light on everything before it.

Arabella and Henry were out walking on the grounds. Arabella, nearly blind and walking with difficulty, stopped and spoke to her husband. She had chosen a spot. It was where she wanted to be buried.

The woman who had bought a Rembrandt, who had lived among her old masters in the Empress’s house in Paris, could barely see by then. She could no longer properly look at the things she had spent her life collecting. And on that walk, with her husband beside her, she chose the hill where she would lie. In the summer of 1924, she came back to New York ill, to the house where she had been the responsible director of the whole enterprise.

On the sixteenth of September 1924, after a long period of illness, she died in the house on Fifty-Seventh Street. She left everything to Archer. Arabella bequeathed her entire estate to her beloved son. Then, faster than anyone could have expected, the things she had gathered began to go.

The great house on Fifth Avenue was the first. In 1925 Archer asked the courts for permission to sell it. In the spring of 1926 its contents went under the hammer, and before the year was out a new building was going up on the corner. In 1940 Tiffany and Company opened its new home on that same spot.

The jewels went next. In 1926 the jeweler Harry Winston bought Arabella Huntington’s jewels from her estate for one point two million dollars. Then the Rembrandt. In 1928 Archer sold it back to Duveen, who sold it for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to a collector named Alfred Erickson.

It stayed in that family until 1961, when the Metropolitan Museum bought it at the Erickson estate sale for two point three million dollars. The Vermeer that Collis had left her for her lifetime, Young Woman with a Lute, went to the Metropolitan in 1925. Henry did the opposite. Shortly after Arabella died, her biographer writes, he resolved to form the Arabella D.

Huntington Memorial Art Collection. He asked Duveen to assemble it, and it opened at San Marino in 1928 in rooms of the library he had built. By one account he had the red velvet that had covered the walls of her New York house brought west and hung again, so that the collection in her name would hang against the walls of her old house. The mausoleum on the hill she had chosen, designed by John Russell Pope, was finished in 1929, two years after Henry died.

They lie there together. What she left of herself is much smaller. A small collection of her papers from 1888 to 1925 sits in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. A few letters survive in the Huntington Library.

For the rest, one local historian has written that she wanted it that way and had most of her personal papers destroyed on her death. What was Arabella so anxious to conceal? Perhaps we will never know. Her tomb on the hill at San Marino carries one last answer to the question every census taker ever asked her.

Born at Union Springs, Alabama, it says, June 1st, 1850. It is one more version. And like all the others, it was written down exactly as she wanted. The census takers came to her door every ten years and wrote down whatever the woman inside chose to tell them.

And in the end, the stone did the same. Somewhere behind all those answers is a nine-year-old girl in a Richmond boarding house, written down as Carolina, waiting at the door for someone to ask her who she really was.