On September 16, 1924, in room 714 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City, Arabella Huntington lay dying. She was surrounded by the wealth she had clawed from nothing, an art collection worth tens of millions in modern terms, pearls that cost more than most men earned in a lifetime. She had been born in a Richmond boarding house to a widowed mother who took in strangers for rent money. She had arrived in New York with an illegitimate baby and a fake husband, living on the charity of the man who would become her lover before he could become her husband.
She was, at her death, one of the wealthiest women in the world. But there was one thing all her millions could never buy, and its absence had haunted her until this final breath. Arabella Duval Yarrington was born around 1850 or 1851, the exact date as shrouded in mystery as the rest of her carefully managed life. She grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of a machinist who died when she was young, leaving a widow with five children in a city still smoldering from the Civil War.
Her mother ran a boarding house to keep the family fed. Arabella learned early that survival meant pleasing people, reading them, giving them what they wanted. Nature had given her the tools: enormous blue eyes, thick auburn hair, porcelain skin, and a figure that created the hourglass silhouette Gilded Age America worshipped. She was a great beauty, and she knew it.
In the late 1860s, her mother moved the family to New York, seeking a fresh start in a city untouched by war’s devastation. What happened next remains one of the great mysteries of Gilded Age New York. On March 10, 1870, Arabella gave birth to a son named Archer Milton Worsham. The birth certificate listed his father as John Worsham, described as her husband.
But the marriage was either fabricated or a sham. The truth, whispered but never proven, was that the baby’s father was almost certainly Collis Potter Huntington, a railroad magnate nearly thirty years her senior, a married man, and the source of the fortune that would transform her life. Collis Huntington had not been born to wealth. He had started as an itinerant peddler, joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, and understood that the real money was in selling supplies to miners rather than mining gold.
In Sacramento, he partnered with Mark Hopkins in a hardware business that became phenomenally successful. When Theodore Judah brought his dream of a transcontinental railroad to Sacramento in 1861, Huntington and three other merchants agreed to finance it, creating the Central Pacific Railroad. Built with federal land grants, government bonds, and exploited Chinese laborers, built through political bribery that made him one of the most hated men in America, the railroad made him one of the richest. By the 1880s, his fortune was estimated at fifty to seventy million dollars, over a billion in today’s money.
This was the man whose mistress Arabella became. But mistresses in the 1870s had no legal rights, no security, no social standing. Arabella was not going to let that happen. In the early 1870s, with Huntington’s financial backing, she began buying and selling real estate in Manhattan in her own name.
By 1877, at age twenty-seven, she owned property worth millions in today’s dollars. She purchased a four-story brownstone on West 54th Street, hired a fashionable architect, commissioned the finest decorators, and filled it with progressive French paintings and aesthetic movement furniture. In 1882, she traveled to Paris and commissioned a portrait by Alexandre Cabanel, the most fashionable society painter of the era, depicting her draped in burgundy velvet, pearls at her throat, her gaze direct and unflinching. It announced her arrival.
When Huntington’s first wife died in 1883 after a long illness, he married Arabella the following July in San Francisco, far from the prying eyes of New York society. She was thirty-three or thirty-four. He was sixty-three. He legally adopted Archer, now fourteen, giving the boy his name and making him his heir.
For the next sixteen years, Arabella lived as Mrs. Collis P. Huntington. In 1889, Collis purchased a massive plot on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the epicenter of Gilded Age wealth, and hired Arabella’s architect to design a mansion in Italian Renaissance style.
Construction took five years and cost millions. It was Arabella who made it legendary. Working with dealers like Duveen Brothers, she filled it with French furniture, tapestries, and paintings, traveling to Paris at least twenty-two times, learning French fluently, studying art history until she developed one of the most sophisticated eyes in America. She bought Rembrandts and a Vermeer.
She bought medieval tapestries from European castles and furniture made for the French court. Her jewelry collection alone was worth over a million dollars by 1900, and the annual wage bill for her household staff of over twenty ran to what would be a million dollars today. And yet she was never fully accepted by New York society. She was never on Mrs.
Astor’s list of the 400. The old money families looked down on the railroad fortunes as nouveau riche, but they looked down on Arabella for something else entirely. They remembered Bella Worsham, the woman with the fake husband and the illegitimate child, the mistress before the wife. No amount of French furniture could erase that stain.
Society matrons cut her. When she appeared at the opera in a box Collis had purchased for a fortune, wearing Worth gowns and extraordinary jewels, she was stared at but not spoken to. One contemporary recorded that respectable women saw little difference between Mrs. Collis Huntington and a prostitute except that one commercialized her sin.
Arabella dealt with rejection by working harder. If they would not accept her socially, they would be forced to respect her intellectually. She took voice lessons, studied, traveled, and transformed herself into a genuine expert on European art, able to discuss attributions and provenance with museum curators. On August 13, 1900, Collis Potter Huntington died of heart failure at his camp in the Adirondacks.
His obituaries were honest. The New York Times called him one of the shrewdest and most unscrupulous businessmen of his generation. His will left roughly a third of his fortune to his nephew Henry Edwards Huntington, and the other two-thirds to Arabella and Archer. Arabella’s inheritance was conservatively estimated at over fifty million dollars, equivalent to one and a half billion today.
She was forty-nine or fifty, and unlike so many Gilded Age heiresses who inherited under trusts controlled by male trustees, her money was truly hers. She controlled it absolutely. For the next thirteen years, she lived as a wealthy widow. In 1907, she made the purchase that cemented her reputation as one of the great collectors of the era, buying the Rodolphe Kann collection in a single transaction for two and a half million dollars.
It included ten Rembrandts and paintings by Vermeer, Van Dyck, and Frans Hals, along with sculptures, tapestries, and furniture that had belonged to French kings. Art historians gasped. By 1913, her collection was valued at fifteen to twenty million dollars, rivaling the holdings of J. P.
Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Meanwhile, another story was developing. Henry Edwards Huntington, Collis’s nephew, had inherited a third of the estate. Born the same year as Arabella, he had proven brilliantly capable, building the Southern Pacific’s Los Angeles operations and creating the Pacific Electric Railway.
His marriage to Mary Alice Prentiss had been cold and unhappy for years. Meeting regularly to manage Collis’s estate, Henry and Arabella grew close. By 1905, rumors circulated that he was in love with his uncle’s widow. The family was scandalized.
In March 1906, Mary filed for divorce on grounds of desertion. Henry was free. But Arabella was cautious. She had waited decades to achieve wealth and a measure of respectability, and she would not risk it for a hasty remarriage.
She made Henry wait seven years. On July 16, 1913, at the American Church in Paris, Arabella married Henry Edwards Huntington. The marriage contract carefully kept each fortune separate. Together, they were one of the richest couples in America, with a combined wealth of seventy to one hundred million dollars.
They had eleven years together, dividing their time between New York and San Marino, California, where Henry was building what would become the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Arabella helped design the gardens that would become world famous, but her heart remained in New York. She continued to buy art, continued her philanthropy, donating to Harvard Medical School, supporting Tuskegee Institute, giving quietly to hospitals, libraries, and schools. In September 1924, at age seventy-three or seventy-four, she fell ill at the Ritz-Carlton.
The illness progressed rapidly. On September 16, 1924, exactly forty-one years after Collis’s first wife had died, freeing him to marry Arabella, she died of heart failure. Henry was with her, as was Archer. The funeral was held at St.
Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. The attendance was large, but not society. Art dealers came, museum curators, business associates. The old guard families who had spent fifty years cutting her stayed away.
In death, as in life, she was acknowledged but not accepted. She was buried in the mausoleum at the Huntington Library in San Marino, a classical structure Henry built to house both their remains, surrounded by the gardens she helped design. Her will left her entire fortune to Archer, estate valued at approximately fifteen million dollars, over two hundred fifty million today, though this likely understated the true value of her art holdings. Archer gave much of it away, donating hundreds of paintings from his mother’s collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including two Rembrandts and the Vermeer, giving her eighteenth-century French decorative arts to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and selling items at auction that Henry purchased to create the Arabella D.
Huntington Memorial Collection. Three years after Arabella’s death, Henry died, leaving the entire Huntington estate to the public as a free educational institution. The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial was installed in the west wing of the library, its walls covered in the red velvet that had lined her New York mansion, physically transplanting her private world into public space.
Her earlier home at 4 West 54th Street was later sold to John D. Rockefeller, and the dressing room she commissioned is preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to this day. What remains of Arabella Huntington is the art, scattered now across American museums, the Rembrandts she chose, the Vermeer she acquired, the French furniture she loved. It has outlasted the scandals, outlasted the social rejection, outlasted the memory of who she was and what she did.
The society matrons who cut her are forgotten, their names surviving only in genealogies and historical footnotes. Her name is on museum walls, in library archives, in the dedications of artworks and gardens. She was never accepted, but she endured, and in building, collecting, and creating, she achieved something far more valuable than acceptance.
She achieved permanence.
