Green Hetty

Green (Henrietta Howland) Hetty (b. Robinson) (1834–1916) financier, eccentric; born in New Bedford, Mass. She attended a Quaker school and inherited approximately $10 million from her father and aunt. She married Edward Green, a silk trader; they had two children but the couple kept their finances entirely separate. Independent of her husband, she became a noted operator on the New York Stock Exchange and invested heavily in real estate. Although the press exaggerated her miserliness—she was dubbed "the witch of Wall Street"—there was no denying her shrewdness and eccentricities: she lived out her later years in cheap lodgings in Hoboken, N.J., then died, the richest woman in America, leaving an estate valued over $100 million.