Eugene Higgins (1860-1948)
Sportsman & Socialite, of Fifth Avenue, New York & Morristown, New Jersey
He was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia University (1882). In 1889, he inherited a significant share in the multi-million dollar carpet manufacturing business started by his father and uncles and the following year won the American Fencing Championship. In 1898, he was hailed by The New York Times as, "not only the richest but the handsomest unmarried New Yorker". He lived between his father's houses on Fifth Avenue (then described as "a mecca of high society") and at Morristown, New Jersey, as well as maintaining a private office at 50 Union Street. He was best known as a socialite, sportsman, and the owner of the yacht Varuna that for a time was the largest in the New York Yacht Club. It was wrecked off the Madeira Islands in 1908 when Higgins received a medal for saving the lives of several of his guests and crew.
For the last nine years of his life Higgins lived in England at a hotel overlooking the sea at Torquay in Devon, although he still maintained homes in New York City and Paris. When he died unmarried and without children in 1948, his will established the Higgins Trust (at the time the eleventh largest of its kind in the States) valued at $40-million for the benefit of science at the universities of Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1976, the Eugene Higgins Charitable Trust was founded and is now based in Providence, Rhode Island.
For the last nine years of his life Higgins lived in England at a hotel overlooking the sea at Torquay in Devon, although he still maintained homes in New York City and Paris. When he died unmarried and without children in 1948, his will established the Higgins Trust (at the time the eleventh largest of its kind in the States) valued at $40-million for the benefit of science at the universities of Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1976, the Eugene Higgins Charitable Trust was founded and is now based in Providence, Rhode Island.
