Thomas Mellon(1813–1908)

Thomas Mellon was born at Camp Hill on the Castletown townland in County Tyrone on the third of February 1813, the son of Andrew Mellon and Rebecca Wauchob, Ulster-Scot Presbyterian farmers of the long Tyrone settlement that had begun with the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century. The family emigrated to western Pennsylvania in 1818 when Thomas was five, sailed from Londonderry to Baltimore in the brig Bethel, and settled on a small farm at Poverty Point near Pittsburgh. He was raised on the farm, schooled at the country log-school and at the Pittsburgh Academy, and at twenty-three worked his way through Western University of Pennsylvania, taking his degree in 1837.

He read law in Pittsburgh, was admitted to the bar in 1839, and through the 1840s and 1850s built one of the most successful conveyancing practices in western Pennsylvania, specialising in the land titles, mortgages and small commercial loans of the rapidly industrialising Allegheny river valley. He invested his fees in real estate and in small private loans secured on industrial property, and by the time of his election to the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas in 1859 was already, at forty-six, a man of substantial private means.

He served ten years on the bench, retired from the court in 1869, and in January of the same year, in his fifty-seventh year, opened T. Mellon and Sons private bank at 145 Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, with his eldest sons Thomas Alexander and James Ross as the junior partners. The bank's method was the conveyancing lawyer's method translated to credit: it lent only against tangible industrial collateral, knew personally every borrower in the Allegheny valley, and held its loans on its own book rather than syndicating them. Through the 1870s and 1880s, as Pittsburgh became the steel and coke capital of the United States, the bank financed Henry Clay Frick's first coke ovens, Andrew Carnegie's early bridge contracts, and a long roster of Allegheny iron, coal and glass concerns. It made the Mellon name, by the 1890s, the central credit institution of western Pennsylvania.

He retired from the active partnership in 1887 at seventy-four and handed the bank to his second son Andrew William Mellon, then thirty-two. Andrew, with his brother Richard Beatty Mellon, took the bank from a Pittsburgh private house to a national power, founded around it Gulf Oil (1901), the Aluminum Company of America (1907) and Union Steel, served as United States Secretary of the Treasury continuously from 1921 to 1932 under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, the longest tenure in the office in American history except Albert Gallatin's, and donated to the nation the building and the founding collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Thomas Mellon died at Pittsburgh on his ninety-fifth birthday, the third of February 1908. The bank he founded became Mellon National Bank, merged with Bank of New York in 2007 to form BNY Mellon, one of the largest custodian banks in the world. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation remains among the largest American grant-making philanthropies; Carnegie Mellon University, formed by the 1967 merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, carries the family name. The Camp Hill cottage in County Tyrone where Thomas was born is preserved as the Ulster American Folk Park, the central monument in Northern Ireland to the Scotch-Irish emigration. The Mellon name in modern American finance, industry and philanthropy carries the weight of the conveyancing-lawyer's bank the judge opened on Smithfield Street in 1869.