Where did the money come from?

Anthony Nicholas Brady, Marcia Brady Tucker’s father.

Anthony Nicholas Brady was born in France and moved with his family to New York. At the age of fifteen, Anthony ran away from home and began working in a prominent Albany hotel called the Delavan House. He sold cigars in a barber shop. His mother and father actually knew where he was even though he had run away. They kept tabs on him and people would report how he was doing. He was doing very well.

At age nineteen, with his older brother, James, he started a tea store in Albany. Then they started opening other stores until they nearly controlled the entire tea trade in Albany and Troy, New York. But our fore-father was not content to just leave it at owning a bunch of tea stores. I can’t document this, but I was told that these tea stores became the foundation of A & P, the Atlantic and Pacific Company, a very prominent grocery store chain.

Then, Anthony left his brother in the tea business and got into construction in the Troy Albany region. He figured out that it was cheaper to buy the quarry to build stone buildings rather than buying the finished stone. So he bought several quarries and did well in the construction business.

Turns out that a neighbor of his in New Jersey (at some point, he had a farm in New Jersey, was an inventor type guy whose name was Thomas Alva Edison. The family story goes that one day Anthony was with some of his friends at his farm and Thomas Alva Edison came over. Edison said “I’ve invented this thing...” which later became known as the light bulb. Anthony was kind of interested in this and he invested with Edison in The New York Edison Electric Company. He found that the natural gas industry was an interesting one so he purchased a company and started supplying gas to some of the major cities on the East Coast – New York and Philadelphia. First he got into lighting cities with natural gas and then with electric light. He took over the trolleys in Philadelphia and New York and probably other cities. Then he got interested in subways so he was instrumental in the beginning of the subways in New York city.

So he was in natural gas, transportation, the Tea business, and granite, and he was on the board of all kinds of different businesses including oil businesses. He was in competition with Standard Oil. When he died at the age of 71 on a business trip to London, he was said to be one of the 100 richest men in America.

Anthony Nicholas Brady also owned the Maxwell Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer. Then his sons took it over. The Maxwell Motor Company later became the Chrysler Company. At one point, his son in law, Carll Tucker, our generation’s grandfather was either the Secretary or the Treasurer of the Maxwell Motor Company.

Carll with two “l’s” was very interested in investing so the portion of the fortune that went to Marcia Brady Tucker was well invested. He was on the board of many banks including The Fiduciary Trust Company, and he had a couple of pearl’s of wisdom that he passed down to us – one of which was, "if you have investments in a corporation or whatever your investments are - always try to be on the board, be on top of them and meet with the people, talk to them, don’t just let them sit there."

Further Background:

Anthony Nicholas Brady was of Irish descent. His parents (His father was also Nicholas) lived in Ireland and in the 1830’s. His father was in the business of cultivating flax and producing linen in Ireland, but he ran into a lot of competition with the cheaper yarns being produced in Ireland and Scotland so he moved his family to France, near Lille. There, the father left the flax business and became a carpenter. He and his family visited his wife's relatives in the Troy, New York area. The family remained but Nicholas’ father went back to Ireland or France (it’s not known which).