Edwin W. Winter

Most of the fellow-Centurions who talked casually with Edwin W. Winter in reading-room or library, where he was a familiar figure in his later years, knew that a rather unusual career had marked the earlier history of their quiet associate. Some of them were aware that he had come up from the ranks in the rough-and-tumble days of Western railway history; that the picturesque transportation men of the period were his personal acquaintances; that he had seen the golden spike driven sixty-one years ago, to link the rails of Union Pacific and Central Pacific into the first transcontinental railway. But they did not find it easy to identify this gentle and self-effacing personality with that of the energetic executive whose task had fallen on the most trying days of Northwestern railway history and on an almost equally exacting crisis of New York City transportation. When Winter was summoned in 1897 to take charge of the Northern Pacific, he had on his hands a transcontinental system just emerged from bankruptcy. Stock of this once powerful company had sold on the New York Stock Exchange, a few months before, at 25 cents per $100 share. It was under Winter’s management that the Northern Pacific so far regained its lost prestige as to invite, barely two years after he relinquished it, the contest of two great banking houses for control which cornered the stock in 1901 and drove its market price to $1,000. The case of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, when Winter was called in 1902 to unravel its tangle of disrupted finance and confused operation, was not much better; but he set that enterprise also on its feet within eight years.

Winter is not usually classed by the railway fraternity as one of the great executives. With railway company finance he rarely undertook to meddle. But the details of the transportation problem were firmly in his grasp, as his tangible achievement proved. Perhaps he might have won greater professional distinction but for his inherent modesty and intense dislike of publicity. He even refused his photograph to the newspapers when he took over the B. R. T.; assuring the disappointed reporters that “the only interest the public takes in my personality is what it can get them for a nickel.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook