Abraham Lincoln summed up his early years on the frontier in Kentucky and

Indiana as "the short and simple annals of the poor." But the hardships he
endured there as a youth weren’t unique. Life was harsh for most frontier
families in the early 1800s.

“Life on the frontier was little better than the life of an ox,” says Lincoln
historian Michael Burlingame. But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

Lincoln’s earliest recollections were of the Kentucky farm where he moved in

1811 with his parents, Thomas and Nancy, and sister, Sarah. She was 4.
Abraham was 2. His parents had been married five years.

Young Lincoln Worked the Farm, Had Little Schooling

At Knob Creek, the Lincolns lived in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor, much
like the one where Abraham was born roughly nine miles away near
Hodgenville. Steep, heavily wooded hills rose on each side of the home. On
the leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s father planted corn and pumpkins on wide
fields with rich soil.

In front of the Lincolns’ door, on the road from Louisville to Nashville, the world
passed: pioneers with heavily laden wagons, peddlers, local politicians,
slaves, missionaries and soldiers returning from the War of 1812.

Stern and often domineering, Thomas Lincoln put his son to work before he
turned 7. Abraham filled the wood box, brought water from the creek, weeded
the garden, gathered grapes for wine and jelly, picked persimmons for beer
making and planted pumpkin seeds.

At the creek, where he often played with his sister, Lincoln may have nearly
drowned.
While walking across a log that spanned the rain-swollen tributary, Abraham
fell in, the story goes. A playmate said he used a sycamore limb to pull Lincoln
from the deep, raging waters. Whether the account—widely publicized in the
late 19th century—is accurate remains unknown. What’s certain is that another
child’s death would have crushed the Lincolns, whose infant son Thomas died
on the farm in 1812.

Eager to learn, Abraham found few opportunities for schooling in rural

Kentucky; instead, he and his sister sporadically attended ABC
schools—so-called “blab" schools in which students repeated their teacher’s
oral lessons aloud. Usually barefoot, Lincoln walked to the one-room
schoolhouse, “a little log room about 15 feet square, with a fireplace at one
side.”

Lincoln’s Family Moved to Indiana in 1816

In the winter of 1816, when Abraham was 7, the Lincolns moved to a

settlement at Little Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. Because winter harvest
was complete, the family lived off wild game, corn and pork bartered from
settlers. “It was a wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with many bears and other
wild animals still in the woods.”

Two years later, Nancy Lincoln died in the remote wilderness—the first of
Lincoln’s many family tragedies. An introspective, generous-hearted woman,
Nancy apparenDuring the Gilded Age—the decades between the end of the
Civil War in 1865 and the turn of the century—the explosive growth of
factories, steel mills and railroads driven by the Second Industrial Revolution
made a small, elite class of businessmen incredibly rich. By 1890, the
wealthiest 1 percent of American families controlled 51 percent of the nation’s
real and personal property.
Among the richest of the rich were the so-called robber barons, whose
extreme avarice drove them to use unethical business practices and exploit
workers to create lucrative monopolies, and in the process amass fortunes
that would amount to billions of dollars in today’s money.

Term 'Conspicuous Consumption' Is Coined

The late 1800s super rich had an existence so opulent that it may have been
almost unimaginable to the masses of ordinary Americans who labored in the
factories and mills they owned. To describe their lifestyle, economist and
sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”

For the robber barons and their families, Veblen wrote, “the apparatus of living
has grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture,
bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot
make way with them in the required manner without help” from armies of
servants.

But the Robber Barons and their families didn’t just enjoy lives of luxury. Just
as they competed in business, they were driven to outdo one another with
their lavish spending and possessions. Beyond that, they hungered to become
the equals of the aristocrats on the other side of the Atlantic.

“The U.S. was a new country, and there was this sense of looking to Europe
and emulating royal society,” explains Elizabeth L. Block, a fashion and social
historian and editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and
author of the 2021 book Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French
Fashion.

Industrialists who didn’t have early roots in colonial America and belong to an
old-money clan would make up for it, Block says, by trying to acquire the
persona of a European lord. “They would do that through buying the right
things, through their possessions and what they were wearing.”

Here are a few of the most ostentatious ways in which the industrialists and
their families flaunted their wealth.

Magnificent Mansions

The Biltmore Mansion of George Vanderbilt in Asheville, North Carolina.

The Biltmore Mansion of George Vanderbilt was built by the Vanderbilt family
in Asheville, North Carolina. The 250-room French Renaissance chateau
includes 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and 65 fireplaces.

Bettmann / Contributor/ Getty Images

The Vanderbilt family’s castle-like 250-room mansion on the 8,000-acre
Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, was so massive that three
separate hills had to be leveled with dynamite and blasting powder to create a
flat space for it, and the structure included nearly 10 million pounds of
limestone, according to Ellen Erwin Rickman’s 2005 book on the estate.

To entertain the Vanderbilts and their guests, the mansion was equipped with
a bowling alley, an indoor pool, and a library with 10,000 volumes, gardens
designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and special smoking
and gun rooms. They also could warm themselves at one of the mansion’s 65
fireplaces.

Other industrialists lived in elaborate homes as well. Another wealthy Gilded

Age family, the Garretts, who made their fortune in railroads, lived in
Evergreen, a Baltimore mansion, where a second-floor bathroom featured
Roman tile mosaics and a bathtub and toilet covered in 23-karat gold leaf.

Elaborate, Numerous Wardrobes

An 1890 oil-on-canvas portrait of Caroline Astor (1831–1908), painted by

Carolus-Duran in 1890.

An 1890 oil-on-canvas portrait of Caroline Astor (1831–1908), painted by

Carolus-Duran in 1890.
Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The industrialists and their wives sailed once or twice each year to Paris,
where courtiers at Paris fashion houses kept the women’s measurements on
file so that they could have the latest designer dresses ready for them to try
on.

“They would come back with five dresses, and roll them out at social events
during the year,” Block explains. Back in the United States, “newspapers
wrote about what these women were wearing.” The couples also would stop in
London, where the men went to Saville Row, where tailors made bespoke
suits for them out of the finest materials. (Banker and industrialist John
Pierpont Morgan, for example, was a customer of Henry Poole & Co.)

Industrialists’ wives also employed dressmakers back home to make

additional clothing for them, because their social status required them to wear
a different outfit to each engagement on their calendars. “Many of them were
changing outfits five or six times a day,” Block says.

Wealthy Gilded Ave women sometimes even coordinated their clothing with
the décor of their mansions, Block says. Caroline Astor, for example, had a
life-size portrait of herself in her home’s reception hall, dressed in Paris-made
finery. When guests arrived for a dinner party, she would greet them standing
beneath the portrait, dressed in the latest fashion for that particular year.
Gilded Age ladies also used jewelry to flaunt their wealth. One socialite, Mrs.
Calvin S. Brice, attended a ball wearing what a New York Times account
described as a “magnificent” diamond tiara, a pendant of diamonds, and a
bracelet and brooch decorated with black pearls and diamonds, according to
the book Gilded New York: Design, Fashion and Society, by Phyllis Magidson,
Susan Johnson and Thomas Mellins.

Lavish Parties

The Gilded Age super-rich sought to outdo one another by throwing grandiose
soirees with massive guest lists. After aspiring socialite Alva Vanderbilt and
her husband, William Kissam Vanderbilt moved into their new mansion on
Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 1883, for example, they celebrated by inviting
1,000 guests to a late-night housewarming party in which everyone had to
dress in historical costumes.

“Guests wore powdered wigs from the 18th century, and commissioned
costumes from French courtiers,” Block explains. They went to the opera, then
changed from their opera clothes into costumes. Then they went to the ball,
had dinner at 2 a.m. and stayed all night, while their carriage drivers waited
outside in the cold.

Another socialite, Cornelia Martin, put on an 1897 ball in which the interior of
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was transformed into a replica of the Palace of
Versailles. Her husband Bradley Martin dressed as Louis XV in a suit of
brocade, while the hostess took on the persona of Mary Stuart in a gown
embroidered in gold and trimmed with pearls and precious stones. Another
guest wore a suit of gold-inlaid armor valued at $10,000 ($336,000 in today’s
money). “The power of wealth with its refinement and vulgarity was
everywhere,” one attendee later recalled.

The popularity of costume parties led super-rich women to come up with

outlandish attire. One socialite, Kate Fearing Strong, wore a taxidermied white
cat as a headdress and a skirt fashioned from cats’ tails to the Vanderbilts’
housewarming ball, which earned her the nickname “Puss.”

Extravagant Furnishings

Gilded Age industrialists and their wives decorated the interiors of their
mansions lavishly, sometimes importing entire suites of furniture from Europe
as a way of demonstrating their well-traveled worldliness and sophistication.

“Others searched beyond Europe to find furniture in Morocco, hangings in

Turkey, bowls on the Mount of Olives and fans in Japan,” Arnold Lewis, James
Turner and Steven McQuillin write in their book, The Opulent Interiors of the
Gilded Age. They took particular pride in owning candelabra previously
possessed by the King of Bavaria, or statues that had once graced the homes
of a noble French family.

While they had enormous budgets for decorating, the American elite didn’t
always have the sophistication to get their money’s worth. “I think we definitely
see that with Alva Vanderbilt’s choices for the interior of her home,” Block
explains. “Maybe she didn’t know the difference between a medieval and a
Renaissance tapestry or one from the 18th century, whereas the Europeans
certainly would have.”

Exotic Dining

Gilded Age industrialists also indulged themselves at the dining table, where
they demonstrated their prosperity by consuming the finest food in gluttonous
quantities. Perhaps one of the most voracious eaters of the era was railroad
magnate “Diamond” Jim Brady, who got his nickname from his habit of
wearing so much finery that his biographer H. Paul Jeffers described him as “a
walking jewelry store.”

According to Jeffers, Brady’s mass consumption of calories started with an

enormous lunch that typically included two lobsters, deviled crabs, clams,
oysters and beef, along with two whole pies for dessert. But that only was
enough to hold him until late afternoon, when it was time for dinner. According
to Jeffers, Brady would start with “a couple of dozen oysters, six crabs, and
bowls of green turtle soup,” and then proceed to a main course that included
two whole ducks, six or seven more lobsters, a sirloin steak, vegetables,
topped off by pastries and a five-pound box of chocolates.

As a restaurateur who served him recalled, Brady sometimes would invite

eight to 10 guests to join him—and then eat the dinners of anyone who didn’t
show up. A restaurant owner called him “the best 25 customers I ever had.”
The super-wealthy lived large, but their opulence had a dark side. The wealth
that paid for it all often was obtained through corrupt business practices, and
served as a reminder of how the income gap between the powerful few and
the many who worked for them became even more extreme. To author and
journalist Jack Beatty, the Gilded Age actually was the “Age of Betrayal,” in
which the obsession with wealth caused Americans to lose sight of the
democracy they’d fought to sustain during the Civil War.

tly consumed milk tainted when cows ate poisonous white snakeroot. (Some
believed the cause of death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.

After Nancy’s death, domestic duties at the family’s one-room cabin fell to
11-year-old Sarah. “[L]ittle Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary
life—indeed, one more cheerless and less inviting seldom falls to the lot of
any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner and biographer.

Through a dismal winter, the motherless children and their 19-year-old orphan
cousin lived in a log cabin without a floor, largely unprotected from severe
weather. In a little more than a year, however, their family circumstances
changed dramatically.