page_title: Hiram Bond
section_title: Kings County Elevated Railway
hierarchical_section_title: Hiram Bond / Business dealings / Kings County Elevated Railway
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Brooklyn, L.I. From U.S. Hotel, New York (NYPL Hades-1803842-1659381) cropped version
context_page_description: Hiram Bond was born May 10, 1838 in Farmersville, Cattaraugus County, New York and died in Seattle March 29, 1906. He was a corporate lawyer, investment banker and an investor in various businesses including gold mining. His family are descended from William Bond an early 17th-century immigrant from Bury St. Edmunds in East Anglia. He was the son of Hiram Bond M.D. and Almeda Slusser and was married to Laura Ann Higgins. He had two children- Louis Whitford Bond born in New York City, New York in 1865 and Marshall Latham Bond born in Orange, Virginia in 1867. He attended Rushford Academy, Rushford, New York, and earned a bachelor's degree from Hamilton College. He earned much of the money for his own education as a distributor of maps and atlases. Among his successes were becoming a publisher, and taking over the rights to a map of the United States which had been prepared by Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Southerner who was a United States cartography officer. Maury, who decided to join the Confederacy, had left the work unpaid for in New York.
context_section_description: Between 1879 and 1887 Judge Hiram Bond was also chief officer of a firm financed by investors from Boston led by Willard T. Sears and Moses Kimball. This firm had acquired rights to construct an urban transit system under the name Kings County Elevated Railway. This line was to run from the Fulton Ferry Terminal inland to the Queens border at City Line. Williard T. Sears was an architect who was able to add value designing the overpasses and bridges. Their package of rights and initial construction was eventually sold off to New York City investors led by Gen. James Jourdan due to the lack of support for the Bostonians by the local political leaders. Due to the persistence of Jourdan the project eventually got off the ground. The company directors besides Jourdan were Edward A. Abbott, Henry J. Davison, Harvey Farrington, Wendell Goodwin, Henry J. Robinson, James O. Sheldon and William A. Read. William A. Read was the financier whose company Read & Company later became Dillon, Read. Hiram's association with the KCER was so well known that it was commonly referred to as "Judge Bond's Road" according to the New York Times. During this period of time he was inducted into the Players Club at Gramercy Park founded by actor Edwin Booth for actors and lovers of the theater. He was also a member of the Union League Club of New York and Lawyers Club of New York. During this time he maintained an office at 115 Broadway in Manhattan and a townhouse in Brooklyn.
caption: View of Fulton Ferry, L.I. From U.S. Hotel, New York 1845
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