I'm here in the Walled Garden, one of my favorite places in all of Pittsburgh.

It's all the remains of a once grand estate, home to one branch of Pittsburgh's Royal family.

This is a story of wealth immeasurable, of scandal, art, drugs, industry and a family whose name is synonymous with Pittsburgh.

Their country estates continue to fascinate where skyscrapers define the skyline.

This is the story of the Mellons I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

I think the best way to explain the family is with this family tree that I've created.

If you want a full size image to follow along while we go through it.

The link is in the description down below.

Let's get into it.

Our story begins in East Liberty in 1843 at the wedding of Thomas Mellon and Sarah Jane Negley.

Thomas Mellon was a prosperous young lawyer downtown who had everything he wanted except a family.

Sarah Jane was the daughter of one of the richest men in the East end a man named Jacob Negley.

Jacob's father, Alexander, had immigrated from Switzerland and marched to Pittsburgh with General Forbes and decided to settle here.

After the war.

Jacob Negley and his siblings inherited virtually the entirety of the East End, which at the time was all farmland.

East Liberty was at that time known as Negley Town.

Jacob's wife, Anna Barbara Winebiddle, also came from a landowning family.

Sarah Jane Negley is nephew.

Son of her brother Jacob was James Scott Negley, who became a celebrated Civil War general and railroad investor, and the village of Negley, Ohio is named for him.

Through his daughter Grace Negley Farson and he had a grandson, Negley Farson, who was an avid fisherman, outdoors writer, and foreign news correspondent.

Best known for his 1942 book Going Fishing.

Meanwhile, Thomas Mellons relatives hailed from Ulster in what is now Northern Ireland.

As the family expanded, the amount of land each generation inherited shrunk, which eventually forced the family to emigrate to the western frontier of America, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

His paternal grandparents, Archibald Mellon and Elizabeth Armour, and all his father's siblings had emigrated a couple of years prior, and in 1818, Andrew and Rebecca mellon and their five year old son Thomas decided to do the same.

The trip took 15 weeks, and the couple began a new life as farmers in Poverty Point, an area north of modern day Morrisville.

Thomas's uncles helped construct the Greensburg Pike, which is now route 30, literally building the road to Pittsburgh.

Thomas was destined to become a farmer like his father, but as a teenager he discovered Ben Franklin's autobiography, Irecs Riches Story of a Self-made Professional man.

And he was hooked on the idea of making something more for himself.

When Thomas was 17, his father was down at the courthouse in Greensburg arranging to buy property for him to farm.

When Thomas decided once and for all he would not be a farmer, he writes that he threw down his axe and ran the ten miles to the courthouse, stopping the transaction just in time and securing the future he wanted for himself.

This set the course of the family's history.

Thomas went to the Western University, now the University of Pittsburgh, and began a prosperous legal career.

Eventually leading him to be elected as a judge from 1859 to 1869.

For the rest of his life, he preferred to be called Judge Mellen.

During his professional career, two things were paramount making money and helping his sons make money.

The judge believed that providing others with the opportunity to make money was much more useful than just giving them money.

Most of the Mellons thereafter have followed this precedent.

After his term on the bench expired, he decided the private sector afforded more opportunities and elected to open a bank on Smithfield Street.

T. Mellon and Sons in 1869.

This bank, later Mellon National Bank and now BNY Mellon, went on to create more wealth in the city than probably any other institution in its history.

Sarah and the judge built a house along the old Negley driveway, what is now Negley Avenue, in 1851, and lived there until their deaths in 1908.

In 1909.

Here they had eight children, six boys and two girls, both girls, Sarah Emma and Annie Rebecca died as infants and Samuel Selwyn died at nine years old.

His death caused the judge, who was famously reserved and distant, to become both quieter and yet more compassionate towards his remaining children.

But the emotional distance is one that persists to the entire family tree.

The Mellon's family dinners were a quiet affair even decades later, when the entire extended family gathered at one of their opulent mansions.

In order of surviving children, we have Thomas Alexander, James Ross, Andrew William, Richard Beatty, and George Negley.

From these children, we get the four major branches of the Mellon family.

George Negley died at age 27, probably from tuberculosis, with no wife and no children.

Many of the Mellon men go by their initials, and I will refer to them accordingly.

Before we delve into the branches, I'd like to take note that the judge's sister, Eleanor, had a couple famous descendants of her own through her daughter, Rebecca Stotler.

She had a grandson, Thomas Mellon Evans, and his son, Thomas Mellon Evans Jr, who are both well known in the corporate sphere, the younger, especially for pioneering the practice of corporate raiding.

Thomas Alexander or T.A.

Mellon, born in 1844, was the least interested in following his father's footsteps.

While a younger man, he operated a lumber in a bank in East Liberty and managed the Ligonier Valley Railroad with his brothers, T.A.

died of oral cancer at age 55, in 1899.

His chain smoking to blame T.A.

was married to Mary Caldwel Her brother Alexander was a senator from Kansas.

He was forced to resign after only two years when evidence of bribery came out.

Their grandparents had been among the first to settle in what is now Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.

Despite his early business acumen, T.A.

never had the same unyielding drive for capital accumulation as his brothers, and thus his branch of the family is today the least notable T.A.

and Mary had four children.

Sarah Negley, who died as an infant.

Edward Purcell, an architect whose claim to fame is designing the golf Tower, which for many decades was the tallest building in Pittsburgh.

Mary C and T.A.

Jr to junior, married Helen Wightman and they had four children, one of whom was Helen S Mellon.

Younger Helen went on to marry civic leader and philanthropist Adolph Schmidt, who before becoming ambassador to Canada, worked alongside R.K.

Mellon to create Pittsburgh's Renaissance One.

He also established the Graduate School of Public Health at Pitt.

This branch has the most members alive today, though few have the last name Mellon.

James Ross Mellon, or J.R., born in 1846, was raised, like all his brothers, with an expectation of leading a commercial life.

The story goes that Sarah Jane Negley went to the grocer in East Liberty to buy eggs, complaining that her chickens never laid any.

As it turns out, little J.R.

had been taking the chickens eggs and selling them to the grocer the whole time.

The judge was pleased.

Sarah?

Not so much.

J.R.

was married to Rachel Hughey Larimer.

Her father, General William Larimer, had been a prominent businessman and landowner in Pittsburgh.

His property in East Liberty eventually became the neighborhood of Larimer.

After an economic downturn, he took his family to the Kansas Territory, becoming involved in land sales.

In 1858, he founded a city at the base of the mountains and named it after the territorial governor, James Denver.

Maybe you've heard of it.

Rachel's aunt, Mary McMasters, married Pittsburgh steel baron B.F.

Jones, a founding member of Jones and Laughlin Steel.

Their grand niece, Rachel McMasters Miller.

Every woman in this family seems to be named Rachel married Roy Hunt, a prominent leader in Alcoa, which his father had founded and the Mellons.

Controlled for decades.

The Hunt Library at CMU was given by them and contains her enormous botanical library.

J.R.

and Rachel split their time between Pittsburgh and Palatka, Florida, which would become a magnet for later generations of the line.

They had five children.

Two of them, Sadie and Rachel, died young.

Thomas, the second was a lawyer and served on many corporate boards in Pittsburgh, including the Mellon Stuart Company, and gave charitably to many organizations.

He never married, Sarah Mellon, the youngest, was married three times.

Her daughter from the third, Alexandra Mellon Grange, was married for a time to Philip Hepburn, a cousin of Katharine Hepburn.

The greatest legacy of J.R.

branch, however, has been through his eldest son, William Larimer Mellon, better known as W.L.

W.L.

due to his age, only being 13 years younger than Andrew, for instance, was more of a peer with his uncles than a nephew.

And with their support, he created one of the greatest Mellon holdings, Gulf Oil.

He had gotten involved early with the oil boom in northwest Pennsylvania and was among the first to recognize the enormous potential that Texas oil fields held.

He controlled Gulf oil for much of his life.

Toward the end of his life, he created the Graduate School of Industrial Automation at Carnegie Tech, now known as the Tepper School of Business.

He married Mary Hill Taylor, a Scottish woman, in 1896, and the family was known to take long trips on their seafaring yacht, the Vagabond yacht.

They had four children Matthew Taylor, Rachel Larimer, Margaret Lederle and W.L.

JR.

Matthew Taylor Mellon earned a doctorate in history from Freiberg University, where his nickname was honeydew, with a thesis on the history of American slavery, which for a while was considered the definitive work on the subject.

A lifelong interest in German history and culture led to him moving to Germany in the 1930s and marrying Gertrude Altegor.

He was fascinated by Hitler, writing an essay defending the Third Reich in the Pittsburgh Press.

He became involved in Nazi Party politics.

He taught philosophy at Freiburg, and was a personal guest of the Führer at the Nuremberg Rally in 1936.

By 1938, he and Gertrude had become disillusioned by the direction the party was headed and moved back to the States.

Matt and his second wife, Jane, took a page out of his book and lived on a yacht for 11 years after getting married.

Landing occasionally to look after their estate in Jamaica before their divorce, Matt and Gertrude had two sons, Karl Negley Mellon and James Ross Mellon.

The second J.R.

the second, or Jay.

Married, but has no children.

He became a big game hunter in Africa and most recently was in the news for simply not paying his taxes.

His defense?

He had renounced his U.S.

citizenship in 1978 and was under no obligations, despite never having moved out of his Fifth Avenue penthouse.

Karl Negley Mellon was troubled by bouts of depression and other more vague mental disorders throughout his life.

Family members say his early adulthood was split between stays in asylums and small periods of stability.

After moving to Maine, Karl and his friends built a huge sailboat to take along the coast.

It lasted only a while before catching fire.

He and his father continued sailing, keeping a log book of adventures called The Watermelons.

Karl and one wife and her six children once sailed at 138 ton converted or carrier from Maine to the Caribbean.

Karl's first wife was Anne Stokes, descendant of the Drexel family of Philadelphia, themselves of German origin.

Her great great grandfather, Anthony Joseph Drexel, founded Drexel University in 1891, and her great aunt Katherine was canonized in 2000.

The first natural born American citizen to become a saint.

Appropriately for this family tree, she is the patron saint of philanthropists.

Karl Mellon, before taking his own life in 1983, had four children, two of whom became prominent Christopher Mellon, born 1957, worked in the intelligence community under Presidents Clinton and Bush, and has in recent years become a major proponent of government transparency in UFO investigations.

He is the only Mellon family member that I am aware of who's been a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Matthew Taylor Mellon, the second born in 1964, was for a time the most visible Mellon.

A fashion designer himself, he married Jimmy Choo, founder Tamara Yeardye, with whom he has one daughter, Araminta, who is now something of a fashion designer herself.

Later he married Nicole Hanley, with whom he has two children.

He created two lines of shoes and a knitwear line.

Matthew invested early in cryptocurrency, turning $2 million into 1 billion.

After years of struggling with substance abuse, at one point spending $100,000 a month on OxyContin, Matthew had flown to Cancun in 2018 to check into an ibogaine treatment clinic.

The night before treatment began, he suffered a fatal heart attack after taking ayahuasca aged 54.

Second son, W.L.

Jr, or Larry, has undoubtedly been the greatest humanitarian in the family.

After his first marriage failed, he moved to a ranch out west, where he met Gwen Grant.

After a few years of restlessness, the couple decided that their life would be better spent in just about any other way than staring at cows all day.

Larry had read about Albert Schweitzer, the humanitarian, and decided to follow his footsteps, attending medical school at age 39 and opening a hospital in Haiti that still operates to this day.

Larry and Gwen operated the hospital until their deaths in 1989.

In 2000.

The hospital played a pivotal role in earthquake relief in 2010.

Larry's only son, W.L.

the third died of a drug overdose during his time in law school.

W.L.s daughter Rachel Larimer Mellon, who had lived to be 107, married John F Walton, a director of finances at Gulf Oil, and they had four children.

The youngest, James Mellon Walton, would serve as president of the Carnegie Museums from 1968 to 1984, overseeing the current art museums construction in the 1970s.

Finally, Margaret Mellon, the youngest, married Thomas Hitchcock Jr of New York in 1928.

The Hitchcocks were fabulously wealthy in their own right, and apparently F Scott Fitzgerald's character, Tom Buchanan, was based on Hitchcock.

He had been shot down in World War One and escaped a German P.O.W.

train by bailing out and walking over 100 miles.

He died in Britain in World War Two while test flying an experimental aircraft.

This left the four children without a father, which other family members attri Peggy Hitchcock, who died just this year at age 90, and her younger brother Billy are the most famous or infamous, depending on your position.

The Hitchcock's own to 2500 acre estate in upstate New York called Millbrook from 1963 to 1968.

They rented this estate to ex Harvard professor Timothy Leary to run his psychedelic experiments.

As the years went on, the academic orientation became a hedonistic one.

Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were among the many high profile visitors.

Later on in the 1970s, Billy and his financial partner Scully got involved in some white collar crime, but were eventually acquitted.

The estate in New York fell into ruins for decades, but has been restored and is still in the family.

Andrew William Mellon, or A.W.

born in 1855, is the Mellon you've most likely heard of.

He inherited his father's disposition towards making boatloads of cash, and multiplied the family fortune through the stratosphere.

As a teenager, he began working at the bank and in 1882 gained full ownership of it.

He turned it into one of the first venture capitalist firms, investing heavily in all those industries that would make Pittsburgh a powerhouse, with the notable exception of steel.

Part of the Mellon Bank M.O.

was to exchange seed money for shares of stock, giving the family a controlling interest in many large companies that dominated Pittsburgh, as well as international markets, including H.C.

Frick, Gulf Oil, Aluminum Company of America, Arca, Alcoa Coppers, Union Trust, Westinghouse Carbon Random, Union Carbide, General Motors, and Rockwell, as well as dozens of smaller companies such as those that ran Pittsburgh's trolley network.

A.W.

became Treasury Secretary in 1921 and served under the Harding, the Coolidge, and the Hoover administrations, making him the oldest, the longest serving, the richest, and one of the most influential Treasury secretaries in American history.

Depending on your political views, his policies helped lead to the economic boom of the 1920s.

The economic bust of 1929, or both.

He also instituted a number of legal loopholes that wealthy families still use today to pass money tax free to future generation.

The Mellons have consistently used these to their benefit, as one of the most notable things about the family is their system of trusts and foundations.

In fact, only one family in American history has held on to their fortune longer.

The duPonts.

The Mellons are worth about $14 billion today, more than they ever have been before he died in 1937, A.W.

spearheaded the campaign to open the National Gallery of Art in DC, donating most of his vast art collection to it in his will.

His preoccupation with building wealth, paired with his shy and awkward personality, resulted in a much longer bachelorhood than his brothers.

A.W.

met Nora McMullen, 24 years his junior, on a trip to England in 1899, and they were wed in 1900.

The couple moved to Pittsburgh, which Nora immediately hated.

The story goes that when they finished their honeymoon and stepped out of the train in East Liberty, she asked, we don't get off here, do we?

You don't live here.

Despite this, the smoggy town of De Nora, south of the city, was named in her honor.

The couple had two children, Elsa and Paul.

Born in 1901 and 1907, not long after Paul's birth, the couple very publicly separated and divorced, with Nora going on a publicity tour touting the awful marriage even though she had been unfaithful sometime afterwards.

A.W.

is said to have asked his associate if he was happy at home.

When he said he was, A.W.

replied then you are a much richer man than I. Nora lived until 1973, splitting time between England and Virginia, rarely returning to Pittsburgh.

As a young woman, Allsa rejected Prince Otto Bismarck, grandson of the Iron Chancellor, instead marrying David K.E.

Bruce, whose father and grandfather had been senators from Maryland.

Later in life, David would become the only American to serve as ambassador to the U.K., France, and Germany.

Their marriage produced one daughter, Audrey Bruce, and the couple divorced in 1945.

Allsa was chronically ill her entire life and died at the age of 68.

In 1969.

When she died, she was the richest woman in America and, like her father, donated her art collection to the National Gallery.

After her divorce from Bruce, Allsa was rumored to be in a decades long romance with G. Lauder Greenaway of Connecticut.

His maternal grandfather was George Lauter Jr, whose parents came over from Scotland along with his mother, sister Margaret Morrison and her husband William Carnegie.

Young George and his cousin Andrew founded Carnegie Steel, giving the louder Greenway family a fortune of their own.

Audrey Bruce married Stephen Currier, whose family became fabulously wealthy by way of Currier and Ives, as well as marrying into the European Warburg family.

The Mellons did not care for Stephen, and so this family operated independently from the rest of the clan.

Much of their enormous wealth was funneled through their Taconic Foundation, which bankrolled much of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In 1967, Stephen and Audrey were flying on a chartered plane from Puerto Rico to the Virgin Islands when the pilot asked permission to fly over a naval installation.

Permission was denied and no further communication was recorded.

Neither the couple nor the plane was ever found.

Their three children, Andrea, Lavinia and Michael, were not taken in by the family and continue to live in Northern Virginia, unassociated with the Mellons at large, though still plenty wealthy.

Nearby is the farm formerly owned by Paul Mellon, who held two passions in life art collecting and horse racing.

Paul is one of only five people in history to have been recognized as an exemplar of racing.

He first married Mary Conover Brown in 1935, and they had two children.

Conover Mellon, born 1937, and Timothy Mellon, born 1942.

Paul served in England during the war, where his British counterparts nicknamed him cantaloupe.

Only a year after the war, Mary died suddenly.

Two years later, Paul married his friend's ex-wife, Rachel Lambert Lloyd, aka Bunny, whose father had invented Listerine.

Bunny was already a well-known gardener and would later achieve greater fame by designing the white House Rose garden for Jackie Kennedy, with whom the couple was friends.

Paul was heavily involved with the opening of the National Gallery, which had been his father's idea.

He and his cousin R.K.

oversaw the creation of Carnegie Mellon University in 1967.

Paul died in 1992, and Bunny lived until age 104, dying in 2014.

Catherine Conover Mellon was married to John W Warner, the third of Virginia, from 1957 to 1973, and they had three children Mary, Virginia, and John the fourth.

While married, Warner was Undersecretary of the Navy, later becoming secretary and then serving as a senator from Virginia from 1979 to 2009.

Timothy Mellon has been married three times but has no children.

He invested in railroads and airlines, creating a railroad holding company, which was sold to CSX in 2022.

As a younger man, he championed environmental causes and underprivileged communities.

However, he has made national headlines in the last few months as it turns out, he has been bankrolling the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In fact, no donor has given more money to Trump's 2024 bid than Tim Mellon, who by late September of this year had given $125 million to the Maga Inc.

PAC.

Many family members describe his political shift as sudden and inexplicable, given the contentiousness of this election season.

Tim is probably the most high profile and controversial family member alive right now.

Richard Beatty Mellon, or RB, born in 1858, was A.W.s right hand man.

And A.W.

interests lay mostly outside of Pittsburgh, R.B.

was firmly entrenched in the city, and his line of the family has had the most influence in the region.

R.B.

served as bank president while A.W.

served in Washington, but before and after this, most decisions and deals were made in unison, as though the two men were one.

One such decision was the opening of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, which began in 1911 on Pitt's campus.

Here, many chemical breakthroughs were made, such as synthetic rubber gas masks and cellulose sausage casing.

Its current building, the massive Mellon Institute on Bellfield Avenue, was opened in 1937, with A.W.

dedicating it just months before he died.

In 1967, the institute was merged with Carnegie Tech, forming Carnegie Mellon University.

A plaque in the lobby dedicates the building to their father, Judge Mellon.

R.B.

married Jennie King, whose father Alexander, had also come over from Ireland as a child.

He was a wealthy eastern landowner, having a grand estate next door to the Negley homestead.

This home, Beechwood, still stands today.

The Jennie King Mellon Library at Chatham University is named for her.

The couple had two children, Richard King Mellon or R.K.

and Sarah Cordelia Mellon.

When fortune magazine published their first Wealthiest Americans list in 1957, R.K., Sarah, Allsa and Paul were all in the top eight.

R.K.

married Constance Prosser of New York, whose father was a banker there.

R.K.

funded all sorts of causes through the region through his foundation, including starting the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, the first of its kind when Mayor David L Lawrence provided the political will for Renaissance one.

R.K.

Mellon provided the capital.

Without him, there may be no Point State Park as we know it today.

R.K.

Mellon Hall at Duquesne University, as well as the under-construction R.K.

Mellon Hall at CMU, are named in his honor.

R.K.

and Connie adopted four children Richard Prosser, Cassandra King, Constance Barbour, and Seward Prosser.

Seward Prosser and his first wife, Karen Boyd, went through a lengthy and public divorce in the mid 1970s, and Prosser received custody.

Boyd kidnaped the girls and took them to New York, where they lived under 14 separate assumed names over a period of four months.

One day, Mellon bodyguards, acting as FBI agents, kidnaped the girls back at gunpoint, forcing them back to Pittsburgh.

In 1990, Seward, through the R.K.

Mellon Foundation, donated 100,000 acres of land to the federal government for protection.

The largest single donation in history.

Seward stepped down as chairman of the foundation in 2019, and the board elected his nephew, Richard A Mellon, as his successor.

Sarah Cordelia Mellon married Alan Magee Scaife in 1927, in a grand wedding at the Walled Garden.

The pavilion and decorations alone cost $100,000.

Alan was a direct mail line descendant of one of the first industrialists in Pittsburgh, Jeffrey Scaife, an immigrant from England who began an iron mill on his mother's side.

He was a great nephew of Christopher Lyman Magee.

Magee is one of Pittsburgh's most notorious mayors, acting as one half of the Magee Flinn Machine, but was also a great philanthropist, creating both Magee Women's Hospital in honor of his mother, Elizabeth Steel, as well as the Pittsburgh Zoo at Highland Park, which ironically is just down the hill from the original Negley homestead.

Sarah and Alan, of course, had their own philanthropic efforts, with Sarah leaving money for the Carnegie Art Museum and Ellen donating to CMU and Pitt, where buildings are named for him.

Sarah and Alan had two children, Cordelia Scaife and Richard Mellon Scaife.

Cordelia was briefly married to Herbert May and never had any children.

In 1973, she was secretly married to longtime boyfriend Richard Duggan, who served as Allegheny County D.A.. Many speculate that their marriage was a loophole to avoid her testifying to corruption charges Duggan faced.

He was found dead of an alleged suicide shortly before trial.

Cordy spent her fortune promoting right wing anti-immigration causes, as well as protecting untold acres of western Pennsylvania forest.

Through her Allegheny Foundation.

Her brother, Richard was best known for buying the Greensburg Tribune in 1970 and later moving it to Pittsburgh as the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in 1992.

He married Frances Gilmore and had two children, Jennie King Scaife and David Negley Scaife.

Under her direction, Jennie led the Scaife foundation to focus on animal welfare, and she died in 2018.

David Negley Scaife is most well known for closing down the underground music venue Graffiti Showcase Cafe in 2000 and using the warehouse space to store his high end car collection.

He and his wife have one daughter, Sarah Mellon Scaife, born in 2004.

So even though most Mellons don't live around Pittsburgh today, they continue to fund so much throughout the city.

Basically, every cultural asset the city has existed in large part due to Mellon money.

They have always been upper crust, richer than the industrialists.

They bankrolled, yet purposefully less public facing than Carnegie or Frick or Heinz.

This family has shaped the progress and destiny of Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anybody else.

And yet is largely under the radar.

To that end, I hope you learned something today that you didn't know before.

Thanks for watching.

And if you want more Pittsburgh history content, make sure to subscribe.

Okay.

Welcome back.

If you have made it this far into the video, thank you.

First of all.

And second of all, that probably means that you find the Mellon family as fascinating as I do.

And I had better because I've been researching them for like four months now to make this video.

So if you want to know more, I think these three books are the best way to find out more information.

These are my three primary sources for this video, at least up until the 70s and since the 70s, I've used, articles to to fill in the gaps.

But let me tell you about it.

So here on the bottom, we've got Burton Hershs 1977 The Mellons A Fortune in History I picked this up at the library in Oakland.

It's awesome.

It's it's written like poetry in some ways.

Some parts are extremely dense.

It's really good.

It covers all the bases, everything you want to know.

And it includes so many far reaching details that connect to other parts of life and other families and other goings on in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Very good then.

Had to get Thomas Mellon's 1885 autobiography, Thomas Mellon In His Times.

This was privately published in his lifetime.

He never intended it for it to be public, but I'm so glad that Paul Mellon decided to make it public because this thing is unintentionally hilarious.

It's also just a really good time capsule of 19th century America, and the man that it produced and the lives that they landed, at least men of, you know, in his class, it's unintentionally hilarious because there are so many social customs and things that it's like, really?

That's the way people thought back then.

But it is what it is.

And it's it's a good read.

Also a little dense.

Sometimes he goes into like some of his law cases that he, he went over when he was a lawyer and a judge, and some parts are very boring, I'll tell you that.

But other parts, it's also a really good, good time capsule into Pittsburgh around that time.

And then most recently I read this.

This is Judge Mellon's Sons from W.L.

Mellon, written in 1948 before his death, I believe, also not meant to be publicly printed, but also I'm glad that it was because it's not only an autobiography of wealth, but it's also a biography of his uncles, which, as you know from watching the video early, were more like his peers than his his, biological uncles just because of the age difference.

So he covers all the goings on with them, all the business that he was up to, that they were up to, and then as well as what his kids were up to.

But of course, this is from 1948.

So it's, you know, outdated, otherwise all the articles I used are down in the description below of this video, as well as the information about these books.

I got the other two books at the Hunt Library at CMU, so if you want to check those out, I highly recommend it.

Once again, thank you for watching, and I really hope that you learned something about the Mellons today, because I find them fascinating and I find that it's really hard to know anything about Pittsburgh without doing something about the Mellons.

See you next time.