iii. Charles Steele(8) was born on May 5 1857. He died on Aug 5 1939 in New York City. Charles Steele earned an M.A. from the University of Virginia in 1878. He studied law at Columbia University Law School and with the firm of S. L. M. Barlow and David Dudley Field, two of the country's most distinguished lawyers. He was admitted to practice before the New York Bar in 1880.
After being admitted to the bar, he formed a partnership with William Dorsheimer, Lieutenant Governor of New York, a partnership that was dissolved in 1884. While at that firm he was associate counsel to the New York, Lake Erie, and Western Railroad and was instrumental in one of its many reorganizations.
He then joined the firm of Seward, Guthrie and Steele where he was chiefly occupied with reorganizing the many lines that came to make up the Southern Railway System. In 1889 he was invited to join the banking firm of J. P. Morgan and Company as a partner, a position he would hold the rest of his life.
According to the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, written in 1910, he "is a legal specialist and a master of the science of business management. As an authority on corporate law and railroad specialist, he ranks among the foremost."
At the peak of his career he was director of dozens of major American corporations, including U.S. Steel, General Electric, International Harvester, International Mercantile Marine (which owned R.M.S. Titanic), and such railroads as Northern Pacific, Santa Fe, the Erie, and the Southern Railway System.
Devoted to music, he donated $5 million to St. Thomas Church at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue to found a choir school for boys. The St. Thomas Boys Choir remains among the world's finest to this day. There is a splendid full-length portrait of Charles Steele in the front lobby of the school.
The love of music evidently passed down through his family. His great granddaughter is Frederica Von Stade, the noted mezzo-soprano.
