In 1856 Hallett’s aspirations led him to run for Congress. He lost this race. Never daunted, the next year, in 1857, he opened a bank in New York City. Samuel Hallett and Company had their offices at No. 53, Beaver Street, NYC. With him were his wife’s brothers Frank M. and George W. McDowell and his wife’s sister’s husband, Nirom M. Crane.

Hallett, the salesman, then went back to Europe selling stocks and bonds for the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, and promoting the Nautilus Diving Bell. Europeans as well as Americans were caught up in the great speculative enthusiasms. These were years of great living and entertaining and travelling for the Hallett family. They had a brownstone residence in Brooklyn and this imposing estate at Wayne for their summers where they entertained politicians, financial tycoons, deposed French royalty, and literary celebrities.

In 1863 Hallett’s firm, in association with John C. Fremont, bought the controlling interest in the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western railroad. This line became the eastern division of the Union Pacific. They soon ran short of money and Hallett went before Congress to get additional funds for the road. Fremont withdrew but Hallett took over and continued construction of the Kansas link of the railroad to the Pacific. Suddenly, on July 27, 1864, Hallett’s phenomenal success ended, when, as the story goes, he was shot down in the street outside his hotel in Wyandotte (now Kansas City), Kansas. Sam Hallett was only 37 years old.

His young widow came to live the year ’round in the summer mansion at Wayne, her home town. The place went into slow decline. Timber and property was sold off and eventually the tenanted farm could barely pay the taxes. Mrs. Hallett secluded herself in the house and lived on until 1893. During the last years of her life her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert Leslie Hallett, with three children, lived in the Hallett mansion with her. One of these grandchildren, Margaret Hallett Lang, wrote of her happy childhood there and described the house and its furnishings in a long letter to Lola Austin Morse in 1951.

 

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