Darius Ogden Mills

Darius Ogden Mills and family (c. 1890) with Whitelaw Reid and J. P. Morgan at the Millbrae estate—present-day Millbrae, California alt=Darius Ogden Mills and family (c. 1890) at the Millbrae estate, in present-day Millbrae, California

Darius Ogden Mills (September 25, 1825 – January 3, 1910) was a prominent American banker and philanthropist. For a time, he was California's wealthiest citizen. He was also a co-founder of General Electric.

Early life Mills was born in North Salem, in Westchester County, New York, the fifth son of Hannah Ogden (1791–1850) and James Mills (1788–1841), a supervisor, postmaster and justice of the peace for the town of North Salem. His maternal grandfather was William Ogden (1767–1815), At age 21, he moved to Buffalo, New York, at the invitation of his cousin, Elihu J. Townsend (the son of Malinda Ogden Townsend, his mother's sister), and later a one third owner.

In December 1848, he took an exploratory trip to California, through the Isthmus of Panama, where he joined the California Gold Rush, following two of his brothers, James and Edgar Mills. By November 1849, he had made $40,000 (~$ in ) and decided to make California his permanent home. This was helped significantly by a cousin from the English branch of the Mills family, Charles Mills, 1st Baron Hillingdon, who ran the Glyn, Mills & Co. bank in London. He never invested in gold mining or silver mining directly, as he considered mining to be too speculative. He rather started ancillary businesses that supported the mining industry, such as banks and railroads. He was a part owner of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, which was the only link from the Comstock Lode to the Central Pacific Railroad. The major shareholder in the railroad was William Sharon, whom William Ralston had sent to Virginia City as representative of the Bank of California. Also in 1864, with other investors, he founded the Bank of California, which grew large in the 1860s and 1870s, but collapsed due to financial irregularities involving its chief cashier, William Chapman Ralston. Mills used his personal fortune to revive the bank, along with Sharon, and attract new investment, and within three years, the bank was again strong. His devotion to philanthropy involved sitting on the boards of a number of charitable and cultural institutions.

Millbrae estate

Mills bought part of Rancho Buri Buri from José de la Cruz Sánchez and built an estate named Millbrae (also known as the Mills estate and the Mills mansion), which gave its name to the present town that grew up around it. The estate took three years to build and was an imposing three-story structure featuring 42 rooms, a conservatory, a carriage house, a gatekeepers house, three artificial lakes, a dairy farm, 37,000 acres of land (at its peak), and various manicured gardens. Due to a large fire, the estate burned down in June 1954.

Ogden Mills (1856–1929), who married Ruth T. Livingston (1855–1920), granddaughter of Maturin Livingston Elisabeth Mills (1857–1931), who married Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain.

Death and legacy He died of a heart attack in 1910 at his Millbrae home, leaving an estate worth $36,227,391 (~$ in ). His remains were returned to the East Coast for burial in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

A number of local institutions are named for him, include Isabella I of Castile Mills Hospital, the Mills Estate housing subdivision, San Francisco's Mills Building, and Mills High School. The city of Millbrae, California, is named after his estate.