The Secretive Gilded Age Family That Vanished From American History: The Drexels

In this in-depth, full-length documentary, we explore how Francis Martin Drexel, a teenage fugitive from Napoleonic-era Austria, became a Philadelphia portrait painter, learned to read money in post-colonial South America, and founded a banking dynasty that financed the Union Army's payroll, underwrote the Northern Pacific Railroad, gave J. Pierpont Morgan his start, produced the world's wealthiest nun, and then deliberately erased itself from American history.

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Francis Martin Drexel was born in 1792 in Dornbirn, a village in the Austrian Empire near the Swiss border. At seventeen, with Napoleon's army occupying the region, his father paid a ferryman to row him across the Rhine in the dead of night. He spent the next five years as a fugitive, working as an itinerant sign and coach painter.

In 1817 he arrived in Philadelphia with twenty kreuzer in his pocket. Within six weeks he had opened a portrait studio. Within a year he was exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1826 a dispute with his brother-in-law drove him to South America, where he spent four years painting presidents and generals across Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. He returned with a private education in unstable currencies, paper scrip, and political risk that no Philadelphia merchant possessed.

He opened Drexel and Company in 1837 in the middle of the Panic that destroyed hundreds of competitors. Within a decade his son Anthony J. Drexel was running the firm.

Anthony Drexel financed the Union Army's payroll when Congress could not. He underwrote the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1871 he handpicked a thirty-four-year-old protégé named J. Pierpont Morgan and merged their firms into Drexel, Morgan & Co., with Drexel as senior partner. He founded the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, which became Drexel University.

He died on a spa visit to Carlsbad in 1893. Within a decade of his death the Drexel name had been stripped from the New York firm, leaving J.P. Morgan & Co.

Anthony's niece Katharine Drexel inherited a share of the family fortune, gave it all to the Church, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Coloured People, opened nearly sixty schools across the American South, and was canonized as Saint Katharine Drexel in 2000.

The financial firm staggered through one final chapter when distant cousin descendants licensed the family name to a Brooklyn investment bank in the 1970s. That bank was Drexel Burnham Lambert. Michael Milken's junk bond machine collapsed in 1990 and the Drexel name on Wall Street was permanently destroyed.

The biographer who spent twenty years reconstructing Anthony Drexel's life concluded that his subject "makes for a difficult subject; he was always reticent about his private life." Before that biography appeared in 2001, no full-length book on him had ever been written.

The most consequential forgotten family in United States history erased itself.