The World's Most Unusual Millionair

The World's Most Unusual Millionaire
Hetty Robinson was born in 1834. When her parents died, she was thirty years old. They left her $10 million ($185 million in today's dollars). She was very good at business and soon made more money. Hetty was famous as the riches woman in the United States, but she was also famous because she was very stingy.

Even when she was young, she was stingy. For instance, on her twenty-first birthday, she refused to light the candles on her birthday cake because she did not want to waste them. The next day, she cleaned the candles and returned them to the store to get a refund.

Hetty always thought men wanted to marry her for her money. Finally, at the age of thirty-three, she decided to get married because she did not want her relatives to get her money. She married Edward Green, who was a millionaire. They had a son and a daughter. Soon after, Hetty divorced him because she did not agree with him about money matters.

Hetty was even stingy with her own child. For example, when her son hurt his knee in an accident, Hetty did not call a doctor. She tired to take care of it herself. When her son's knee didn't get better, she dressed him in old clothes and took him to a free clinic. The doctors recognized her and asked for money. Hetty refused to pay and took her son home. The boy did not get medical treatment, and a few years later his leg was amputated.


Hetty was stingy with herself, too. For example, she always wore the same black dress. As the years passed by, the color of the dress changed from black to green and then brown. When the dress became dirty, she went to a cheap laundry and told them to wash only the bottom where it was dirty, and she waited until it was ready. Her undergarments were old newspapers she got from the streets. She rented a cheap apartment with no heat in New Jersey because she did not want to pay taxes in New York. Then she traveled on the train to her office in New York. Her office was a space in a bank, which the bank gave to her for free. All she ate was raw onions and cold oatmeal. She as too stingy to spend money to heat he food. Sometimes, to heat her oatmeal, she put it on the office heater because that was free. She also ate cookies, but regular cookies were too expensive for her, so she walked a long way to get broken cookies, which were much cheaper. One time, she spent half the night looking for a two-cent stamp.

When Hetty Green died in 1916, she had no friends. She left more than $100 million (over $17 billion today) to her son and daughter. Her son and daughter were not stingy like Hetty, and they spent the money freely.