He was very young and his capital was small.  But he had an abiding faith in the new industry.  Not that he dreamed then of floating steel battleships.  But he did foresee steel in new and various uses.  Later on he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge and the elevator.  He never quite forgave Roebling.  That failure of his, the difference only of a month or so, was one of the few disappointments of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life.  That, and Howard’s marriage.  And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization that Howard’s middle-class wife would never bear a son.

The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs of approaching greatness.  On the east side, across the river, he built his first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips of lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.

He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had, as time went on, a rapidly increasing market.  Labor was cheap and plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.  Perhaps Anthony Cardew’s sins of later years were due to a vast impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be had.

The Cardew fortune began in the seventies.  Up to that time there was a struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things.  He went to England to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid, tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alien in the crude, busy new city.  And he built himself a house, a brick house in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and run on English lines.  He soon became the leading citizen.  He was one of the committee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from the very beginning he took his place in the social life.

He found it very raw at times, crude and new.  He himself lived with dignity and elegant simplicity.  He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler.  And, at the head of his table, he let other men talk and listened.  They talked, those industrial pioneers, especially after the women had gone.  They saw the city the center of great business and great railroads.  They talked of its coal, its river, and the great oil fields not far away which were then in their infancy.  All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision.  But not all of them lived to see their dream come true.

Old Anthony lived to see it.

In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains, Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy.  He owned oil wells and coal mines.  His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his own river boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carried his steel.