D. LeRoy Dresser

Daniel Leroy Dresser (1862 - July 10, 1915) was a shipbuilder who took his own life on July 10, 1915.

Biography

Daniel was born in 1862 to Brevet Major George Warren Dresser and Elizabeth Stuyvesant LeRoy. His sisters included Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, who married George Washington Vanderbilt II and Natalie Bayard Dresser Brown, who married John Nicholas Brown I. Two other sisters married Mr. George D. Merrill of Stockbridge, Massachusetts and Viscount Romain D'Osmoy of Paris respectively.

He was a graduate of Columbia College in 1889 and a member of the New York Yacht Club and the Seawanhawka-Corinthian Yacht Club.

Career

He was president of the Trust Company of the Republic which failed in 1903 due to the financial failure of United States Shipbuilding Company. He was also president of the Merchants Association and of the silk commission house of Dresser & Co.

In 1908 he was the leader of the Progressive Party in Rhode Island.

Near the end of his life he had patented a steam generator but was unable to attract investors to bring it to market.

Personal life

In 1889, he married Emma L. Burnham. She wife divorced him in 1908, citing Mr. Dresser's mental instability, since the failure of the Trust Company of the Republic in 1903.

On December 22, 1914, he married for the second time to Mrs. Marcia Walther Baldwin, an actress and pianist.

Death

He shot and killed himself with a .38 caliber revolver at the Delta Psi Fraternity house on Riverside Drive in New York City.