Early Life
William Whitney was born at Conway, Massachusetts of Puritan stock. The family were descended from John Whitney of London, who settled at Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1635. William Whitney's father was Brigadier General James Scollay Whitney; his mother, Laurinda Collins, was a descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford. William Whitney had a well known older brother, industrialist Henry Melville Whitney (1839–1923), president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, founder of the West End Street Railway Company of Boston, and later founder of the Dominion Coal Company and Dominion Iron and Steel Company in Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island. His sister Lucy Collins "Lily" Whitney married Charles T. Barney, who became the president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Another sister, Susan Collins Whitney, married Henry F. Dimock.
Educated at Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, Whitney was graduated from Yale University in 1863, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and then studied law at Harvard. He left in 1864 to study law with Abraham R. Lawrence in New York City, and in 1865 was admitted to the bar.
On October 13, 1869, he married Flora Payne, daughter of Senator Henry B. Payne of Ohio and a sister of Whitney's Yale classmate, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, later treasurer of the Standard Oil Company. The Whitneys had five children:
- Harry Payne Whitney (1872–1930)
- Pauline Payne Whitney (1874–1916) - married Almeric Hugh Paget, 1st Baron Queenborough
- (William) Payne Whitney (1876–1927)
- Oliver Whitney (1878–1883)
- Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887–1968) - married (1) Willard Dickerman Straight; (2) Leonard Knight Elmhirst
Flora Payne Whitney died in 1894 at age fifty-two. Two years later, William Whitney remarried to Edith May (widow of a Mr. Randolph). In 1898, she suffered a horse riding accident at their estate in Aiken, South Carolina in what is now known as Hitchcock Woods and died at age forty-one on May 6, 1899.
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