Colt, Samuel Pomeroy, 1852-1921

Samuel Pomeroy Colt was born in Patterson, New Jersey on January 10, 1852. He was the youngest of six children of Christopher and Theodora Goujand DeWolf Colt and the nephew of Samuel Colt, inventor of the Colt revolver. His father was a dry goods merchant in New York City and Connecticut, his mother a descendant of the DeWolf mercantile family of Bristol, Rhode Island. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1870 to 1873, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1876. He was admitted to the New York bar in that same year and to the Rhode Island bar in 1877. In 1875, he was appointed aide-de-camp to Rhode Island Governor Henry Lippitt with the honorary rank of "colonel," a title by which he was addressed for the remainder of his life. He served on the Governor's staff until 1877. A year earlier, while still on Lippitt's staff, he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives from Bristol. His primary interests while in the Legislature were in the areas of regulating child labor and promoting the right of women to hold and inherit property. Colt left the Legislature in 1879 to accept an appointment as an Assistant Attorney General under Rhode Island Attorney General Willard Sayles. Upon Sayles retirement in 1882, Colt ran for and was elected to the first of four, one year terms as Rhode Island's Attorney General. During his seven year tenure in the Attorney General's Office, he vigorously prosecuted liquor law violations and had a strong interest in murder cases, often leading the prosecution of these cases personally. In contrast, his private legal practice, which he continued to pursue while serving in the Legislature and the Attorney General's Office, focused on probate and estate work. He served as an executor for the estates of Cornelius J. Vanderbilt, the son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Ambrose Burnside, former Rhode Island governor and Civil War general.

Colt's active public political career waned after he was denied election for a 10th term as Attorney General in 1886.In 1875, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed aide-de-camp to Rhode Island Governor Henry Lippitt with the honorary rank of "colonel," a title by which he was addressed for the remainder of his life. He served on the Governor's staff until 1877. A year earlier, while still on Lippitt's staff, he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives from Bristol. His primary interests while in the Legislature were in the areas of regulating child labor and promoting the right of women to hold and inherit property.Colt left the Legislature in 1879 to accept an appointment as an Assistant Attorney General under longtime Rhode Island Attorney General Willard Sayles. Upon Sayles retirement in 1882, Colt ran for and was elected to the first of four, one year terms as Rhode Island's Attorney General. During his seven year tenure in the Attorney General's Office, he vigorously prosecuted liquor law violations and had a strong interest in murder cases, often leading the prosecution of these cases personally. In contrast, his private legal practice, which he continued to pursue while serving in the Legislature and the Attorney General's Office, focused on probate and estate work. He served as an executor for the estates of Cornelius J. Vanderbilt, the son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Ambrose Burnside, former Rhode Island governor and Civil War general.Colt's active public political career waned after he was denied election for a 10th term as Attorney General in 1886. He did stage an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1903 and made a brief and abortive run for the U.S. Senate in 1907. These campaigns apparently were mounted more out of a sense of obligation to the Republican Party than out of any great desire to reenter elective politics. Both before and after these debates, however, Colt remained a behind-the-scenes power and major financial contributor to the Republican Party in Rhode Island. Colt's active public political career waned after he was denied election for a 10th term as Attorney General in 1886.

His political defeat in 1886 also marked the beginning of a major shift in his professional life. At the age of thirty-three, he ceased his active participation in the legal profession to pursue his interests in the business world. In 1886, Colt founded the Industrial Trust Company, a banking corporation which has grown into today's Fleet/Norstar Corporation. The early incorporators, representing the political, business, and industrial elite of late nineteenth century Rhode Island, included William and Frederic Sayles, Zechariah Chafee, Nelson Aldrich, Lucien Sharpe, and John B. Herreshoff. Within two years of its founding, Industrial Trust was the largest bank in Rhode Island and one of the largest in New England. Colt served as president of the Industrial Trust Company from its founding in 1886 until 1908 and as Chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1908 to his death in 1921. A year after founding Industrial Trust, Colt was appointed as a receiver for the bankrupt National Rubber Company which was located in his hometown of Bristol. By the spring of 1888, he had succeeded in reorganizing and reopening the factory as the National India Rubber Company which manufactured rubber boots and shoes. In 1892, he merged National India Rubber with a number of other rubber companies to form U.S. Rubber, the forerunner of the present UNIROYAL Corporation. Colt served as president of U.S. Rubber from 1901 to 1918 and oversaw its growth into one of the largest corporations in the world. By 1917, a year before Colt's retirement from the presidency, the company had absorbed more than forty smaller rubber companies and employed more than 20,000 people in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. In addition to Industrial Trust and U.S. Rubber, Colt had a major financial or personal interest in railroads, lumber, public utilities, and publishing. He served on the boards of directors of more than forty companies and was one of the wealthiest men in the country. In 1908 Colt paid for the construction of a public high school in the town of Bristol as a memorial to his mother. He donated the money to build a stone chapel for St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Bristol. His 400 plus acre waterfront farm, North Farm, at Poppasquash Point in Bristol was open to the public during his lifetime. The farm, , bequeathed after his death to the state of Rhode Island, represents the bulk of the area now known as Colt State Park. Colt married Elizabeth Bullock of Bristol in 1881. They had three sons the first of whom, Samuel Pomeroy Colt, Jr., died of a viral infection in 1890 at the age of nine. The remaining two sons, Russell Griswold (born 1882) and Roswell Christopher (born 1889), survived their father. Russell married noted stage actress Ethel Barrymore 1909. Samuel Pomeroy Colt died of complications from a stroke August 13, 1921, at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island.