Virtually no records exist of the wages paid to the many people who built Morgan’s million-dollar Library. This letter is a rare exception: it lists typical day rates for various categories of workers employed by the stone contractor.
Skilled carvers were some of the higher-paid tradespeople, earning $5.50 per day. At the other end of the spectrum, laborers hoisting the stones on-site earned fifty cents a day under the employment of William Angus (a Scottish immigrant whose firm set the marble blocks). For comparison: the artist Hughson Hawley billed at a daily rate of $25 for his work on the watercolor rendering of the Library shown elsewhere in this exhibition; Beatrix Farrand, the landscape designer, charged $50 a day plus expenses.
Edward B. Tompkins (1850–1907), president of Robert C. Fisher & Co.
Page from a letter to Charles Follen McKim, New York, 7 February 1903
New-York Historical Society, McKim, Mead & White Architectural Collection