Businessman becomes an important player in the sugar business in Cuba and New York City. Daughter established fund for religious groups and medical services.
Nathaniel Tooker (1833-1911)
Sarah Tooker (1850-1896)
Margaret Tooker Peterson (1887-1960)
After the Spanish-American war ended in 1898, Cuban property owners were reeling from debt and American businessmen, interested in investment possibilities, flocked to the island. Among them was New Jersey sugar merchant Nathaniel Tooker, vice president of the newly formed Cuban-American Sugar Company. Soon the company acquired 77,000 acres of prime sugarcane-growing land and important sugar mills.
Within four years, sugar production on the Caribbean island nation nearly tripled, from 350,000 to 973,000 tons. The company generated tremendous wealth for its investors, and the booming sugar business boosted rum production and jobs in the Cuban countryside.
Nathaniel Tooker was born on July 20, 1833, in Middle Hope, New York, to Nathaniel and Jane Ammerman Tooker. He married Anna Christina Danforth on October 6, 1864. They had eight children, including three who died in infancy, during their 14-year marriage. Anna died in 1879.
Between 1870 and 1887, sugar refineries were one of the New York area’s most important businesses, processing nearly 70 percent of all imported raw sugar at about a dozen plants in Brooklyn, Queens, Yonkers, and New Jersey.
As vice president of the Cuban-American Sugar Company and a director of the National Sugar Refining Company in Yonkers, Nathaniel had the means to employ servants to help raise the children and send them to elite private schools.
In the early 1880s, Nathaniel moved his family to East Orange, New Jersey, where he met and married Sarah Brown. They had one son, Norman, and a daughter, Margaret. Sarah, died in 1896.
Nathaniel retired in 1900, after National Sugar Refining Company was acquired by “Sugar Trust” magnate H.O. Havemeyer’s American Sugar Refining Company.
Nathaniel’s son Norman, a star athlete at Newark Academy, entered Princeton in 1902, where he was an All-American right end on the Tigers’ football team and “one of the best punters on the intercollegiate gridiron,” according to antiquefootball.com. He also competed in the high jump in the 1904 Olympics. Norman went on to receive a PhD in medicine from Columbia University, then taught hygiene and physical education at Princeton.
Another son, Frederick J. Tooker, became a medical missionary at a Presbyterian Church mission in Hunan, China. Frederick also was associated with the Tooker Memorial Hospital in Suzhou, China, a medical facility for women and children that Nathaniel arranged to have built in memory of Sarah. In June 1911, at a time when Nathaniel and family members were making plans to visit Frederick in China, he suffered a stroke and died as he was boarding the Staten Island Ferry. He was 77.
To honor her parents, their daughter Margaret arranged for a fund in The New York Community Trust.
Margaret, who was born in 1887, married the Rev. Reid Dickson in 1910, and they had two daughters. Her marriage to the Rev. Dickson, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in New Providence, New Jersey, ended in divorce.
In 1922, she wed George A. Jeffers, an immigrant from Northern Ireland who owned a linen and handkerchief manufacturing company in Westchester. George died of pneumonia in 1935 at their summer home in Connecticut.
Her third husband, Jesse Dudley Peterson, was a retired stockbroker and former governor of the New York Stock Exchange. They were married in October 1942, and he died in 1950 at their home in Manhattan. Margaret passed away August 4, 1960, at age 73.
The Nathaniel and Sarah Tooker Fund is for religious organizations (including churches, missions, and religious education) and for medical purposes (including hospitals, laboratories, education, and research).