Artist: Robert Wadsworth Grafton (1876–1936)
Frederick Henry Prince
PRINCE, FREDERICK HENRY (1858–1953), inducted between 1920–1934
The son of Boston Mayor Frederick O. Prince, Frederick H. Prince became one of America’s most successful capitalists, with deep connections to the Union Stock Yards. He invested in the Chicago Junction Railway—the connecting line that tied all stockyard rail companies together—and, eventually, he had controlling interest in dozens of other, smaller rail companies. He purchased small industry businesses and merged them into Union Stock Yards. Prince purchased land around the stockyards, as well as rail hubs in Chicago, establishing the first industrial park in the world: the Central Manufacturing District. Eventually, he repeated that industrial real estate model in other cities. Foreseeing the stock market crash of 1929, Fred Prince protected his investments and looked for bargains, including gaining control of Armour and Company in the early 1930s.
As chairman of Union Stock Yards, he financed the construction of buildings lost in the 1934 fire, commissioning artist Robert Grafton to repaint the lost Saddle & Sirloin portraits and building Chicago’s famed International Amphitheater. Since his surviving son had no interest in his business interests, Prince adopted his third cousin, William H. Wood, then an adult, as his heir. Frederick Wood and his wife established the Prince Charitable Trusts in 1947, a philanthropic foundation with giving programs in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Rhode Island. His sarcophagus is entombed in the nation’s capital, in Washington National Cathedral’s south crypt aisle.
Source: Saddle & Sirloin Guidebook 2026, p. 161