Henry Lane Eno

Who was Henry Lane Eno?

Henry Lane Eno was born in New York City on July 8, 1871; he died at Montacute House, Somerset, on September 28, 1928. A member of the Eno real estate and banking family, he was the son of Henry Clay Eno and his wife Cornelia, the daughter of George W. Lane of New York.

Eno, a member of the circle of Mary Seney Sheldon, built the Fifth Avenue Building on the site of his grandfather's Fifth Avenue Hotel facing Madison Square; an unpaid researcher at Princeton University with the courtesy title of "Professor", he was better known as a psychologist, author and poet.

Having graduated from Yale College in 1894, and gaining an L.L.B. from Columbia, in 1898 he married his first wife Edith Marie Labouisse. On the death of his father in 1914, Enos inherited a fortune estimated at over $15,000,000; this was considerably increased when in 1919, he successfully contested the $10 million will of his unmarried uncle, Amos F. Eno, a son of the builder and owner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, for decades New York's grandest and most fashionable, the engine of the Eno fortune, originally founded in textile merchandising; Amos Eno was a founder of the Second National Bank of New York. The nephew claimed he needed the money for the education of his children, Amos and Alice.