Who was Ogden Livingston Mills?

Ogden L. Mills was President Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury from Feb. 12, 1932 to March 3, 1933. His grandfather was the Mills of The National Gold Bank of D. O. Mills, Sacramento, Calif., charter 2014. This lineage represents quite a numismatic connection. One thread that ran through the grandfather (Darius Ogden Mills), father (Ogden Mills) and son (Ogden Livingston Mills) was Nevada’s Virginia & Truckee Railroad, the only rail link between Nevada’s fabulous Comstock silver mining district and the Central Pacific Railroad. This story is worth a look. Much of what follows is distilled from Wikipedia and Drew (2014).

Darius Ogden Mills (Sep 25, 1825 - Jan 3, 1910) was born in North Salem, N.Y. At age 15, shortly after his father’s death in 1841, he began working as a clerk in a small general store in New York City. He moved to Buffalo, N.Y., when he was 21, sponsored by the son of his aunt to serve as the cashier of the Merchants’ Bank of Erie County, in