Heeney, Cornelius (1754–1848), businessman and philanthropist, was born in King's Co. (Offaly) to catholic parents. Virtually nothing is known of his early life except that a relative gave him a start in business in Dublin, so that when he followed his father to America in 1784 he had a mercantile education of sorts, though he was penniless. On the voyage his ship was struck by lightning when entering the Delaware River. Oystermen, acting as rescuers, charged a dollar for each passenger put ashore. A quaker gave Heeney the money, saying: ‘Whenever thou seest a fellow creature in want of a dollar as thou art now, give it to him, and thou wilt have repaid me’ (cited Meehan, 4). This made a great impression on the young man, who liked in his days of affluence to recount the story and offer it as the basis for his own philanthropy.
Though catholic, Heeney was much patronised by quakers – in Philadelphia a quaker named Mead gave him employment, and when, a few months later, he moved to New York, he was engaged as accountant and bookkeeper by another quaker, a shipping merchant named William Backhaus. A fellow employee was John Jacob Astor, founder of the family of multi-millionaires. When Backhaus retired (1797), he left his business to Heeney and Astor. They were mainly fur traders but their partnership was short-lived as Heeney left to open a store in the same line, at 82 Water St. A shrewd, cautious merchant, he soon built up a considerable fortune which he disbursed generously to the catholic church and to charities, since he was a bachelor whose personal expenses were small, though he loved to entertain. As trustee of St Peter's, the first catholic congregation in New York, he acted as treasurer to the congregation and in 1809 was a chief subscriber to the fund to build St Patrick's cathedral. In addition he built a parish school for girls, gave a lot to enlarge St Peter's graveyard, put aside $18,000 and a plot of ground to build an orphan asylum in Prince St., and made other gifts of money and property to St Peter's and St Patrick's that amounted to about $60,000. As a leading New York catholic who helped establish a catholic printing press and the first catholic paper, Truth Teller, in April 1825, he was named guardian to the young John McCloskey (1819–85) who became the first American cardinal.
In 1806 he presented a petition to the New York state assembly, demanding that an anti-catholic oath of office be wiped from the statute books so that his friend Francis Cooper could take his seat. Heeney then followed Cooper into the assembly, serving five terms as a Democrat from 1818 to 1822. His most notable action as assemblyman was joining forces with Thomas Addis Emmet (qv) and other exiles of the 1798 rebellion to block the election of Rufus King to the United States senate. As ambassador to London, King had attempted to prevent Emmet and other imprisoned United Irishmen from emigrating to the US.
A fire in New York's First Ward in December 1835 destroyed 648 stores, including Heeney's. He did not rebuild it but retired on his still considerable fortune to a farm in Brooklyn Heights, which became known as a Mecca for those in need. Widows and orphans were the special objects of his charity. In Brooklyn he gave land to build St Paul's church and for the adjoining girls’ orphan asylum and industrial school. In 1845, deciding to be his own executor, he established the Brooklyn Benevolent Society to distribute relief to catholic poor. The Irish famine was then under way, and at the inaugural meeting of the Society Heeney explained that ‘his idea of the charity was mainly that his catholic fellow countrymen and their families should be relieved from want, many of them on arrival here being in absolute need of assistance’ (Meehan, 14). He transferred all of his property to the society by deed; over the ensuing decades the income from rents and investments averaged $15,000 to $25,000 a year. In 1918 it was estimated that over a million dollars had been distributed, the orphan asylum being the chief beneficiary. In the twentieth century the society was geared towards education – in 1992 it funded the Cornelius Heeney Memorial Scholarship for Brooklyn freshmen in financial straits.
Shrewd in business, Heeney was playful and childlike in private, rejoicing in playing practical jokes on his many guests. About 5 ft 9 in. (1.75 m) in height, clean-shaven with a receding hairline and an aquiline nose, he had an idiosyncratic dress sense: ‘The tout ensemble of his makeup at once suggested the quaker, whom he seemed to imitate . . . His hair, when long, was confined behind his neck by a slight ribbon and fell over his coat collar, and to a stranger he would pass as an orthodox quaker, even to the broad brimmed hat and the William Penn knee breeches’ (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 Sept. 1891). He died 3 May 1848 in Brooklyn and was buried in a vault he had reserved for himself beside St Paul's, the church built on his land.