map of the new Republican-leaning election district in Essex County." After his move to Boston, Thorndike developed large tracts around today's Downtown Crossing neighborhood in Boston into an elite residential neighborhood. Thorndike was a strong opponent of the War of 1812. At a political gathering in the summer of 1812, he stated that he would willingly give all of his wealth to oppose the continuation of the war. Later, he was considered to have been among the men who may have contemplated secession from the Union as a last-ditch option, a charge which he later denied. Radical Federalists like John Lowell supported his selection as a delegate to the Hartford Convention, but he was not chosen. In 1813, fellow merchant Francis Cabot Lowell asked Thorndike to invest in his new Boston Manufacturing Company. Thorndike and his son, Israel, Jr., received a twenty percent ownership stake in the company, which became the first successful textile manufacturer in the country and which inaugurated the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Upon Lowell's death, Thorndike became president of the Boston Manufacturing Company, and served in that role from 1817 to 1831, overseeing the company's significant expansion. He also invested in numerous other industrial ventures, which made him the wealthiest man in New England, with a greater amount of capital invested in textile manufacturing than any other person in the United States. As a result, Thorndike is considered to have been the fiftieth wealthiest American of all time (adjusted for inflation). Thorndike used his immense wealth for philanthropic enterprises, such as to buy the map collection of German scholar Christoph Daniel Ebeling. He donated it to Harvard University, thereby founding the Harvard Map Collection, in 1818 after Ebeling's death. Thorndike also remained somewhat active in politics. In 1820, he was a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, where he supported property requirements for voting and opposed the popular election of the Governor's Council. In 1825, along with his neighbor, Daniel Webster, who owned the adjoining townhouse, he hosted a dinner in the honor of the Marquis de Lafayette on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Thorndike died at his home in Boston on May 9, 1832, with a fortune estimated between $1 and $1.8 million. Family Thorndike was married three times: first, to Mercy Trask, who died in 1784; second, to Anna Dodge, who died in 1817; and third to Sarah