A duke bought Kylemore Castle with an American heiress's family money, lost it to debts, and later went to prison

Mitchell Henry, a London surgeon, took over his family's Manchester cotton business after his father died in 1862. He bought about 14,000 acres at Kylemore in Connemara, much of it bog, and built Kylemore Castle from 1867. His wife Margaret died of a fever caught in Egypt on 4 December 1874, and he built a Gothic church in her memory. Reclaiming the bog and keeping two large houses drained his money. In 1903 he sold Kylemore to William Montagu, 9th Duke of Manchester. In 1900 the Duke had married Helena Zimmerman, daughter of Eugene Zimmerman, a Cincinnati railroad president and Standard Oil shareholder. Wikipedia says Zimmerman bought the castle for the couple; a New York Times headline of 1903 said the Duke paid $315,000. Zimmerman gave his daughter a fixed allowance and wrote his will so the Duke received nothing. He died in December 1914 leaving an estate of about $10 million in trust. The Duke's gambling debts forced the sale of Kylemore^†. Benedictine nuns who had fled Ypres during the war took possession in November 1920. The Duke divorced Helena in 1931 and remarried that December. In 1935 he was sentenced to nine months in Wormwood Scrubs for obtaining money from a pawnbroker by false pretences. The nuns ran a girls' boarding school at Kylemore until 2010. In 2026 the abbey is a Benedictine monastery held by The Kylemore Trust and one of Ireland's leading visitor attractions.