The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials, made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. It was estimated that the 266 acres of land, constituting what was owned by individuals and private corporations in one section alone--the South Side,--were worth $319,000,000. This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as much more. The principal landowner in this one section, not to mention other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with $11,000,000 worth of land; the next was Leiter, who owned in that section land valued at $10,500,000.[169] It appeared from this report that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth--or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Field's real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiter's to nearly the same. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Field's executors reported to the court early in 1907. The executors of Field's will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago at $30,000,000. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere. FIELD'S MANY POSSESSIONS. Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The factors constituting this fortune are various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work. [Illustration: MARSHALL FIELD.]