In 1935, A Secretary Bought Three Shares Of Her Company's Stock For $180. Seventy-Five Years Later, Her Alma Mater Got A VERY Happy Surprise

Grace Groner did not look like a millionaire, nor did she live like one. For most of her life, no one around her knew she was quietly sitting on a stock portfolio worth millions of dollars.

She lived in a tiny, one-bedroom cottage in Lake Forest, Illinois, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. Surrounded by sprawling estates and country-club money, Grace bought her clothes at rummage sales, walked instead of buying a car, and furnished her home with mismatched dishes and an old television.

When she passed away in January 2010 at the age of 100, her attorney contacted the president of her alma mater, Lake Forest College. While the school knew Grace intended to leave something behind, the actual figure stunned the campus: Grace Groner had left the college approximately $7 million.

The entire fortune traced back to a single decision she made 75 years earlier.

In 1935, while working as a secretary at Abbott Laboratories, Grace bought three shares of specially issued company stock for $60 per share. Her total investment was $180. Adjusted for inflation, that was roughly $5,900 today. Not pocket change for a young woman during the Great Depression, but certainly not the kind of seed money anyone expected to become a multi-million-dollar fortune.

Grace's financial superpower wasn't spotting an obscure start-up. It was behavioral discipline. She bought, and she never sold.

Grace's 75-Year Strategy:

1. Buy quality assets
2. Reinvest all dividends
3. Ignore market volatility
4. Let time do the heavy lifting

Over the next seven and a half decades, Abbott stock split repeatedly, and Grace reinvested every dividend. She ignored market crashes, World War II, recessions, inflation, bull markets, bear markets, and every temptation to cash out. By the time of her death, those three original shares had multiplied into more than 100,000 shares worth about $7 million.

From a conventional financial-planning standpoint, keeping nearly all of her wealth tied up in a single company was incredibly risky. For every Abbott success story, there are cautionary tales involving employees of companies like Enron, Lehman Brothers, or Bear Stearns. Grace got lucky with the company she chose, but she also possessed the rare temperament required to let that luck compound uninterrupted for 75 years.

To put it in perspective: if Grace had invested that same $180 into the broader S&P 500 in 1935, her account would be worth around $27,360 today. An excellent return, but a far cry from millions.

gragrA Life Built On Grace, Not Greed

Grace Elizabeth Groner was born in 1909 in rural Illinois. She had a twin sister named Gladys. When the girls were 12, both of their parents had died.

Grace and Gladys were taken in by the Anderson family, prominent Lake Forest residents who had been friends with their parents. The Andersons raised the twins, treated them as family, and paid for them to attend boarding school and Lake Forest College.

Grace graduated from Lake Forest College in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression. That era bred a deep financial caution in her, but it never mutated into greed. She simply did not need much.

After college, Grace took a job as a secretary at Abbott Laboratories, where she remained for 43 years. She never married and never had children. She lived for many years in an apartment before a friend left her the small cottage in Lake Forest.

Her home was modest even by ordinary standards, and almost absurdly modest by Lake Forest standards. Her single bedroom could barely fit a twin bed and dresser. The house sat in a part of town once associated with servants' quarters. Grace could have afforded a much larger home, but she chose not to buy one.

She also did not own a car. According to the foundation later established in her name, after her car was stolen, Grace simply decided to walk rather than replace it. Even in old age, she could be seen tending her garden with a walker.

But Grace was not a miser. She traveled extensively in retirement. She volunteered for decades at First Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest and also volunteered as a secretary at Barat College. She quietly gave anonymous financial help to neighbors in need, often funneling money through her longtime attorney and friend William Marlatt.

Marlatt later explained that Grace could have lived in any house in Lake Forest, but chose not to. Her friends, he said, liked her for who she was, not for what she had.

Money was simply never the organizing principle of her life.

The Gift To Lake Forest College

Grace never forgot the education she had received thanks to the Anderson family. Lake Forest College remained one of the central institutions in her life. She attended football games and cultural events on campus and gave $180,000 during her lifetime to create a scholarship program.

But she wanted to do more.

Two years before her death, Grace established the Grace Elizabeth Groner Foundation, a 501(c)(3), to receive her estate. Her instructions were clear: the money was to support qualified, service-oriented Lake Forest College students.

When she died on January 19, 2010, her fortune stunned the school. Her estate, built from that $180 Abbott stock purchase, was worth approximately $7 million. The foundation was expected to generate more than $300,000 per year for student opportunities.

This was not merely a traditional scholarship fund. Grace wanted students to have real-world service-learning experiences, including internships, international study, community service projects, and other opportunities that could shape their lives beyond the classroom.

She also left her cottage to the foundation. The home became known as "Grace's Cottage" and is used to house female Lake Forest College seniors connected to the foundation's programs. In a fitting twist, the tiny home that once concealed a fortune became a living piece of the legacy she left behind.

What Her Shares Would Be Worth Today

The magic of Grace's story did not stop in 2010. Had her estate's original holding of roughly 128,000 Abbott shares remained completely untouched, the portfolio would have undergone a major transformation.

In January 2013, Abbott spun off its research-based pharmaceutical division into a new public company: AbbVie. Abbott shareholders received one AbbVie share for every Abbott share they owned.

So Grace's foundation would not just own Abbott today. It would own Abbott and AbbVie.

Portfolio Value Breakdown

• Abbott Laboratories: At a current price of roughly $91 per share, her original 128,000 shares would be worth about $11.7 million.
• AbbVie: The matching 128,000 shares of AbbVie would be worth roughly $29.2 million.
• Combined Value: The original $180 investment would now be a combined portfolio worth about $40.9 million.

The Annual Dividend Engine

Had the shares remained untouched, the dividend generation alone would have become a perpetual charity engine. Based on current annual dividend rates:

• Abbott Dividends: Roughly $324,000 annually.
• AbbVie Dividends: Roughly $889,000 annually.
• Total Annual Income: More than $1.2 million per year flowing to student opportunities.

Abbott Laboratories today is a healthcare giant with more than $44 billion in annual revenue and a market capitalization around $150 billion. Grace bought into the company when it was a very different enterprise, then allowed that one decision to ride for the rest of her life.

Her story is not a template most people could or should copy exactly. A financial advisor would almost certainly warn against keeping an entire fortune in one stock. But as a human story, it is hard to beat: an orphaned girl received the gift of an education, lived humbly for a century, quietly became a millionaire, and then used her fortune to give other students life-changing opportunities.

Grace's $180 decision did not merely become a $7 million gift. Had the shares remained untouched, that same decision would now represent a roughly $41 million portfolio throwing off more than $1 million a year.

Not bad for three shares purchased by a secretary in 1935.