The Higgins family rose from the mercantile and manufacturing class of nineteenth-century New York, transforming craftsmanship in textiles into one of the era’s great industrial fortunes. Originating in New England and settling in Manhattan by the early 1800s, the family established E. S. Higgins & Co., a firm that became synonymous with luxury carpeting and with the refinement of American domestic interiors after the Civil War. The patriarch, Nathaniel Dyer Higgins (1823–1882), combined Yankee practicality with cosmopolitan taste, importing English weaving technology and adapting it for a new national market. His success placed the family among the city’s leading industrial dynasties, on a level with the Lorillards, the Roosevelts, and the Astors in social visibility if not in landed wealth. The Higginses maintained residences in both Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights and were active in Episcopal and civic institutions, including St. Ann’s Church and the Brooklyn Orphan Asylum.

Through Nathaniel’s daughter Nathalie Higgins (1846–1901), who married the French-born Jules Reynal Roche Fermoy de Saint-Michel (1838–1894), the Higgins fortune and lineage entered the Reynal and later Thébaud and Alexandre families, linking industrial wealth with the social and cultural prominence of the Gilded Age. Their descendants would carry this legacy into the twentieth century, blending American enterprise with continental sophistication and leaving an enduring imprint on New York’s artistic and philanthropic life.