Henry Gratton Springs was a prominent trader, real estate investor, and banker in Charlotte, North Carolina. His middle name was sometimes spelled Grattan. His parents were Adam Alexander Springs and Margaret "Peggy" McLean (Hawkins), who resided on their own terms in an area that was originally part of Lincoln County, North Carolina, and later part of Gaston County.

H. G. Springs's obituary said that he habitually (and cheerfully) refused to reveal his age. According to most documents he was born sometime in the mid 1820s, which marks him as his mother's youngest son (though not necessarily her youngest child). One outlier was the 1900 Charlotte census, which proclaimed him to be 84 and listed his occupation as "Capitalist." Elder capitalist though he may have been by 1900, there is no way H. G. Springs was born in January 1816 as stated there. He was not yet of "a lawful age" when his relatives filed a guardianship paper for him early in the 1840s, prior to his coming into his estate from his late father Adam A. Springs.

As a young man, Henry Gratton Springs worked for stage lines that operated in Raleigh, Hillsborough, Greensboro, and Charlotte. By the early 1850s he had settled in Charlotte. Over the next decades he made a great deal of money from investments, primarily in real property. Much of his income derived from rent. He also served as vice president of the Merchants and Farmers National Bank, in which he was a shareholder. Despite acquiring a vast amount of real estate, H. G. Springs boarded most of his adult life at the Central Hotel, known at one time as Mansion House. He was living at the Central at the time of his death in 1902.

Although he had left a detailed will, the full distribution of Henry Gratton Springs's wealth proved problematic. A fraction of his estate was accidentally left unprovided for when one of the named heirs died. A call went out for kin of the late H. G. Springs to come forward to claim their share of this portion.

During the lengthy search for H. G. Springs's relations, the probate court established that his mother had been the only parent of interest for inheritance purposes. The sum in question wound up divided among known descendants of Henry Gratton Springs's maternal siblings, that is, descendants of other children of his mother Margaret. The older of these children had been born with the surname Hawkins, which was the married name of Margaret McLean. The younger children, born in the years after William Hawkins deserted his wife Margaret McLean Hawkins, were all given the surname Springs. The court did not distinguish between family 1 (Hawkins) and family 2 (Springs) when assigning inherited amounts from the intestate portion. (However, various illegitimate children of two daughters of H. G. Springs's mother -- that is, nieces and nephews themselves born out of wedlock -- were deemed ineligible to inherit.)

One part of the actual will caused a stir because the amount was large and the legatee had not expected it. Henry Gratton Springs left $10,000 to a certain "son of my nephew." No close relatives of this young man shared in H. G. Springs's largesse. The bequest implicitly acknowledged as H. G. Springs's brother one Adam Alexander "Alex" Springs (1811-1855) of Charlotte, who was grandfather of the heir. This late brother Alex Springs had had a brother and sister in Alabama, mentioned in 1850s documents, who (like Alex) were paternal siblings to H. G. Springs. All three Springs children in this set were born earlier than the six Springs children of H. G. Springs's mother as listed in his probate papers. Their mutual father was known by many to be Adam Alexander Springs (1776-1840).

The first Springs siblings' numerous descendants -- some of whom lived in Charlotte and would have been well aware of the proceedings -- did not have legal claim to the intestate portion of the estate of H. G. Springs, son of their own ancestor Adam Springs (1776-1840). This branch of the family goes basically unmentioned in the probate documents. Only the one grandson of Alex Springs (1811-1855) received money ($10,000) from the estate, and only because it was willed to him.

As to the $10,000, the newspapers had a field day with the surprise legacy. They attributed its inspiration to a gift of fancy slippers, which had been shipped from the Philippines by the young soldier H. Holland Springs -- on a whim -- to his great uncle the dignified Charlotte businessman.