Captains of Industry

J >> James Parton >> Captains of Industry

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It was Frederick Tudor also who originated and developed the best
methods of cutting, packing, storing, and discharging ice, so as to
reduce the waste to the minimum. I am assured by a gentleman engaged in
the business that the blocks of ice now reach Calcutta, after the long
voyage from Boston, with a waste scarcely noticeable. The vessels are
loaded during the cold snaps of January, when water will freeze in the
hold of a vessel, and when the entire ship is penetrated with the
intensest cold. The glittering blocks of ice, two feet thick, at a
temperature below zero, are brought in by railroad from the lakes, and
are placed on board the ships with a rapidity which must be seen to be
appreciated. The blocks are packed in sawdust, which is used very much
as mortar is used in a stone wall. Between the topmost layer of ice and
the deck there is sometimes a layer of closely packed hay, and sometimes
one of barrels of apples. It has occasionally happened that the profit
upon the apples has paid the freight upon the ice, which usually amounts
to about ten thousand dollars, or five dollars a ton.

The arrival of an ice ship at Calcutta is an exhilarating scene. Clouds
of dusky natives come on board to buy the apples, which are in great
request, and bring from ten to thirty cents each, according to the
supply. Happy is the native who has capital enough to buy a whole barrel
of the fruit. Off he trudges with it on his back to the place of sale,
or else puts it on a little cart and peddles the apples about the
streets. In a day or two that portion of the cargo has disappeared, and
then the ice is to be unloaded. It was long before a native could be
induced to handle the crystal blocks. Tradition reports that they ran
away affrighted, thinking the ice was something bewitched and fraught
with danger. But now they come on board in a long line, and each of them
takes a huge block of ice upon his head and conveys it to the adjacent
ice-house, moving with such rapidity that the blocks are exposed to the
air only a few seconds. Once deposited there, the waste almost ceases
again, and the ice which cost in Boston four dollars a ton is worth
fifty dollars.

When Frederick Tudor had been employed twenty-five years in this trade,
finding it inconvenient to be separated from the great body of
merchants, he embarked again in general mercantile business, by way of
re-uniting himself to his former associates. The experiment resulted in
ruinous losses. In less than three years he was a bankrupt, and owed his
creditors two hundred and ten thousand dollars more than he could pay.
The ice business being still profitable and growing, it was proposed to
him that he should conduct it as the agent of his creditors, retaining a
specified sum per annum for his personal expenses. To this he objected,
and said to them:--

"Allow me to proceed, and I will work for you better than I can under
any restriction. Give me the largest liberty, and I will pay the whole
in time with interest."

He was then fifty-two years of age, and he had undertaken to pay an
indebtedness, the mere interest of which was about ten thousand dollars
a year. By the time he had got fairly at work the treachery of an agent
whom he had raised from poverty to wealth lost him his Havana monopoly,
his principal source of profit. Then it became necessary to buy land
bordering the lakes from which he gathered ice, and to erect in
Calcutta, New Orleans, and elsewhere expensive and peculiarly
constructed buildings for storage. Occasionally, too, he experienced the
losses and adverse incidents from which no business is exempt.
Nevertheless, in fourteen years from the date of his bankruptcy he had
paid his debts, principal and interest, amounting to two hundred and
eighty thousand dollars, besides having acquired a large quantity of
real estate, some of which had increased in value tenfold. Thus, while
paying his debts, and in the very process of paying, and while thinking
only of his creditors' interest, he had gained for himself a very large
fortune. He continued an ice merchant for more than fifty years; or, as
he said himself:--

"I began this trade in the youthful hopes attendant on the age of
twenty-two. I have followed it until I have a head with scarcely a hair
that is not white."

It was this enterprising merchant who may be said to have created the
beautiful seaside retreat near Boston called Nahant, where he invented
many ingenious expedients for protecting trees and shrubs from the east
winds which lacerate that rock-bound coast. His gardens and plantations
in Nahant were famous many years before his death. He died in 1864, aged
eighty-one, leaving to his children and to his native State a name which
was honorable when he inherited it, and the lustre of which his life
increased.

[Illustration:

Yours
Myron Holley]

MYRON HOLLEY,

MARKET-GARDENER.

Fifty years ago, this man used to sell vegetables and fruit from door to
door in the streets of Rochester, N. Y. He had a small farm a few miles
out of town, upon which he raised the produce which he thus disposed of.
An anecdote is related of a fine lady who had recently come to Rochester
as the wife of one of its most distinguished clergymen. She ran up into
her husband's study one morning, and said to him:--

"Why, Doctor, I've just seen the only gentleman I have yet met with in
Rochester, and he was at our basement door selling vegetables. How
wonderful! Who is it? Who can it be?"

"It must be Myron Holley," said her husband.

Another of his lady customers used to say that he sold early peas and
potatoes in the morning with as much grace as he lectured before the
Lyceum in the evening. Nor was it the ladies alone who admired him. The
principal newspaper of the city, in recording his death in 1841, spoke
of him as "an eminent citizen, an accomplished scholar, and noble man,
who carried with him to the grave the love of all who knew him."

In reflecting upon the character of this truly remarkable person, I am
reminded of a Newfoundland dog that I once had the honor of knowing near
the spot on the shore of Lake Ontario where Myron Holley hoed his
cabbages and picked his strawberries. It was the largest and most
beautiful dog I have ever seen, of a fine shade of yellow in color, and
of proportions so extraordinary that few persons could pass him without
stopping to admire. He had the strength and calm courage of a lion, with
the playfulness of a kitten, and an intelligence that seemed sometimes
quite human. One thing this dog lacked. He was so destitute of the evil
spirit that he would not defend himself against the attacks of other
dogs. He seemed to have forgotten how to bite. He has been known to let
a smaller dog draw blood from him without making the least attempt to
use his own teeth in retaliation. He appeared to have lost the instinct
of self-assertion, and walked abroad protected solely, but sufficiently,
by his vast size and imposing appearance.

Myron Holley, I say, reminds me of this superb and noble creature. He
was a man of the finest proportions both of body and of mind, beautiful
in face, majestic in stature, fearless, gifted with various talents, an
orator, a natural leader of men. With all this, he was destitute of the
personal ambition which lifts the strong man into publicity, and gives
him commonplace success. If he had been only half as good as he was, he
might have been ten times as famous.

He was born at Salisbury, Conn., in 1779, the son of a farmer who had
several sons that became notable men. The father, too, illustrated some
of the best traits of human nature, being one of the men who make the
strength of a country without asking much from the country in return. He
used to say to his sons that the height of human felicity was "to be
able to converse with the wise, to instruct the ignorant, to pity and
despise the intriguing villain, and to assist the unfortunate." His son
Myron enjoyed this felicity all the days of his life.

After graduating at Williams, and studying law at New Haven, he set his
face toward western New York, then more remote from New England than
Oregon now is. He made an exquisite choice of a place of residence, the
village of Canandaigua, then only a hamlet of log huts along the border
of one of the lakes for which that part of the State is famous. The
first step taken by the young lawyer after his arrival fixed his
destiny. He was assigned by the court to defend a man charged with
murder--a capital chance for winning distinction in a frontier town.
Myron Holley, however, instead of confining himself to his brief and his
precedents, began by visiting the jail and interviewing the prisoner. He
became satisfied of his guilt. The next morning he came into court,
resigned the case, and never after made any attempt to practice his
profession.

He was, in fact, constitutionally disqualified for the practice of such
a calling. Having a little property, he bought out a bookseller of the
village, laid out a garden, married, was soon elected county clerk, and
spent the rest of his life in doing the kind of public service which
yields the maximum of good to the country with the minimum of gain to
the individual doing it.

The war of 1812 filled all that region with distress and want. It was he
who took the lead in organizing relief, and appealed to the city of New
York for aid with great success. As soon as the war was over, the old
scheme of connecting Lake Erie with the Hudson by a canal was revived.
It was an immense undertaking for that day, and a great majority of the
prudent farmers of the State opposed the enterprise as something beyond
their strength. It was Myron Holley who went to the legislature year
after year, and argued it through. His winning demeanor, his persuasive
eloquence, his intimate knowledge of the facts involved, his entire
conviction of the wisdom of the scheme, his tact, good temper, and,
above all, his untiring persistence, prevailed at length, and the canal
was begun.

He was appointed one of the commissioners to superintend the
construction of the canal at a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a
year. The commissioners appointed him their treasurer, which threw upon
him for eight years an inconceivable amount of labor, much of which had
to be done in situations which were extremely unhealthy. At one time, in
1820, he had a thousand laborers on his hands sick with malaria. He was
a ministering angel to them, friend, physician, and sometimes nurse. He
was obliged on several occasions to raise money for the State on his
personal credit, and frequently he had to expend money in circumstances
which made it impossible for him to secure the legal evidence of his
having done so.

In 1825 the work was done. A procession of boats floated from Lake Erie
to New York Harbor, where they were received by a vast fleet of
steamboats and other vessels, all dressed with flags and crowded with
people. In the midst of this triumph, Myron Holley, who had managed the
expenditures with the most scrupulous economy, was unable to furnish the
requisite vouchers for a small part of the money which had passed
through his hands. He at once gave up his small estate, and appealed to
the legislature for relief. He was completely vindicated; his estate was
restored to him; but he received no compensation either for his services
or his losses.

He returned to his garden, however, a happy man, and during the greater
part of the rest of his life he earned a modest subsistence by the
beautiful industry which has since given celebrity and wealth to all
that fertile region. He remained, however, to the end of his days, one
of those brave and unselfish public servants who take the laboring oar
in reforms which are very difficult or very odious. After the abduction
of Morgan, he devoted some years to anti-masonry, and he founded what
was called the Liberty Party, which supported Mr. Birney, of Kentucky,
for the presidency.

One of his fellow-workers, the Hon. Elizur Wright, of Boston, has
recently published an interesting memoir of him, which reveals to us a
cast of character beautiful and rare in men; a character in which the
moral qualities ruled with an easy and absolute sway, and from which the
baser traits appeared to be eliminated. He was like that great,
splendid, yellow king of dogs which escaped perfection by not having
just a spice of evil in his composition.

Let me add, however, that he was as far as possible from being a
"spoony." Mr. Wright says:--

"He had the strength of a giant, and did not abstain from using it in a
combative sense on a fit occasion. When his eldest daughter was living
in a house not far from his own, with her first child in her arms, he
became aware that she was in danger from a stout, unprincipled tramp who
had called on her as a beggar and found her alone. Hastening to the
house, without saying a word he grasped the fellow around body and both
arms, and carried him, bellowing for mercy, through the yard and into
the middle of the street, where he set him down. Greatly relieved, the
miserable wretch ran as if he had escaped from a lion."

Mr. Wright adds another trait: "Once in Lyons (N. Y.) when there was
great excitement about the 'sin of dancing,' the ministers all preaching
and praying against it, Myron Holley quietly said: 'It is as natural for
young people to like to dance as for the apple trees to blossom in the
spring.'"

THE FOUNDERS OF LOWELL.

We do not often hear of strikes at Lowell. Some men tell us it is
because there are not as many foreigners there as at certain
manufacturing centres where strikes are frequent. This cannot be the
explanation; for out of a population of seventy-one thousand, there are
more than twenty thousand foreign-born inhabitants of Lowell, of whom
more than ten thousand are natives of Ireland. To answer the question
correctly, we must perhaps go back to the founding of the town in 1821,
when there were not more than a dozen houses on the site.

At that time the great water-power of the Merrimac River was scarcely
used, and there was not one cotton manufactory upon its banks. At an
earlier day this river and its tributaries swarmed with beaver and other
fur-yielding creatures, which furnished a considerable part of the first
capital of the Pilgrim Fathers. The Indians trapped the beaver, and
carried the skins to Plymouth and Boston; and this is perhaps the reason
why the Merrimac and most of its branches retain their Indian names
Merrimac itself is an Indian word meaning sturgeon, and of its ten
tributaries all but two appear to have Indian names: Contoocook,
Soucook, Suncook, Piscatagoug, Souhegan, Nashua, Concord, Spiggot,
Shawshine, and Powow.

Besides these there are the two rivers which unite to form it, the names
of which are still more peculiar: Pemigewasset and Winnepiseogee. The
most remarkable thing with regard to these names is, that the people who
live near see nothing remarkable in them, and pronounce them as
naturally as New Yorkers do Bronx and Croton. It is difficult for us to
imagine a lover singing, or saying, "Meet me by the Pemigewasset, love,"
or asking her to take a row with him on the lovely Winnepiseogee. But
lovers do such things up there; and beautiful rivers they are, flowing
between mountains, and breaking occasionally into falls and rapids. The
Merrimac, also, loses its serenity every few miles, and changes from a
tranquil river into a--water-power.

In November, 1821, a light snow already covering the ground, six
strangers stood on the banks of the Merrimac upon the site of the
present city of Lowell. A canal had been dug around the falls for
purposes of navigation, and these gentlemen were there with a view to
the purchase of the dam and canal, and erecting upon the site a cotton
mill. Their names were Patrick T. Jackson, Kirk Boott, Warren Dutton,
Paul Moody, John W. Boott, and Nathan Appleton; all men of capital or
skill, and since well known as the founders of a great national
industry. They walked about the country, observed the capabilities of
the river, and made up their minds that that was the place for their new
enterprise.

"Some of us," said one of the projectors, "may live to see this place
contain twenty thousand inhabitants."

The enterprise was soon begun. In 1826 the town was incorporated and
named. It is always difficult to name a new place or a new baby. Mr.
Nathan Appleton met one of the other proprietors, who told him that the
legislature was ready to incorporate the town, and it only remained for
them to fill the blank left in the act for the name.

"The question," said he, "is narrowed down to two, Lowell or Derby."

"Then," said Mr. Appleton, "Lowell, by all means."

It was so named from Mr. Francis C. Lowell, who originated the idea. He
had visited England and Scotland in 1811, and while there had observed
and studied the manufacture of cotton fabrics, which in a few years had
come to be one of the most important industries of the British Empire.
The war of 1812 intervened; but before the return of peace Mr. Lowell
took measures for starting the business in New England. A company was
formed with a capital of four hundred thousand dollars, and Mr. Lowell
himself undertook the construction of the power loom, which was still
guarded in Europe as a precious secret. After having obtained all
possible information about it, he shut himself up in a Boston store with
a man to turn his crank, and experimented for months till he had
conquered the difficulties. In the fall of 1814 the machine was ready
for inspection.

"I well recollect," says Mr. Appleton, "the state of admiration and
satisfaction with which we sat by the hour watching the beautiful
movement of this new and wonderful machine, destined as it evidently was
to change the character of all textile industry."

In a few months the first manufactory was established in Waltham, with
the most wonderful success. Henry Clay visited it, and gave a glowing
account of it in one of his speeches, using its success as an argument
against free trade. It is difficult to see what protection the new
manufacture required. The company sold its cotton cloth at thirty cents
a yard, and they afterwards found that they could sell it without loss
at less than seven cents. The success of the Waltham establishment led
to the founding of Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, and Manchester. There are
now at Lowell eighty mills and factories, in which are employed sixteen
thousand men and women, who produce more than three million yards of
fabric every week. The city has a solid inviting appearance, and there
are in the outskirts many beautiful and commanding sites for residences,
which are occupied by men of wealth.

But now as to the question above proposed. Why are the operatives at
Lowell less discontented than elsewhere? It is in part because the able
men who founded the place bestowed some thought upon the welfare of the
human beings whom they were about to summon to the spot. They did not,
it is true, bestow thought enough; but they _thought_ of it, and they
made some provision for proper and pleasant life in their proposed town.
Mr. Appleton, who many years ago took the trouble to record these
circumstances, mentions that the probable effect of this new kind of
industry upon the character of the people was most attentively
considered by the founders. In Europe, as most of them had personally
seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen
or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They
caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the
charge of women known to be competent and respectable. Land was assigned
and money subscribed for schools, for churches, for a hospital.
Systematic care was taken to keep away immoral persons, and rules were
established, some of which carried the supervision of morals and manners
perhaps too far. The consequence was that the daughters of farmers,
young women well educated and well-bred, came from all quarters, and
found the factory life something more than endurable.

But for one thing they would have found it salutary and agreeable. The
plague of factory life is the extreme monotony of the employment, and
this is aggravated in some mills by high temperature and imperfect
ventilation. At that time the laws of health were so little understood
that few persons saw any hardship in young girls standing on their feet
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours a day! It was
considered a triumph when the working-day was reduced to thirteen hours.
Thirty years ago, after prodigious agitation, the day was fixed at
eleven hours. That was too much. It has now been reduced to ten hours;
but it is yet to be shown that a woman of average strength and stamina
can work in a cotton mill ten hours a day for years at a stretch,
without deteriorating in body, in mind, or in character.

During the first years the girls would come from the country, work in
the mill a few months, or two or three years, and then return to their
country homes. Thus the injury was less ruinous than it might have been.
The high character of the Lowell operatives was much spoken of in the
early day. Some of the boarding-houses contained pianos upon which the
boarders played in the evening, and there was a magazine called the
"Lowell Offering," to which they contributed all the articles. These
things seemed so astonishing that Charles Dickens, when he was first in
the United States, in 1842, visited Lowell to behold the marvels for
himself. How changed the world in forty years! Few persons now living
can remember even the cars of forty years ago, when there were but a few
hundred miles of railroad in the United States.

The train which conveyed the great novelist from Boston to Lowell
consisted of three cars, a gentlemen's car in which smoking was allowed,
a ladies' car in which no one smoked, and "a negro car," which the
author describes as a "great, blundering, clumsy chest, such as Gulliver
put to sea in from the kingdom of Brobdingnag." Where is now the negro
car? It is gone to rejoin its elder brother, the negro pew. The white
people's cars he describes as "large, shabby omnibuses," with a red-hot
stove in the middle, and the air insufferably close.

He happened to arrive at his first factory in Lowell just as the dinner
hour was over, and the girls were trooping up the stairs as he himself
ascended. How strange his comments now appear to us! If we read them by
the light of to-day, we find them patronizing and snobbish; but at that
day they were far in advance of the feelings and opinions of the
comfortable class. He observed that the girls were all well-dressed,
extremely clean, with serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls,
and their feet well protected both against wet and cold. He felt it
necessary, as he was writing for English readers, to _apologize_ for
their pleasant appearance.

"To my thinking," he remarks, "they were not dressed above their
condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of
their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with
such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means."

He alluded to the "Lowell Offering," a monthly magazine, "written,
edited, and published," as its cover informed the public, "by female
operatives employed in the mills." Mr. Dickens praised this magazine in
an extremely ingenious manner. He could not claim that the literature of
the work was of a very high order, because that would not have been
true. He said:--

"Its merits will compare advantageously with a great many English
Annuals."

That is really an exquisite touch of satire. He went on to say:--

"Many of its tales inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and
teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence. A strong feeling for the
beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left
at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air.... It
has very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or
fine life."

I am so happy as to possess a number of the "Lowell Offering," for
August, 1844. It begins with a pretty little story called "A Flower
Dream," which confirms Mr. Dickens's remarks. There are two or three
amiable pieces of poetry, a very moral article upon "Napoleon at St.
Helena," one upon the tyranny of fashion, in which young ladies are
advised to "lay aside all glittering ornaments, all expensive
trappings," and to present instead the charms of a cultivated mind and
good disposition. There is one article in the number which Mr. Dickens
would have enjoyed for its own sake. It is "A Letter from Susan;" Susan
being a "mill girl," as she honestly calls herself. She describes the
life of the girls in the mill and in the boarding-house. She gives an
excellent character both to her companions and to the overseers, one of
whom had lately given her a bouquet from his own garden; and the mills
themselves, she remarks, were surrounded with green lawns kept fresh all
the summer by irrigation, with beds of flowers to relieve their
monotony.

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