In connection with some research on the beginnings of German business history the author of this paper has drawn attention to what is probably the earliest firm history ever written. This history of an iron works, entitled Geschichte und Feyer des Ersten Jahrhunderts des Eisenwerks Lauchhammer, was compiled by the Works' general manager, Johann Friedrich Trautscholdt, and privately printed in Dresden in 1825. Of the literally thousands of firm histories which have been issued in Europe and America since that time, only a few can bear comparison with this very first one, a truly remarkable performance. It is typically what the Germans call a Festschrift, i.e., a publication to celebrate an anniversary. This article, based thereon, will show what a mine of information that early firm history is; but hard work was necessary to bring the gold to the surface.

In the years after the Civil War, American industrial development was rapid. Mushrooming factory towns became, with the exploitation of timber and mineral resources, a characteristic feature even in frontier areas. The Saginaw Valley of Michigan mirrors this phenomenon. A lumberman's frontier, it grew to be a major center of lumber production for the nation.

An essential factor in this industrial expansion was the growth of the labor force. In 1850 a single mill of the Valley employed 12 or 14 men; by 1885 it required the services of 75 to 150 men and in some cases of 200. In 1885 over 4,000 men were employed in the mills of the Valley. Such growth of the industry and of the labor force introduced serious problems of labor relations.

This article is concerned with a description and analysis of labor relations in the sawmills of the Saginaw Valley from 1865 to 1885. Labor relations rest to a great extent upon attitudes; the attitudes of the employer, of the employee, and in some cases of the rest of the community. Presumably these attitudes have a basis in the conditions under which the industry is operated and under which the labor force works and lives.

Only once in a generation, because of fortuitous circumstances, the stress of the period or the brilliance of a personality, a man lives a life of unusual service to his profession and to the commonweal. To the distinguished company of accounting immortals, William Plender is rightfully admitted because he, more than any other English practitioner, achieved in his lifetime wide recognition as a skillful interpreter of financial data as well as a faithful servant of the Crown.

Plender's life has much to recommend it for study by the rising generation not only in Great Britain but in other parts of the world where accountancy has achieved the status of an honored profession. It is for this reason, alone, that the present memoir is written: to re-count the rise of one accountant in professional and public circles because of the quality of his mind and the force of his personality, to say, this was accomplished by one man; it can be done by others if they but dedicate themselves to the pursuit of the professional ideal wherever it may be found, in England, in America, everywhere.

Historians have properly considered the period of sectional strife to be a germinal source of major determinative forces in American history. Yet, preoccupation with the Civil War and Reconstruction, their causes and consequences, has so dominated the interests of historians of the South that they may well have neglected or misunderstood many of the basic economic developments of the region.

Let us be more skeptical of the plausible and widely held assumptions that the war was responsible for the economic institutions of the New South or that radical Reconstruction can be held accountable for many of the major economic problems of the post-Reconstruction era. The primary purpose of this article is to treat in summary fashion the broad developments in one southern industry, developments which in themselves suggest that the time has arrived to study southern economic development for its own sake.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the financial milieu of the United States was enlivened by the appearance of farm mortgage companies whose agents scoured the northeastern states, proclaiming the discovery of an investors' mother Iode, the western farm mortgage. To the experienced investor the farm mortgage was no innovation of course, but the mortgage companies were to bring the mortgage market to a new peak of organization and their investors ultimately to a state of frustration compounded. This paper deals with the history of one western mortgage company.

The earliest printers in Europe faced financial, storage, and marketing problems not unlike those of new industries today: how to attract operating capital for production and for carrying inventories, where to store a slow-moving and bulky stock, and how to overcome the prejudice against a new product, in order to create an extensive market. These were the three major difficulties that the first printers in Italy as well as elsewhere had to surmount.

In the Benedictine monastery, at Subiaco, south of Rome, in 1465, two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, had set up a printing press, which two years later they moved to Rome. Other Germans introduced printing into Milan and Venice in 1469 and the following year into Foligno and Trevi. By 1472, Venice had over a half dozen competing printing offices established by German and by French printers. About fifteen other Italian cities had at least one printing office.

If one remembers Count Detlev von Einsiedel's character and achievements, as described in the first installment of this article, one will not be surprised that under his leadership a spirit of scientific enlightenment, of restless improvement, and of innovation came to permeate the Lauchhammer Works so that it became one of the leading German iron works. To be sure, genuine primary innovation was rare, as it is by necessity. Only in the case of casting figures and in that of enameling iron utensils was something brought into existence in the Lauchhammer plants that had never existed before. But on top of that, there were numerous derivative innovations, i.e., innovations as far as that particular part of Germany was concerned. Or to put it differently, the elder Count Einsiedel transferred to Saxony achievements made in the most advanced areas of eighteenth-century iron industry. It is from this point of view that the following presentation must be read, a presentation in which the Count's primary innovations, previously described, are not mentioned again.

Where did the owners of early Illinois industries get the capital and the funds to start their factories? What was the background of these early manufacturers? The evidence that will be presented here suggests that the typical Illinois manufacturer of the nineteenth century was a self-financed man who was born and raised in Europe or on the eastern seaboard.

Let us begin with the basic thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, Wisconsin and Harvard historian of the last generation, who reinterpreted the history of this country. Turner's thesis, enunciated at the Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893, was that society was reborn on every new frontier. Its character was influenced not only by heredity but even more by its new environment. Thus the American economy reflected not only European, especially Anglo-Saxon customs and institutions brought across the Atlantic, but it also reflected the pioneer's adaptation to primitive frontier conditions. By the second, third, and fourth generation, Americans had forgotten or abandoned certain European ways because these were not adapted to survival in the New World.

A good deal has been written about general commerce between Britain and China in the mid-nineteenth century. But little is available to illuminate the problems of trading as they confronted particular persons or commercial Houses. The surviving records of Rathbone, Worthington and Co. make possible a study of the question: what sort of calculation did rational men attempt in order to turn to profit these new and inchoate markets?

Businessmen are accustomed to thinking of the capital they use as of two types: short-term and long-term. Short-term capital is the capital which is used typically to finance seasonal peaks in business activity, such as the rush at Christmastime; it is borrowed from commercial banks and must be repaid in a short time, usually less than a year. Long-term capital may be either equity capital, invested by the owners of the business, or borrowed capital, on loan to the owners for a number of years. Long-term capital is usually obtained by businessmen through investment bankers. There are many exceptions to these generalizations, and the exceptions have been increasing in number in recent years, but historically and in theory these general statements may be treated as working definitions.

A recent survey by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce reported that so-called “fringe benefits” are now taking 16.4 per cent of the payrolls of American industry as a whole. Probably the best-known of these welfare programs is the United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund, which was started in May, 1946, by agreement between the union and the Department of the Interior, then operating the mines, and which was accepted by the operators when the industry returned to private hands. The Fund is financed by a royalty on every ton of coal produced. The royalty was originally 5 cents a ton, but it has risen every year until it is now 50 cents a ton. The revenues of the Fund up to June 30, 1952, were $476,000,000; its expenditures in the same period were $387,000,000. These disbursements went to finance several different types of benefits—pensions for retired miners, hospital and medical care, rehabilitation of the disabled, maintenance of men who were permanently and totally disabled, and death benefits and maintenance aid for miners' families. The Fund is administered by three trustees: one named by the United Mine Workers, one by the operators, and one designated jointly.

The profits of and the amount of capital sunk in the Lauchhammer Iron Works are not revealed in the Festschrift, the history of that firm which has served as the main source of this article. (The omission is hardly surprising, since this company was owned by noblemen, one of whom was the most powerful official in the Kingdom of Saxony, and since its history was written by the general manager of the Works and was published in 1825.) But profits must have been considerable. Otherwise the Works' continuous improvement and expansion, described earlier in this article, would have been impossible. In 1818, the Lauchhammer Iron Works was even able to lend to the Gröditz plant the funds it needed to expand into an integrated iron enterprise. Whether the Works had any bank connection prior to 1825 is not known; none is mentioned in the history, but that fact is not conclusive. Cash holdings were probably rather large; this, however, was not the case in 1776 (see the inventory on page 233). It seems certain that both expansion and improvement in the eras of both Einsiedels were financed by ploughing back profits.

In many small New England towns during the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth, all the business activities, centered usually about the general store, would be carried on by members of one family. Such a situation may be studied by means of a collection, comprising the records of the W. G. Sargent Co., of Sargentville, Maine, recently received by the Manuscript Division, Baker Library. The village of Sargentville, a part of the town of Sedgwick, is on the coast, east of Bucksport, and separated by a channel (now spanned by a bridge) from Deer Isle. Once there was a flourishing wharf (now demolished), where bait, fish, lime, ice, and granite were shipped up and down the coast, in return for products handled by the country stores in the vicinity. The Sargents, who seem to have given their name to the community about 1879, were at the center of this activity, building ships, arranging for their loads, and distributing the return goods, either as wholesalers or through stores they controlled.

Twenty-one years ago Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, acquired the early records of Pierson & Company, dealers in iron and makers of nails and screws, at Ramapo, New York. But only now has the organization and listing of these materials, dated from 1795 to 1865, been completed.

The Piersons began making cut nails in New York City in 1787 or 1788. In 1795 Josiah G. Pierson obtained a patent on a nail-making machine which is reported to have been the first such device “that produced satisfactory results and was generally used.” That same year Pierson established a plant at Ramapo, a village in Rockland County, New York, not far from the New Jersey line. The plant included a rolling and slitting mill; raw materials were received through Haverstraw, and finished goods were shipped by the same route to New York City, where an office and store were maintained at 107 Broad Street. Josiah Pierson died in 1798, and shortly Jeremiah H. and Isaac P. Pierson were carrying on the business under the firm name of Josiah G. Pierson & Brothers.

The dedication of the Ford Motor Company Archives on May 7, 1953, marks a milestone in research in the history of business in the United States. As far as the Editor of the Bulletin knows, this is the first time a large American corporation has established a separate organization not only to preserve and handle its historical records but also to make them available to scholars for research. To one whose memory goes back to the days when it was nearly impossible to gain access even to old records of business concerns, this event has a very special significance.

Access by scholars to company records is, of course, not uncommon today Several companies have deposited their historical records in public depositories, a notable example being the records of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad in the Newberry Library in Chicago. Others have admitted scholars to their offices for research in their records. The Ford Motor Company has gone still further in that it has established a central depository, with a trained archival staff, which is open to accredited scholars.