For one hundred and forty-four years (or from 1796 to 1940) a certain drug store did business in the town of Beverly, Massachusetts, in the same location, for all but the first two years of this long span. To the writer's generation it was known as Baker's Drug Store, and it stood on the corner of Washington and Cabot streets. In 1796, when Robert Rantoul started his shop, there was no Washington Street and Cabot was called Country Lane. But the young man chose his business and its location well and when, an old man, he came to review his life for his grandchildren, he could point with pride to the success of this and his other ventures.

This is the tale of a nonentity and failure. Were it not for the fame of his brother, the great John, we should know nothing of Ebenezer Hancock. As it is, a handful of his papers have been handed down to us, mixed up with the letters of Brother John the statesman and Uncle Thomas the merchant prince. Because he played poor relation to these celebrities, we can follow the life of a mediocre man who would in the ordinary course of events have been utterly forgotten; what is perhaps more interesting, we can trace his ill-starred business doings, which were probably a great deal nearer to the norm than were memorably successful ventures.

The builders of the railroads in the 'thirties included not only inventors and engineers but also businessmen. It is the latter, usually neglected by historians, who solved business problems as significant as the problems of the engineers. At least, that was true of the roads in this study—the Boston & Lowell, the Boston & Worcester, the Eastern, and the Western. Although the formal structure of a business is not very important for small business firms, these four railroads represented at least two or three times the capitalization of the larger factories of that time. The early railroads, except for small branch lines like the Andover & Wilmington, were sufficiently large to demand careful business organizations if the enterprises were to be successful.

The inventor does the work and the promoter gets the money. That seems to sum up the popular view of the relation between promotion and technology in nineteenth-century America. Take the typewriter as an example. Thomas A. Edison declared in 1921: “Mr. Christopher L. Sholes was the father of the typewriter and got nothing but trouble and neglect in connection with the invention. He fell into the hands of promoters with the usual results.” Who were these promoters? Edison did not name names, but chief among them were in fact the following: James Densmore, George Washington Newton Yost, the firm of E. Remington & Sons, and finally the latter's selling agents—Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict—who in 1886 bought the Remingtons' typewriter property and organized the Remington Standard Typewriter Company, which was eventually succeeded by Remington Rand, Inc. Among all these, Densmore is the one whom Edison had particularly in mind, and the one whom many others have denounced. Indeed, according to one account, the only thing Densmore did for the typewriter was to give Sholes $6,000 for the invention and then turn it over to the Remingtons for a cool million!

Many will think it strange that the textile machinery industry should have been chosen to point up a discussion of innovation, especially technological innovation. No industry in America has been more consistently singled out as an example of technological backwardness. About a decade ago the Honorable Henry Wallace, while on a lecture tour of New England, voiced the opinion that the American textile machinery industry was a hundred years behind the times. That Mr. Wallace based his statement on information so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless is of little importance. What is important is that all with eyes to see are likely to agree with him. Anyone who is familiar with the modern spinning frame and who, on visiting the Smithsonian Institute, chances to see on display there the spinning frame built by Samuel Slater in 1790 is inevitably struck by the similarity between the two machines.

America's indebtedness to Europe in the nineteenth century as a source of industrial ideas and technique is well-known. Our purpose, however, is to show that the transfer of technological knowledge was by no means one way, from Europe to America. In fact at least one important exception exists in the rubber manufacturing industry, the foundations of which were laid in the first half of the nineteenth century. The origins of this industry in the United Kingdom and throughout the Continent of Europe, including European Russia, show a marked dependence of the Old World on the New, not only in terms of technique but in the establishment of American business houses in Europe.

For several reasons the aspect of management decisions that has interested most business historians has involved the innovating function. For one, the main responsibility for introducing innovations in a capitalist society, without which the economy would tend to stagnate, is undertaken by the business executives. Secondly, the fortunes of individual companies are closely related to the capacity of the managements to undertake and cany through changes. While it is true that a passive policy may be sufficient to establish a new firm or to maintain a going concern, the rewards in the form of prestige, income, size or position in the market, and the like, are more likely to go to those organizations whose managements take an active role, who pioneer changes or are quick to see the applications to their own organization of innovations developed outside.

This study is an exploration, on a limited scale, of the part played by businessmen in early railroad construction and operation. The business history of railroading is significant not only for that industry but also for the leadership that the railroads maintained among the large business units in the nineteenth century and the consequent influence on organization, management methods, and policies of big business. In this paper we are concerned only with a sample, the beginnings in the decades of the 'thirties and 'forties, in order (1) to see wherein our knowledge of early railroad history needs enlarging and (2) to demonstrate the type of information that can be gleaned from the manuscript minutes, reports, and correspondence of early railroads.

The W. L. Douglas Shoe Company, founded in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1876, achieved an outstanding success as the first shoemanufacturing company to establish its own chain of retail stores. After World War I, however, the company entered a long and dreary decline which resulted finally in its removal to another state and its eventual sale to another company. This recent merger, with Arthur Million, Inc., a subsidiary of the General Shoe Corporation, marks the end of W. L. Douglas as an independent company.

Business history reveals that business has been a major factor in the development of our present civilization. Business is the “core” of modern society. Consequently, business philosophy (an explanation of the phenomena of business) should logically be considered of extremecimportance in the realm of ideas and thoughts which shape and guide our civilization.

It is not often—perhaps fortunately—that Baker Library receives a collection totaling four tons. That was the approximate weight of material brought by moving van from Augusta, Maine, this past May. The four tons comprised the paper remains—apparently untouched since the early nineteen-hundreds—of the E. C. Allen mail-order and publishing house, which flourished in Augusta during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Of the four tons, approximately one and a half are represented by bound and unbound files of Home and Fireside, Sunshine, Golden Moments, and the dozen other farm and home magazines published by Allen and his associates. Another ton consists of the oleographs, or colored reproductions of oil paintings, distributed as premiums or as mail-order offerings. The remaining ton and a half is the measure of the business records, bound and unbound, with which we are here chiefly concerned. It is expected that the full story of the enterprise will be told later, possibly by someone working for a Ph.D. degree. But before describing the collection itself, and some of the incidents met in its arrangement, a brief account of E. C. Allen's activities will be helpful.

Throughout American history the frontier was plagued by a shortage of capital and credit. The small pioneer farmer who migrated westward to take up cheap or free land needed capital or credit to build his homestead, secure tools and supplies, and provide for the immediate needs of himself and his family until the farm became self-sustaining. Likewise, men who wished to engage in commercial and industrial enterprises on the frontier had to have adequate capital or credit facilities to establish their businesses and to continue operations until the regular marketing of their products made the project self-supporting. The characteristic frontiersman was optimistic about the future and desired to enlarge his capital investment by expanding his landholding or his business in the expectation that future prosperity would create a greater demand for his produce—he believed that the larger the scale of his operations the greater the profits he would reap. His investments and operations, therefore, tended to outrun his own capital, and he characteristically turned to others for help. Since all elements in a frontier society were handicapped by the insufficiency of capital, and its handmaiden, credit, only limited aid could be expected from the frontier community. Assistance from the more stabilized eastern regions was necessary if the pioneer effort was to expand and prosper.

The history of the Sante Fe Trail has been written and rewritten, replete with colorful episodes of wars and skirmishes, of Indian massacres and Spanish resistance, and of privations of hunger, thirst, and exposure. Regarded from the long-time point of view, these efforts have been far from satisfying. The more basic story of the rooting of capital and the building of towns, for which all these hazards appeared inviting and worth bearing, has received little attention.