Atkinson, Edward (10 February 1827–11 December 1905), businessman and reformer, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Amos Atkinson II, a merchant, and Anna Greenleaf Sawyer. He was educated in private schools in both Brookline and Boston, but the family’s financial distress prevented him from attending Harvard as planned and propelled him instead at age fifteen into the world of business. After rising to the accounting department of a Boston dry goods firm, Atkinson in 1851 was appointed treasurer and agent of the textile company Ogden Mills....
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Atkinson, Edward (1827-1905), businessman and reformer
Gregory Kaster
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Cone, Moses Herman (1857-1908), textile entrepreneur
Dale L. Flesher
Cone, Moses Herman (29 June 1857–08 December 1908), textile entrepreneur, was born in Jonesboro, Tennessee, the son of Herman Kahn, a Jewish wholesale grocery merchant, and Helen Guggenheimer. Cone’s father was born in Bavaria, and his mother, though born in Virginia, was of German heritage. When Cone’s father moved to the United States, the family name was changed to Cone. Cone was the eldest of thirteen children and spent his formative years in Jonesboro, where his father owned a grocery store. The family moved in 1870 to Baltimore, Maryland, where Cone attended the public schools....
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Hazard, Thomas Robinson (1797-1886), manufacturer and reformer
Gail Fowler Mohanty
Hazard, Thomas Robinson (03 January 1797–26 March 1886), manufacturer and reformer, was born in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the son of Rowland Hazard, a manufacturer and merchant, and Mary Peace. Hazard’s father established the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, the first water-powered wool-carding and fulling mill in South Kingstown, about 1802, on the site of an eighteenth-century fulling mill. By 1814 the company had expanded to include spinning and perhaps the earliest power loom-weaving in the state. After limited formal education at Westtown in Pennsylvania, and after training in mill management and operations at the growing enterprise, Hazard worked in the family’s woolen business between 1813 and 1842....
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Howland, William Dillwyn (1853-1897), textile manufacturer
Thomas A. McMullin
Howland, William Dillwyn (27 March 1853–23 April 1897), textile manufacturer, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the son of Matthew Howland, a whaling merchant, and Rachel Collins Smith. Howland was raised in one of New Bedford’s wealthiest and most prominent families. He graduated from Brown University with a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1874. After college Howland worked in his father’s whaling firm. In 1875 he married Caroline Thomas Child, with whom he had two children. Howland was hired in 1877 to work in the office at the Wamsutta Mills, the largest of a number of textile mills that transformed New Bedford in the late nineteenth century from a whaling port into one of the major cotton textile manufacturing centers of America....
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Johnson, George Francis (1857-1948), shoe manufacturer and philanthropist
Leonard F. Ralston
Johnson, George Francis (14 October 1857–28 November 1948), shoe manufacturer and philanthropist, was born in Milford, Massachusetts, the son of Francis A. Johnson, seaman and shoe worker, and Sarah Jane Aldrich. Johnson’s childhood was spent in a series of New England villages as his father moved about in search of better work. He left school at age thirteen to go to work in a boot factory....
