Elisha Peck (1789-1851) was a Massachusetts-born merchant who formed a partnership with Anson Green Phelps. He ran the British side of their business from Liverpool for about thirteen years. The partnership ended in 1834 after an accident at their New York warehouse claimed the lives of seven people. Their assets were divided and Peck took ownership of the metal manufacturing plants at Haverstraw, New York. Phelps continued with the mercantile business that he had developed with Peck, forming a new company called Phelps Dodge.
Anson Green Phelps was an American entrepreneur and business man from Connecticut. Beginning with a saddlery business, he founded Phelps, Dodge & Co. in 1833 as an export-import business with his sons-in-law William E. Dodge and Daniel James based as partners in Liverpool, England. His third son-in-law, James Boulter Stokes, became a partner some years later.
Haverstraw is a town in Rockland County, New York, United States, located north of the Town of Clarkstown and the Town of Ramapo; east of Orange County, New York; south of the Town of Stony Point; and west of the Hudson River. The town runs from the west to the east border of the county in its northern part. The population was 36,634 at the 2010 census. The name comes from the Dutch word Haverstroo meaning "oats straw", referring to the grasslands along the river. The town contains three villages, one of which is also known as Haverstraw. Haverstraw village is the original seat of government for the town, hosting the area's historic central downtown business district and the densest population in northern Rockland County.
Phelps Dodge Corporation was an American mining company founded in 1834 as an import-export firm by Anson Greene Phelps and his two sons-in-law William Earle Dodge, Sr. and Daniel James. The latter two ran Phelp, James & Co., the part of the organization based in Liverpool, England. The import-export firm at first exported United States cotton from the Deep South to England, and imported various metals to the US needed for industrialization. With the expansion of the western frontier in North America, the corporation acquired mines and mining companies, including the Copper Queen Mine in Arizona and the Dawson, New Mexico coal mines. It operated its own mines and acquired railroads to carry its products. By the late 19th century, it was known as a mining company.
Peck was born in Lenox, Massachusetts; his parents were Lucretia Pattison and Elisha Peck, whose ancestors had landed in America from Essex, England, in about 1635.[1] Peck left Lenox at an early age and moved to Berlin, Connecticut, becoming involved in business with his uncle, Shubael Pattison, a tinsmith and trader. He also married Pattison's daughter, Chloe, in about 1814.[2]
Lenox is a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. Set in Western Massachusetts, it is part of the Pittsfield Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 5,025 at the 2010 census. Lenox is the site of Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Lenox includes the villages of New Lenox and Lenoxdale, and is a tourist destination during the summer.
Essex is a county in the south-east of England, north-east of London. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and London to the south-west. The county town is Chelmsford, the only city in the county. For government statistical purposes Essex is placed in the East of England region.
Berlin is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 19,866 at the 2010 census. It was incorporated in 1785. The geographic center of Connecticut is located in the town. Berlin is residential and industrial, and is served by the Amtrak station of the same name. Berlin also has two hamlets: Kensington and East Berlin.
Shubael Pattison[Note 1] was the son of Edward Patterson, a tinsmith of Scots/Irish Presbyterian descent, credited with bringing the manufacture of tinware to America.[3] Before this time tinware utensils were normally imported from Britain. In addition to making and selling tinware, Shubael Pattison also ran a general store in Berlin and dealt in furs.[4][5]
Partnership with Anson G Phelps
Notice of formation of businessAdvertisement for Phelps & Peck; NY Evening Post 1821
Anson Green Phelps was born in 1781 and served an apprenticeship in the saddler's trade in Hartford, Connecticut. He found a market for his leather goods in South Carolina and expanded his business by shipping cotton from there to New York. The cotton was then sold to England and in return Phelps imported manufactured goods for sale in America. He also started to run a small shipping company and moved his business from Hartford to New York, where he formed a partnership in 1821 with Peck. In America the partnership was called Phelps & Peck, located at 179/181 Front Street, and in Britain it was called Peck & Phelps, operating from Liverpool. The company imported metals but also diversified, selling such things as furs, feathers, and tobacco. They distributed goods along the Atlantic seaboard using their coasters, and peddlers took their wares to sell at inland settlements. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the rapidly expanding West also provided an unlimited market for their manufactured goods. Between 1821 and 1824 their annual average profit was approaching forty thousand dollars.[6]
Hartford is the capital city of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. The city is nicknamed the "Insurance Capital of the World", as it hosts many insurance company headquarters and is the region's major industry. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford area of Connecticut. Census estimates since the 2010 United States Census have indicated that Hartford is the fourth-largest city in Connecticut, behind the coastal cities of Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford.
South Carolina is a state in the Southeastern United States and the easternmost of the Deep South. It is bordered to the north by North Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the southwest by Georgia across the Savannah River.
The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and in the U.S. state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Partnership of Phelps & Peck dissolved 1834
Peck moved to Liverpool, England, with his wife and children in about 1821. At this time, 80% of all cotton exported from America to Britain came into the country via Liverpool, from where it was transported to mills in Manchester and beyond via the canal system. Coastal shipping also delivered manufactured metals to Liverpool, such as tin-plate from Wales, for export to America. By 1830 Peck was almost certainly the largest exporter of tin-plate from Britain, shipping about 51,000 boxes in that year.[Note 2][7]
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England, with a population of 545,500 as of 2017. It lies within the United Kingdom's second-most populous built-up area, with a population of 3.2 million. It is fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and an arc of towns with which it forms a continuous conurbation. The local authority is Manchester City Council.
Return to America
Anson G. Phelps's daughter, Elizabeth, married Daniel James in 1830 and he was invited by his father-in-law to join the Phelps, Peck company. James was from a farming background and had moved to New York to start business in wholesale groceries, so his knowledge of the metal trades was limited. He and Elizabeth were sent to Liverpool to work for Elisha Phelps, arriving in June 1831 with their new baby. In September of that year Peck left Liverpool with his family on the ship Sampson and returned to America leaving his assistant, Thomas Morris Banks, and the inexperienced Daniel James in charge of the business. James would eventually take over the Liverpool operation, remaining in Britain until his death in 1876. Thomas Banks was his chief clerk and became a partner in about 1838.[8][9]
Daniel James (1801–1876) was one of the three founder partners of Phelps, Dodge & Co., a New York trading organisation established in 1833/4, exporting cotton to England and importing manufactured goods in return such as tin, tin plate, iron and copper. James was born in America but was to live in Liverpool for 47 years running the British side of the business called Phelps, James & Co. The company was to dominate the export market of tinplate from the United Kingdom for three-quarters of a century at a time when Wales was the centre of world production.
Sampsondale
Anson G. Phelps had purchased land at Haverstraw, Rockland County, New York, adjacent to the Minisceongo Creek and Hudson River, with the intention of starting an iron works. Peck obtained the machinery for the rolling mill in Britain and employed Welsh engineer, Rhys Davies, to install and commission the equipment.[Note 3][10] The mill opened in about 1833 and Peck named the works Sampsondale in reference to the ship that brought him and his family back to America in 1831. In addition to the rolling mill, other production on the site included the manufacture of screws, wire and chemicals such as sulphuric acid.[11] The New York office for the company was 21 Cliff Street.[12]
Break-up of the partnership
Phelps and Peck opened a new warehouse on the corner of Cliff and Fulton streets, New York, in about 1828. It was a large structure of six stories, with 100 feet frontage in Cliff Street, 75 feet in Fulton. On May 4, 1832 there was a catastrophic structural failure and the building partly collapsed, killing seven employees. Phelps and Peck continued in business together for a short time afterwards, but the formal partnership officially ended in 1834. Phelps restarted with two of his sons-in-law: William E. Dodge in America and Daniel James in Liverpool. The two new businesses were named Phelps Dodge in America and Phelps James in Britain.
The assets of the old business were split and Peck received $175,000 in cash and the iron works at Sampsondale. He operated this with his eldest son Shubael Peck and called his new company E. Peck & Son. Phelps and Peck remained joint owners in some aspects of their old business including the shipping and property interests.[13]
Tragically the 22 year old Shubael was killed in 1837 when a steam boiler on a pleasure craft he had designed exploded. A companion, Henry Beecher, was also killed and Shubael's cousin, John J. Peck, was seriously injured, but survived.[Note 4][14] The rolling mill closed some years later due to economic conditions, but was reopened in 1860 under the management of Elisha's son John Peck.[15]
Other interests
Elisha Peck had business interests in railroads including the Somerville & Easton and Elizabeth & Easton Railroads (which became the Central Railroad of New Jersey), the Providence Railroad and the Hudson River Railroad. He also became involved in steam boat connections between Haverstraw and New York.
His brothers, Elijah and Jebez Peck, were owners of mills in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and they operated under the name of J. & E. Peck Manufacturing. Another brother, Oliver, was involved with Lenox Iron Works and later produced window glass with his partner and brother-in-law William Augustus Phelps.[16] Elisha Peck's nephews, John J. Peck and Henry M. Peck, became residents of Haverstraw and they were both involved with the production of bricks.[Note 5]
Elisha Peck died in 1851; his wife, Chloe, died in 1844.[17] They had five children: Shubael, Harriet and John who were all born in Berlin, Connecticut, plus Edward and Mary Ann who were both born in England.
Peck built himself a prestigious mansion in Haverstraw in 1833. It remained in the family until 1959 when it was demolished and the site is now a shopping plaza.[18]
Legacy
Peck's association with Anson G. Phelps laid the foundation for the creation of Phelps, Dodge & Co., a business that became the dominant importers of metals into America, and the dominant exporters of tin-plate from Britain for half a century. The company eventually became one of the largest copper mining and copper producing concerns in the world.[19]
Notes
↑ Spellings of the name vary, often seen as "Patterson".
↑ A basic box of tin-plate contained 112 sheets, each measuring 14 inches X 20 inches. During much of the 19th century, Wales was the centre of world production for tin-plate.
↑ Henry Beecher was the manager of the Sampsondale chemical works
↑ Haverstraw was renowned for the manufacture of bricks, with the industry employing thousands of people in the area. It became known as "brick making capitol of the World". Henry M. Peck was the son of Jebez Peck and John J. Peck was the son of John Peck, both brothers of Elisha.
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↑ "E Pattison - Tinsmith". Ulster American Folk Park. National Museum of Northern Island. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
↑ DeVoe, Shirley Spaulding (1968). The Tinsmiths of Connecticut. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. pp.Chapter 1.
↑ North, Catharine Melinda; Benson (Adolph Burnett), Adolph B (1916). History of Berlin, Connecticut. New Haven: Tuttle. p.73. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
↑ Cleland, Robert Glass (1952). A History of Phelps Dodge. New York: Alfred A Knofp. p.12.
↑ Brooke, Edward Henry (1944). Chronology of the Tin Plate Works of Great Britain. Cardiff: William Lewis. pp.Introduction.
↑ Lowitt, Richard (1954). A Merchant Prince of the 19th Century. New York: Columbia University Press. p.61.
↑ Madison, Nathan Vernon (2015). Tredegar Iron Works:: Richmond’s Foundry on the James. Arcadia Publishing. pp.Chapter: Tredegar Iron Works, Established 1837.
↑ "The North River Times, Number 31,". HRVH Historical Newspapers. Hudson River Valley Heritage service administered by the Southeastern New York Library Resources Council. March 20, 1835. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
↑ Lowitt, Richard (1954). A Merchant Prince of the 19th Century. New York: Columbia University Press. p.19.
↑ "Serious Accident". New York Courier & New York Enquirer. May 27, 1837.
↑ "Phelps, Dodge & Co. records". THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ARCHIVES & MANUSCRIPTS. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
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