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real estate speculation

Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World

In 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to make his fortune by selling ice to people in tropical climates.

Most people thought the 23-year-old was crazy, but Frederic Tudor knew something most people didn’t. His wealthy family had the luxury of an ice house, and he had experienced the joys of cold mixed drinks and ice cream in the summer. He figured he could get the rest of the world addicted to the stuff.

And so in 1806, he launched his business by sending to Martinique a brig full of ice cut from his family’s pond. He told his sales agent to give it away to bartenders.

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” Frederic Tudor wrote.

His first venture failed, and so did his second, third and fourth. In the end, Frederic Tudor made his millions and revolutionized the way the world ate and drank.

Frederic Tudor

He was born in to a Brahmin family on Sept. 4, 1783, the day after the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution. His father, William Tudor, had studied law in John Adams’ law office, become George Washington’s first judge advocate general and started a lucrative law practice in Boston.

William Tudor liked to live large and followed the new upper-class fashion of drinking alcoholic beverages with ice. His 23-year-old son Frederic seized on the idea of bringing the luxury of ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds to the tropical masses in the Caribbean.

In 1806, he sent his first shipment of ice to Martinique amid much derision. “No JOKE,” reported the Boston Gazette. “A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Ice turned out to be a harder sell than Frederic Tudor imagined. He was trying to sell it to people who had never once experienced anything cold. They didn’t have ice houses, and they didn’t know how to keep ice from melting. He and his partner – his brother William – lost money on the deal. William dropped out of the business, founded the North American Review and co-founded the Boston Athenaeum.

Failure

Frederic Tudor stubbornly persisted, sending another shipment of ice to Cuba. Again he lost money.

So did his father – in a real estate speculation gone disastrously wrong. Frederic Tudor kept shipping ice, losing money but learning ways to keep ice cold. Sawdust, for example, worked better than straw.

But then Frederic Tudor spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtors prison after his business partner swindled him.

He kept going. “Let those laugh who win,” he wrote.

He borrowed money, bought ice in Massachusetts and an icehouse in Cuba and set sail for the Caribbean. “Pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf,” he wrote. Finally, he made some money on his crystal blocks of Yankee coldness.

Smash

Frederic Tudor expanded his business to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, developing new sales techniques along the way.

He gave bartenders free ice for a year after teaching them how to keep it frozen in a ‘refrigerating jar’ and how to make cocktails like the Smash. He sold ice to Havana coffee shop owners and the keeper of the Tivoli Gardens after teaching them how to make ice cream.

During one mild winter, he faced an ice shortage. So he sent his ship’s captain to take a detour to Labrador and hack off part of an iceberg. Tudor also ventured to the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine to find enough ice to ship.

In 1825 came another big turning point: Frederic Tudor met Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel owner. Wyeth invented a horse-drawn ice plow that cut ice from ponds far more cheaply and efficiently than the laborious hand labor then used. Tudor hired Wyeth as his foreman and expanded his ice-cutting operation.

Harvesting ice

India

In 1833, Frederic Tudor gambled that a shipment of ice would survive the voyage to India. He was right. The arrival of the ice caused a sensation, especially among the colonial British administrators.

Henry David Thoreau heard about it. He watched as Tudor’s men divided Walden Pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into square, two-foot blocks. “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” wrote Thoreau.

The same year he sent ice to India, Frederic Tudor, 50, met 19-year-old Euphemia Fenno. They married the next year and had six children.

Ice King

Frederic Tudor finally achieved the success he craved, earning the nickname ‘Ice King.’ At one point he owned ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Ala., Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

But he had created a market for ice too big for one company to serve. By 1855, 12 companies shipped ice from the Boston area.

In the run-up to the Civil War, American ships carried more tonnage of ice than any other commodity except for cotton.

People had come to view ice as a necessity to preserve food and medicine. When the Civil War broke out, two-thirds of Boston and New York households received ice deliveries every day.

And in 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bartenders Guide, with recipes for America’s cocktails – most of which used ice.

Wenham Lake Ice

Between 1844 and the early 1850s, the remarkably pure ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts became a fashionable luxury among the British aristocracy. The best London hotels put up signs advertising Wenham ice. It was said you could read a newspaper through a block of Wenham Lake ice two feet thick.

Wenham Lake today

Wenham ice inspired the popularity of cocktails like sherry cobblers and mint juleps in London. No fancy dinner party was complete without it, and Queen Victoria insisted on it.

A competitor to Frederic Tudor, the Wenham Lake Ice Co., had promoted the stuff.

By 1850, Norway and Sweden began to export ice. One ice company bought Lake Oppegaard in Norway and rechristened it “Lake Wenham.”

Aftermath

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, his fortune said to amount to $200 million in today’s dollars. His estate in Nahant, Mass., became a country club. His great-granddaughter Tasha Tudor illustrated nearly 100 children’s books and received many honors for them.

The ice business thrived, with Massachusetts supplying ice around the world from ponds in Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Ayer, Stoneham, Wakefield, Woburn, Andover and Lynnfield.

By 1880, 22 icehouses stored 30,000 tons of ice next to Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain. In Vermont, 5,000 men cut ice on Lake Champlain.

But artificial refrigeration eventually overtook the need for natural ice. The commercial ice maker, invented in 1854, allowed people around the world to make their own ice for cocktails and ice cream.

How To Make a Smash

Dissolve sugar in water in a cocktail shaker; add mint and spirits. Shake well with ice and strain through a fine strainer into a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish.

Images: Wenham Lake By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029494. Ice harvesting: Cutting the cross sections with a saw–ice harvesting, Conneaut Lake, Pa. Pennsylvania Conneaut Lake, 1907. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018652316/. This story about Frederic Tudor was updated in 2022.

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Johnny Appleseed, The Real Reason He Wandered

Johnny Appleseed wasn’t quite a New England version of St. Francis, wandering the countryside in rags, scattering apple seeds and befriending woodland creatures.

Oh he did wear rags, he did love animals and he did bring apples to thousands of people. And he certainly roamed the newly settled frontier.

But he did it to make money selling apples for hard cider.

And Johnny Appleseed died a wealthy man.

John Chapman birthplace in Leominster, Mass.

Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Leominster, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1774. You can hardly miss him if you visit the city. His birthplace has a granite marker and a billboard, streets and schools bear his name and a wooden statue of him stands in City Hall.

He only lived in Leominster a few years, though. His mother died when he was very young, and his father moved to Longmeadow, Mass., and remarried. Along came 10 half-siblings, and Johnny and a half-brother left the crowded house around 1796.

At that time, New England farmers began to head west in great number, looking for better soil and bigger farms. Life on the frontier wasn’t easy, and often farmers only had hard cider to quench their thirst for an alcoholic beverage.

Photograph of John Chapman in the 1840s.

Johnny Appleseed saw his opportunity. He had a knack for predicting where the next wave of settlement would go, and he began to plant apple seeds in anticipation of the next settlers.

He didn’t scatter seeds for orchards, but planted nurseries — in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Johnny Appleseed eventually traveled as far as Ontario, Illinois and West Virginia.

Once he planted his nurseries, he built fences around them. Then he hired someone to take care of them and returned every year or two to check on his trees. The caretaker sold seeds and saplings.

He wandered because he had to to buy up inexpensive land before the next group of customers settled the frontier.

Apples

The apple industry created the myth that Johnny Appleseed brought a healthful, delicious fruit to pioneer farmers.

Johnny Appleseed

In truth, his apples had one purpose, and it wasn’t to make pies and crumbles. Farmers could only make hard cider from them.

Johnny Appleseed’s apples didn’t come from grafted trees, but from seedlings. Henry David Thoreau once wrote that apples from seeds were “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”

Eight years before he died, the financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his wealth. Nevertheless, Johnny Appleseed died a rich man, owning more than 1,200 acres of prime real estate.

Bit of a Loon

Parts of the Johnny Appleseed myth do have elements of truth to them, though. He did dress in rags, sometimes even in old coffee sacks with holes cut in them for his head and arms.

Stamp.

He did it because he followed the Swedenborgian religion, and believed that the more he suffered in this world the more happiness he would experience in the hereafter. According to his obituary, he ‘submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter.’

Johnny Appleseed often stopped in frontier cabins to spread ‘some fresh news from Heaven.’

According to Harper’s magazine, he once lingered to hear a longwinded preacher speak to a crowd of people from a stump he used as a lectern.

The preacher urged his listeners to give up extravagance.

“Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher asked

Exasperated, Johnny Appleseed put his bare foot on the stump and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!”

Folk Hero

Johnny Appleseed shared his trees with Native Americans during his travels, and converted some of them to his religion. They in turn taught him how to heal with herbs and plants, and even hostile tribes left him alone.

He had some other eccentric beliefs, which at least one biographer attributes to a kick on the head from a horse. For example, he thought it cruel to ride a horse or chop down a tree.

Gravesite of John Chapman.

He also liked to give ribbons to small girls and entertain small boys by walking on hot coals.

Eventually his travels brought him a reputation as a healer and a folk saint.

Johnny Appleseed died around 1845, though the exact date of his death is disputed. He left his valuable nurseries to his sister.

Today, an annual Johnny Appleseed Festival draws an average of 10,000 people – held in the fall, of course, around the time of the apple harvest.

Read more surprising apple history along with historic apple recipes in the New England Historical Society’s e-book, 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes. Available now for only $2.99 from Amazon.

With thanks to MassMoments. Image of Johnny Appleseed gravesite, By Rochelle Karp – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21439692; Apples by By Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA – Newtown pippins, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33880381. This story was updated in 2022.

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R. H. Macy Starts His Thanksgiving Parade in Massachusetts

R. H. Macy took a long and winding path to becoming the merchant prince of New York City. Early in his journey, he introduced the Macy’s Parade — in Massachusetts.

Macy had opened a dry goods store in Haverhill, but it didn’t succeed. He also opened stores in Boston and Marysville, Calif., but those failed too.

When he finally opened a fancy dry goods store on Sixth Avenue in New York, he had reached his 36th year. And he had learned from his mistakes.

Rowland Hussey Macy

R. H Macy

Rowland Hussey Macy was born in Nantucket on Aug. 30, 1822, the fourth of six children in a Quaker family. His father owned a small shop. At 15 he shipped out aboard the whale ship Emily Morgan and spent four years at sea. He returned with a red star tattooed on his forearm, to mark the star that once guided him safely through a thick fog into port.

He also came back with a $500 share of the catch – about $11,000 in today’s money. With that money he started a small thread-and-needle shop in Boston, but within two years he had to close it. Then he opened a dry goods store, which failed in 1845. On the last page of the account book he wrote,

I have worked Two Years for Nothing.

Damn,

Damn.

Damn.

Damn.

Haverhill

Macy’s in Haverhill

In 1843, R.H. Macy moved to Haverhill, Mass., and started another dry goods store. He chose as its trademark a rooster bearing the words, “While I live, I’ll crow.” That motto proved prescient, for his flair for promotion helped him found the world’s first department store.

But that was still years away. In Haverhill, he hoped the nearby mills would send him customers, but the store folded within a year.

In 1849, he decided to follow the California Gold Rush with his brother Charles. He sailed to California, leaving his wife and two small children behind. The Macys opened Macy & Co., in Marysville, Calif., to provision miners. The store failed after two months when the miners gave up looking for gold and moved on.

He returned to Haverhill in 1851 and opened still another dry goods store with still another brother, Robert. He called it “Haverhill Cheap Store,” eventually moving to 70 Merrimack Street.

The First Macy Day Parade

In 1854, the Macy brothers held a Fourth of July parade as a way for the city’s immigrant mill workers to celebrate America. The parade, led by a band, marched past the Cheap Store. The weather was hot, the road dusty and only about 100 spectators showed up. It was a far cry from today’s extravagant Thanksgiving Day parade.

After that store closed he opened another at 68-74 Merrimac St., which survived for three years. Macy advertised the store as the “greatest emporium east of Boston.” He also boasted that management visited Boston every week for new styles — and New York every 60 days.

He also tried his hand at real estate speculation in Wisconsin and made some money.

4 Rules for Success

The first Macy’s in New York

With his real estate profit and money from financial backers, he moved to New York City in 1858. He started a fancy dry goods store on Sixth Avenue with a red star as his trademark.

Macy had learned from his past mistakes and relied on four principles considered radical at the time:

Sell at fixed, marked prices.
Sell for less than other stores.
Buy and sell for cash.
Advertise vigorously.

On the day he opened his door, he sold $11.06 worth of dry goods. Thirteen months later, he had sold $90,000 worth of products and employed 15 people.

For the next two decades, R.H. Macy looked for new things to sell and new ideas to promote them despite his failing health. He adopted the store Santa Claus, themed exhibits and lit-up window displays to draw in customers. He offered a money-back guarantee and sold made-to-measure clothing for men and women. In 1874, Macy put up a window display that included dolls themed to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Macy wrote all of his own advertisements, spending 3 percent of his sales on advertising when his competitors spent 1 percent.

Macy’s flagship store.

His store grew into one of the world’s most successful department store chains, with a flagship building so large it could fit 10,000 average-size houses inside it.

R.H. Macy died while in Paris in 1877 while hunting for new items. Thirty-seven years after his death, Macy’s presented the second Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores by Robert Hendrickson. This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may want to read ‘When Downtown Department Stores Spelled Christmas’ here.

Image: Macy’s in Herald Square By Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA – HeraldSquare-Oct14-1, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74460073.

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Andrew Dexter Builds Boston’s First Skyscraper, Causes First Banking Collapse

In 1807, Andrew Dexter began building the tallest building in America, a temple of finance that soared an unheard-of seven stories — and caused the young republic’s first major bank collapse.

The Exchange Coffee House

The skyscraper was the Exchange Coffee House, a product of the commercial ambitions that seized the country. It also resulted from the unregulated banking system that allowed swindlers like Andrew Dexter to flourish and fail.

The Exchange Coffee House went up in smoke nine years after it opened. People could see the fire as far away as New Hampshire and Maine. But even before the flames started, the Exchange Coffee House had caused plenty of damage. It destroyed banks as far away as the Michigan Territory.

Dexter’s failure ‘was one of the most direful events in the economic history of New England,’ wrote historian Horace White in 1911.

Andrew Dexter, Jr.

Born on March 28, 1779, in Brookfield, Mass., Andrew Dexter was named after his father, a prosperous textile merchant. He grew up in Providence, graduated from Brown and moved to Boston to take up the law. Dexter then studied with his uncle, Samuel Dexter, later named the third U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1808, he married Charlotte Morton, the daughter of Perez Morton and niece of Fanny Apthorp, who committed suicide after giving birth to Perez Morton’s illegitimate child.

Andrew Dexter by Gilbert Stuart

Coffee, a luxury beverage at the time, marked the people who drank it as cosmopolitan, as elite. As Dexter began to amass wealth, an ambition seized him. He wanted to build an enormous exchange that would serve as Boston’s financial nerve center – and serve coffee.

Gospel of Ascent

Jane Kamensky, author of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, explained the expansionary zeitgeist that influenced Andrew Dexter

“The gospel of ascent seeped into every sphere of life in the early republic, from farm house to schoolhouse to courthouse to countinghouse to meetinghouse,” she wrote. “And wherever it touched, aspiration took shape. In the slaveholding south and the rural north and the ever-expanding backcountry, aspiration pushed relentlessly at the horizontal: a hunger for more acres, farther shores.

In Boston, aspiration was vertical, wrote Kamensky.

Speculators and Swindlers

Back in the early days of the Republic, banks issued notes that customers could exchange for gold or silver. People conducted business by exchanging the notes at a discount, which depended on the bank’s reputation and its distance from the people doing business. A bank note that could be exchanged in Boston, for example, was more valuable to Boston businessmen than a note that had to be exchanged in Providence.

Charlotte Morton Dexter by Gilbert Stuart

Some banks were established far from commercial centers because of the difficulty in exchanging notes for specie. Speculators and swindlers bought or established banks in far-away places so they could issue notes that would take a long time, if ever, to redeem.

The discount rate was set by traders doing business in the street. Dexter intended the Exchange Coffee House to be a place where they could trade bank notes indoors. It would also have a coffee room, reading rooms, conference rooms, a hotel, dining rooms and business offices.

A Marvel

The Exchange Coffee House took two years to build. As it rose from Salter’s Court, so did Dexter’s ambition. In the end he built a vast exchange floor, a 40-by-60-foot atrium framed by pillars on each floor that grew more ornate as they rose to the ceiling. A sumptuous Coffee Room was furnished with imported mahogany furniture, velvet draperies, china from Canton and silver from the Andes. Even the privy was a marvel: It was four stories high with windows on every floor.

The Rev. William Bentley

People came long distances to see the fantastic building. The Rev. William Bentley recorded in his diary on Nov. 14, 1808:

For the first time saw the Exchange but the naked front, without anything but its own surface on the line of the street, is not capable of affording a view but of a very large building.

Exposure and Flight

There were more tales than customers. Traders preferred to do business on the sidewalk, even when it rained. Then President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo slowed commerce in New England. Dexter could rent only a third of the offices. The bar stood empty, and the hotel barely had an occupant.

That wasn’t Andrew Dexter’s problem any more. To finance his dream, he had started or taken control of the Berkshire Bank in Pittsfield, Mass., the Farmers’ Exchange Bank in Gloucester, R.I., the Penobscot Bank of Bucksport, Maine, the Coos Bank of Haverhill, N.H., and the Detroit Bank, housed in the first brick building in Michigan. He issued hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank notes while building his ever-more-grandiose skyscraper.

Nathan Appleton and other Boston merchants grew suspicious of Dexter’s ‘country’ bank notes. In 1808, they took their story to the press. Shopkeepers began refusing banknotes from Dexter’s banks. Appleton and his friends sent agents to Dexter’s far-away banks to redeem the notes that Boston shopkeepers had accepted as currency. The banks couldn’t exchange the notes for gold or silver, and the extent of Dexter’s fraud began to be realized. Dexter could no longer pay his workmen, and hundreds, if not thousands of them were wiped out.

Avoiding Disgrace

When the Farmer’s Exchange collapsed, it turned out Dexter had issued $760,000 in bank notes. The bank had a total of $86 in gold and silver on hand.

Andrew and Charlotte Dexter slumped off to Nova Scotia in 1809 to avoid prosecution. During the War of 1812 they moved to Athens, N.Y., to take advantage of that state’s lenient bankruptcy rules. By 1817, Dexter’s father had died and Dexter used his inheritance to speculate in Alabama real estate. He founded Montgomery, moving his family there in 1819. Charlotte Dexter died shortly after they arrived. Andrew Dexter continued his real estate speculation in Texas and Mexico, but died broke on Nov. 2, 1837, in Mobile, Ala.

The Exchange Coffee House had long gone by then. New owners completed it, but it never achieved the success Dexter anticipated. It then changed hands several times until Nov. 3, 1819, when a fire totally destroyed it. The remains of America’s first skyscraper smoldered for months. Three years later, another, less grand coffee house exchange was built on the site.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Flashback Photo: P.T. Barnum Turns a Jail Sentence Into a PR Coup

P.T. Barnum was so good at promoting himself he turned a 60-day jail sentence into a publicity campaign that made him a statewide celebrity.

He actually didn’t get into the circus business until he was 61 years old. He pursued a number of business and political ventures before founding the Greatest Show on Earth, including real estate speculation and a term as mayor of Bridgeport, Conn.

Barnum was born July 5, 1810 in Bethel, Conn., to an innkeeper, storekeeper and tailor, Philo Barnum, and his second wife, Irene Taylor. His father died when he was 15, leaving him to settle his debts and care for four siblings under the age of seven. Barnum went to work as a store clerk, and in 1828 set up his own fruit and confectionary store with help from his grandfather. He was soon running a successful lottery business, speculating in real estate and auctioning books. In 1831 he started a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom.

It was the newspaper that landed him in jail. Barnum published an editorial accusing a prominent local church deacon, Seth Seelye, of charging exorbitant interest to an orphan. Seelye accused him of libel. The judge – a ‘lump of superstition,’ according to Barnum – sided with Seelye. Barnum was fined $100 and sentenced to 60 days in jail.

For Barnum, it was a great career move. Subscriptions increased to the Herald of Freedom. Though he had a comfortable cell, ate well and received visits from many friends, Barnum was viewed as a martyr. When he was released from jail, 40 horsemen and 60 carriages escorted him home as a band played during the entire three-mile parade.

Decades later, in a conversation with Ulysses S. Grant, Barnum speculated that the former U.S. president and Civil War hero was ‘the best known American living.’ Grant disagreed: “You beat me sky-high, for wherever I went, in China, Japan, the Indies, &c., the constant inquiry was, ‘Do you know Barnum?’ I think, Barnum, you are the best known man in the world.”

For 13 more things you may not have known about P.T. Barnum, click here.

With thanks to The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like it in the Universe by Phineas Taylor Barnum and Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum by Neil Harris. This story was updated in 2017.

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