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Rochester's Flour-Milling Industry in Pre-Canal Days

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Edmond M. Beame
Edmond M. Beame
Affiliation:
Graduate Fellow in History at University of Illinois
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Abstract

The early development of Rochester as a flour-milling center demonstrates several themes. Here, as in countless other places, the resiliency of the petty capitalist in the face of natural disasters and violent commodity price swings stands clear. But the early millers, flexible and energetic in entrepreneurial activity, were also, like their product, perishable. The broader and more important pattern is that of the persistence of an industry favored by basic geographic and market circumstances. Individual milk succumbed in rapid sequence, but rapidly they were replaced. Surviving the handicap of limited capital, the milling industry burst its heal bonds and exploited the regional potentialities of water access to Canada. Transition to what then amounted to a national market came in 1823, when the Erie Canal linked Rochester with the Hudson. Thus a new epoch was forecast, when a broadened market would not only stimulate local growth but shape it through complex economic influences hitherto little felt by the millers on the Genesee.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Summer 1957 , pp. 209 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1957

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References

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25 Ontario Repository and Western Advertiser, Feb. 7, 1815.

26 Merchant milling was distinguished from custom milling as a more com plex form of economic activity. The merchant miller actually purchased the grain of the farmer, ground it, and then had to undergo the vicissitudes of marketing the flour himself. In custom work the farmer, rather than the miller, retained ownership of the product throughout the whole process; the miller merely performed the service of grinding the grain. During the first half of the nineteenth century there was not always a clear-cut distinction between the custom and the merchant miller, since even the larger merchant mills in those days reserved a set of stones or two for custom work. Merchant milling also went under the names of “flouring” and “manufacturing” flour.

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53 Hamlet Scrantom to his father, Jan. 24, 1819, “Scrantom Letters,” p. 192.

54 Rochester Directory (1827), p. 93; Rochester Telegraph, Feb. 22 and June 27, 1820.

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57 Hamlet Scrantom to his father [July 8, 1820], “Scrantom Letters,” p. 194.

58 In a letter to Nathaniel Rochester at a later date Hervey Ely made clear the extent of those losses: “We commenced our business here with a Cash Capital of 14000 Doll[ar]s & … that Mill … has been the primary, fruit ful source of our heaviest misfortunes, it was that & that alone which brought us to the verge of Bankruptcy….” Hervey Ely to Nathaniel Rochester, March 12, 1823, in McKelvey, Blake, ed., “Letters Postmarked Rochester, 1817–1879,” Rochester Historical Society, Publications, XXI (1943), 18.Google Scholar

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60 Ibid., Sept. 10, 1822.

61 Exports of flour from the United States, for example, which had been 750,660 barrels in 1819, increased to 1,177,036 barrels in 1820 and 1,056,119 in 1821. Hazard's United States Commercial and Statistical Register, I (Oct., 1839), 251.

62 Rochester Telegraph, Dec. 3 and 31, 1822.

63 Ibid., Dec. 24, 1822.

64 Ibid., Feb. 5, 1822.

65 Ibid., March 18, 1823.