A few miles from my home, there nestles in the friendly atmosphere of the Green Mountains of Vermont a hamlet of fifty people, known as South Reading: just a sleepy little neighborhood now, but formerly a thriving, active community. Here were located a map-printing shop, several sawmills, a grist mill, a woolen mill, a chair factory, a smithery, and a tannery.

The use of highly specialized techniques for financing equipment on railroads in the United States became common soon after the Civil War. Comparatively little is known, however, of their origins and early evolution. Much of the published information on early railroad equipment financing is concerned with federal, State, and municipal government aids to the new railroads. Because public financing was a matter of public record, that story has been preserved in considerable detail. Unfortunately this has not been the case with private financing. The lack of specific data in this field has obscured important historical precedents for the equipment trust and conditional sale agreements, which were to become so important in the later decades of the 19th century. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine some original and hitherto unpublished manuscript material which presents examples of railroad equipment financing as early as 1838.

The commercial drummer seems to have occupied an important place in English trade for some time before his services were widely employed in this country. An article in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine in 1839 called attention to this situation and suggested that American business men were missing a real opportunity in not adopting similar methods. English drummers who called on the country trade had already acquired the stock characteristics that Americans only at a later date recognized as belonging to the occupation — the sample case as a badge of identification, together with a thorough grasp of the latest scandal for the entertainment of customers.