The Shaw Family of Cummington, Massachusetts
The Rise and Fall of a 19th Century Business Empire
One of the benefits of writing The Curious Yankee is that stories occasionally find me rather than the reverse. Renewing an old friendship with a subscriber now in Vanceboro, Maine led to a conversation about the Shaw family, owners of a tannery there that turns out to be only one piece of a business empire extending from Massachusetts to Maine, Quebec, and Wisconsin. The story has its start in the ruins of a dam on Mill Brook, a tributary of the Westfield River in the little town of Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts.
Sylvanus Shaw, the progenitor of the Cummington Shaw clan, was born in Abington, Plymouth County, Massachusetts in 1765. As the youngest of seven children, his prospects there may have been limited. After serving in the Revolutionary War he married Persis Wilder Stoddard of Hingham in 1792 and, by 1793, had relocated to West Cummington. It was not a randomly selected destination as both his older brother Josiah and an older sister Lydia (Shaw) Richards had settled in the neighboring town of Plainfield by 1790.
Cummington, with a plentiful supply of the hemlock bark used in the tanning of shoe leather, was a logical spot for a tannery and indeed, there had been one previously. Around 1790 Colonel William Edwards established tanneries in Cummington, Northampton, and Chester that were later sold to the Hampshire Leather Manufacturing Company, said to be the first incorporated tannery in America. While that venture failed in 1815 it may have been the origin of the multilocational business model utilized by the Shaws several decades later.
The tanning of leather was a filthy process in which hides were soaked in vats of lime solution, rinsed, the fat scraped off (a process known as scudding), pickled in salt and sulphuric acid, and soaked again in pits full of concentrated tannin. The tannin was extracted from oak or hemlock bark crushed by a water-powered mill. Hemlock bark was heavy and shipping expensive, so tanneries were typically located in close proximity to both a supply of hemlock and a source of water. It was an environmentally nightmarish procedure from start to finish entailing massive deforestation, foul odors, and the dumping of liquid waste both on land and in the river that powered the bark mill.
There is no evidence to indicate that Sylvanus Shaw had any involvement in the tannery business, but three of his sons, Brackley, Spencer, and Charles Colson Shaw, their sons, and sons-in-law, would play outsized roles in the industry over the next century. On 9 March 1826, 30-year-old Brackley Shaw, cordwainer (shoemaker), of Cummington, purchased from William Mitchell of Cummington, tanner:
“a certain tract of land in Cummington aforesaid with the buildings thereon and being a part of Lot No thirty six in the third division and bounded as follows viz, beginning at Millbrook bridge , thence southerly on the County Road to Joseph Mason’s land, thence westerly to the centre of said brook, thence Northerly up said brook to the first mentioned bounds . Containing one and half acres more or less. Also one equal undivided half of what I now own of the tan works in common with Joseph Mason + Nehemiah Richards, Jr. together with one equal half of the water and other privileges thereto belonging, meaning to except the letre [sic] attached to the above works for a more particular description reference to be had to Joseph Mason’s deed to me dated the sixteenth day of May 1807.” 1
While the deed from Joseph Mason to William Mitchell could not be found, the reference suggests that Mason’s tannery was in operation prior to 1807. Joseph Mason’s daughter Sillinda was married to Brackley Shaw while another daughter, Polly, was married to Brackley’s older brother Ebenezer.
Brackley Shaw operated the Cummington tannery until his death on 7 April 1848, at age 52. Ownership then passed to his son Lorenzo Shaw, who presumably owned it with several of his brothers as the business appears on an 1873 map of Cummington as “L. Shaw & Bros.”
The L. Shaw & Bros. tannery operated until it was destroyed in a fire on 23 February 1876.
In 1849, following the death of their father, Brackley’s sons Fayette, Brackley Mason, and William formed F. Shaw & Brothers with the intent of establishing tanneries in Maine and Quebec. In 1851 Brackley M. Shaw traveled to Dexter, Maine where he established a second tannery, managed by William and their younger brother Thaxter, along with an uncle, Charles Colson Shaw. That business was initially operated as C. & B. Shaw & Co. By 1868 Charles was running the Dexter tannery on his own. He prospered and remained in Dexter until his death in 1893, later serving in the State Senate and as President of both the Dexter & Newport Railroad and the First National Bank of Dexter.
In 1859 Brackley and William Shaw expanded into Quebec, building a tannery at Roxton Falls and, in 1864, at Waterloo. The latter tannery was run by their uncle, Spencer Shaw, who would remain in Quebec until his death in 1891. The Shaws would ultimately establish a total of 14 tanneries in Canada. By 1881 their Canadian operation, known as Shaw Brothers and Cassils, was reportedly
“doing the largest business of any leather manufactory in Canada, amounting in the country alone, to about 6,000,000 pounds of leather, or 400,000 sides annually, consuming 30,000 cords of bark. Its market extends all over the Dominion and into Newfoundland, but its leading business is done in Montreal, which is the center of the shoe business in Canada, there being from twenty-five to thirty factories here, and a dozen or more of them first class. The firm also exports from one to two million pounds of leather annually to England.” 2
In 1867 Charles Colson Shaw and his son Greenville Jefferson Shaw bought an existing tannery in Hartland, Maine from Isaiah Billings. This tannery and others purchased later in Burnham, Detroit, and Plymouth were operated as Shaw & Son. A shortage of hemlock would lead to the closure of all but the Hartland tannery by 1878.
In 1870 Fayette and his brothers bought 36 square mile Hinkley Township in Washington County, Maine, constructing a tannery on Grand Lake Stream. A year later Fayette and his brother-in-law, Romanzo Kingman, built yet another tannery at Independence Plantation, renaming the town Kingman on its incorporation in 1873. In 1872 they built at Vanceboro. These were not simply a few factory buildings, but entire communities with stores and tenement houses for the workers, sawmills, and stables. In addition, the Shaws had extract works at Houlton, Maine, and in Poquiock, New Brunswick, which simply extracted tannic acid from crushed hemlock bark for sale to tanneries overseas.
In 1883 F. Shaw & Brothers failed, sending shock waves through the nation’s boot and shoe industry. Contemporary accounts suggest that the failure had its roots in the 1881 failure of the Pacific National Bank of Boston and the Shaw’s decision to keep afloat several large boot and shoe manufacturers whose deposits at Pacific National Bank were being honored at pennies on the dollar.
To avoid a general panic at that time F. Shaw & Bros. assumed the burdens of quite a number of their customers, who were heavy losers, and several heavy failures at that time were prevented, but Shaw & Bros. have never been able to throw off the burden they assumed. Several of the smaller concerns have not recovered from the losses caused by the bank’s failure, and in some instances their obligations to Shaw & Bros. have increased rather than diminished. The load became greater than even the immense resources of the millionaire house could carry. The failure of C. W. Copeland & Co. was the last straw. This concern owes Shaw & Bros. about $400,000.3
Another newspaper offered a simpler explanation:
“A prominent business man here ascribes the failure to the ambition of the Shaws to control the leather manufacturing of the country.” 4
F. Shaw & Bros. properties and corporate assets, including 12 tanneries and 1.5 million acres of land in Maine, New York New Brunswick, and Quebec, were assigned to a trustee. The company continued to be run for the benefit of its creditors until 1896 when the tanneries at Vanceboro, Princeton, Grand Lake Stream, Brookton, and Forest City were sold to the International Leather Company. By 1910 all of International Leather’s large tanneries in Maine had ceased operations.
In 1890 Fayette Shaw, his younger brother Thaxter, and their respective sons Fayette Delos and Frederick Manson Shaw relocated to Medford, Wisconsin. where they built and operated tanneries in much the same fashion as they had in Maine. Technology, however, was rapidly eliminating the need for hemlock bark, and, in 1902, the Shaw family’s Wisconsin holdings were sold to the United States Leather Company, another monopolistic holding company organized in 1893. United States Leather would become one of the largest corporations in America and one of the original companies comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average
The Shaw family’s Canadian interests, operated as Shaw Brothers & Cassils, also survived the failure and, under the leadership of Charles Colson Shaw’s son, Charles Orlando Shaw, were reconstituted as the Anglo-Canadian Leather Company in 1891. Anglo-Canadian operated a large tannery in Huntsville, Ontario until 1960. While said to have been the largest producer of shoe leather in the British Empire, Anglo-Canadian was perhaps best known for its company band which achieved national recognition in the 1920s.
William Shaw died of typhoid fever in 1882, prior to the company’s failure. His brothers lived out the remainder of their lives in a relatively unassuming fashion. After the sale of his Wisconsin businesses, Fayette Shaw retired to his estate in Newton, Massachusetts where he died in 1905, Thaxter died at his son’s home in Escanaba, Michigan in 1914, and Brackley in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1917. The United States Leather Company was dissolved in 1952, the only company listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average to suffer that fate. Little remains of F. Shaw & Bros. extensive holdings. Thaxter Shaw’s home in Vanceboro still stands at 19 Winchester Way, albeit in a somewhat dilapidated state, and the ruins of Brackley Shaw’s original tannery dam lie just north of Stage Road where it crosses Mill Brook in Cummington. Both are easily found by curious explorers.
Hampshire County Registry of Deeds, Springfield, MA Book 68 Page 599.
The Canadian Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men, Quebec and The Maritime Provinces Volume (Chicago, New York & Toronto, American Biographical Publishing Company, 1881.) 90.
The New York Times, 31 July 1883.
The Lewiston Evening Journal, 31 July 1883.
Another well done story!
Thank you! I had fun with it.