Fifty years with the Revere Copper Co. A Paper Read at the Stockholders' Meeting held on Monday 24 March 1890

Excerpt

A Personal Word by way of introduction. My first appearance in the Revere Copper Company's office, then at No. 22 Union Street, was on Monday morning, March 23, 1840. Saturday night last, therefore, completed the full period of fifty uninterrupted years of service.

In the nature of things it cannot be expected that this record will be repeated by me, nor can any one else duplicate it for a long time to come. There is no other stockholder whose certificate bears an earlier date than 1881, and no one in the office has a retrospect of twenty years even.

The Company was incorporated and organized in the year 1828. In 1840, all the original corporators, or associates, were living. Other stockholders from their families were afterwards added, but they all, the first associates and the others subsequently admitted, have passed away. It follows that, at the present time, there is no other one living who has been brought into daily business intercourse with the members of this Company from its very beginning.

It would therefore seem to be a very proper and fitting thing for me, on so interesting an occasion, to review somewhat the personnel of the Company.

FOOTNOTES:

The office and storehouse were removed June 1, 1843, to No. 97 State Street; again July 1, 1867, to No. 47 Kilby Street; and still again, November 1, 1888, to No. 369 Atlantic Avenue, where they now are. In the conflagration of November 9 and 10, 1872, the building Nos. 45 and 47 Kilby Street was destroyed. During its reconstruction, just one year, building No. 113 (later 117) State Street, corner of Broad Street, was occupied.

Mr. James Edmiston Brown came into the office February 8, 1873. He deserves special mention here for his faithful, efficient, and valuable services.

II.

Preliminary thereto, however, a brief historical statement should be made of the beginnings of the enterprises to which the Company succeeded.

In January, 1801, Colonel Paul Revere bought the old powder-mill at Canton, where during the Revolutionary War, largely by his instrumentality and agency, the Colony and State had been supplied with powder. He and his son, Mr. Joseph W. Revere, under the firm-name of Paul Revere & Son, erected and adapted the buildings necessary for the manufacture of copper into sheets and bars.

In the years 1804 and 1805 Mr. J. W. Revere spent considerable time on a visit to England and the continent for the purpose of obtaining all the information possible in the prosecution of their undertaking.

Colonel Revere claims, in letters written by him at the time, that their mill for rolling copper was the first erected in this country. And it may be said in passing that the copper trade in England was hardly more advanced there than here.

Their business grew slowly, but it made a steady progress until substantially established. Colonel Revere died in 1818, but the son, Mr. Joseph W. Revere, continued on with the manufactory started at Canton until it became a part of the incorporated Company.

Singularly coincident with the events already narrated, Mr. James Davis, but five months younger than Mr. Joseph W. Revere, had come to Boston from Barnstable, his native town, and acquired here a trade, reaching his majority in 1798.

In the very first years of the present century he established himself on Union Street as a brass founder....