Gilchrist Family Papers, 1867-1945

Summary

Creator:

Gilchrist Family.

Abstract:

Alpena, Michigan, family; correspondence, letterpress books, financial papers, and other material largely relating to the family's business enterprises in lumbering, sugar manufacturing, ferry and excursion lines, mining, and banking; contain record of business affairs in Alpena, Michigan, and other areas of northern Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Oregon, and Mississippi; family members represented in the collection include Frank W. Gilchrist and two of his sons, Frank R. and Ralph Gilchrist, also members of a related Fletcher and Potter families.

Extent:

7 linear feet

Language:

English.

Call Number:

851367 Aa 2

Authors:

Finding aid prepared by: John D. Beatty

Background

Scope and Content:

The Gilchrist Family Papers, which date from 1867 to 1945, reflect the business life of four generations of a prominent Alpena, Michigan family. The lives of four generations of Gilchrists are documented by the collection, but the bulk pertains primarily to Frank W. Gilchrist and his son, Ralph. Included in the collection is an assortment of correspondence, financial statements, inventories, reports, and cost estimates, pertaining to the lumbering, sugar beet, shipping, and mining industries.

The collection contains a considerable amount of material pertaining to Michigan business history, especially in the areas of lumbering, shipping, cement, and mining industries. Among the papers are financial statements, profit and loss records, invoices, lists of timber prices, salary records, blueprints of milling operations, and correspondence. They provide a documentary record of a family-owned business, which, when faced with declining lumber sales in northern Michigan, attempted to diversify its holdings in the real estate, mining, shipping, and sugar beet industries. Some of these endeavors proved successful for the Gilchrists; others did not. The papers record both the family's successes and failures.

Particularly useful for this study are the correspondence and financial statements of Frank W. Gilchrist and the early papers of his son, Ralph. The collection includes records of the Huron Sugar Company, the Alpena Portland Cement Company, and the Gilchrist Transportation Company, all of which failed to produce sufficient profit for the Gilchrists. The lumber and land companies were more successful.

The collection also serves to document the manner in which Ralph Gilchrist, Frank's son, carried the family industries into the 1920s and 1930s, managing to survive the effects of the Great Depression. The collection contains year by year, and in some cases month by month, financial statements, showing Gilchrist assets before, during. and after the stock market crash of October, 1929. The records of Gilchrist & Company Limited, the Detroit Trust Company; and Commonwealth Securities Incorporated are especially valuable for this study.

The Gilchrist Papers are not particularly useful for social history or for information on the family's private life. The collection does contain a travel diary of William H. Potter, dated 1883, in which a journey from Alpena to Detroit is described, but the bulk of the material reflects only the Gilchrists' official business functions. Correspondence usually relates information on stock acquisition, land purchases, lumber sales, and estate liquidation. The Potter papers are perhaps more personal in nature, containing some correspondence between the elder Albert Gilchrist and his daughter Ella, but these letters are few.

The researcher interested in Michigan business history, however, will find the collection useful for the above-named industries. Moreover, the collection also provides evidence for changes that took place from the 19th to 20th centuries within the office itself and the manner in which business was conducted. To some extent the papers reflect how the family reacted to early forms of office automation, as for example complaints that secretaries make too many typographical errors and that it is often easier to write letters by hand.

The collection remains in excellent condition, for the most part, although the letterpress books from the 19th century are faded and nearly illegible.

Biographical / Historical:

Of the many individuals and families who influenced the lumber and shipping industries of Michigan in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Gilchrist family of Alpena was among the most enduring and successful. From the time Frank Gilchrist built his first lumber mill at Alpena in 1867 to the end of the Great Depression, the Gilchrists remained prominent Michigan industrialists.

The family's founder, Albert J. Gilchrist (1816-1899) a native of New Hampshire, settled at Marine City, St. Claire County, Michigan with his family in 1849. Taking advantage of the burgeoning lumber industry, he purchased the Rust Brothers Lumber Mill at Marine City and soon constructed new mills at Saginaw and Sand Beach, Huron County. He abandoned these operations in 1863, however, and moved to Oberlin, Ohio. There he became one of the principal benefactors of Oberlin College until his death. He was survived by four children: two daughters, Florence A. and Ella J., and two sons, Frank William, and Albert Junior.

All of Albert's children, with the exception of Florence (who died unmarried in 1887), continued their father's success and interest in business. Ella, who died in 1905, married William H. Potter of Alpena, an early business associate of Frank Gilchrist, co-owner of the Webster Manufacturing Company, president of the Alpena Sulfur Magnetic Springs Company, and director of the Alpena National Bank. Ella's brother, Albert Gilchrist Junior, followed his father to Ohio and became a prominent Cleveland attorney. In addition to serving as Ella's executor, Albert was secretary of the Gilchrist Transportation Company, a Cleveland-based shipping company headed by his cousin, J. C. Gilchrist.

Frank William Gilchrist, (1845-1912), eldest son of the first Albert, received his education at Oberlin College, but upon earning his degree he returned to his boyhood home in Michigan. In 1865 he married Mary E. Rust, daughter of Aloney Rust, a pioneer lumberman and patriarch of a prominent lumbering family at Marine City. Two years later in 1867, at the encouragement of his father and in-laws, Frank established the F. W. Gilchrist Company on the banks of the Thunder Bay River near Alpena. The new company soon enjoyed-the success generated by the booming interest then being taken in the northern Michigan timber industry, and Frank found a swift return for his original investment. For several decades the demand for Gilchrist's white and Norway pine seemed insatiable. In the span of 45 years the mill cut over 800 million feet of lumber, about a fifth of the total amount produced at Alpena.

The huge profits generated by these sales permitted Frank to expand his growing enterprise to include other industries. By the end of the century he was the owner of a fleet of ships that carried ore and lumber from Alpena to Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, incorporating this venture as part of the original F. W. Gilchrist Company. In addition, he founded or established a controlling interest in the Steel Steamship Company, the Tyrone Transportation Company, the Merida Steamship Company, the Globe Steamship Company, and the Inland Star Transit Company, all of Mentor, Ohio, as well as the Lakeshore Transit Company of Vermillion. He also purchased stock in the Gilchrist Transportation Company of Cleveland in 1907, but sold his interest three years later in a dispute with his cousin, J. C. Gilchrist, over the borrowing of money.

Decline in the Michigan lumber industry at the end of the century led Frank to diversify his holdings further. He purchased the Alpena Portland Cement Company, but closed the operation in 1904 after it became unprofitable. He attempted to enter the burgeoning Michigan sugar beet industry in 1901 with the establishment of the Huron Sugar Company at Harbor Beach, Huron County, but this venture, too, proved unsuccessful and was abandoned in 1903. Flank also became an ambitious speculator in land. In 1897 he purchased timber land in Hardy Township, Ontario, and was encouraged by his initial success to purchase additional property at Degollado, Chihuahua, Mexico in 1901. Two years later he co-founded the Post Land and Lumber Company at Drummond, Wisconsin, with his cousins William A. and Aloney J. Rust. The company successfully acquired large tracts of prime timber property in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. During the same year he was also persuaded by his son, Ralph, to invest in several hundred acres of timber land in Crook, Klamath, and Lake Counties, Oregon.

Throughout this period of diversification Frank never entirely abandoned his interest in the lumber industry. In 1805 he established his son, Frank Rust Gilchrist, in the firm of Frank Rust Gilchrist and Company, a Cleveland-based dealership, but the venture failed in 1905. In 1897 the elder Frank purchased an interest in the Rust-Owen Lumber Company at Drummond, Wisconsin, along with his cousins Frank G. Owen and the Rust brothers. In 1904 he established the Three States Lumber Company at Memphis, Tennessee, which was followed three years later by the Gilchrist-Fordney Company at Laurel, Mississippi, in which he shared financial interest with Joseph A. Fordney. Frank named his son, William, to act as his principal agent at Three States, while he named his other son, Frank Rust, the president of Gilchrist-Fordney. Within three years both companies became leading producers of southern yellow pine.

In addition to his commercial interests, Frank sat on the Board of Directors of the Exchange Bank of Alpena, serving as its president from 1897 to 1904. He assisted in the organization of the Alpena County Savings Bank and possessed financial interests in the Bank Street Block in Cleveland from 1898 to 1910, and in the Detroit Trust Company from 1903 to 1906.

Frank W. Gilchrist died in 1912, two days after his first lumber mill, F. W. Gilchrist and Company, ceased operation. His extensive estate was divided equally among his four children, Frank Rust, William A., Grace A., and Ralph E. Gilchrist. Each child continued to maintain the business affairs of their father with some success, although they did not always agree upon the way in which these interests should be managed. Sibling rivalry led, inevitably to bitter feuding, particularly between William and Ralph. William's refusal to allow his interest in the Alpena Portland Cement Company to be sold, and his unwillingness to accept Ralph's claim to the Oregon lands of their father, led Ralph to join Frank, and Grace in the founding of Gilchrist & Company, Limited, in 1914. The new company became an umbrella organization for their shares of active and dormant Gilchrist family properties.

The death of Frank Rust Gilchrist in 1917 and the marriage of Grace Gilchrist to Henry E. Fletcher, president of the Alpena Paper Mills, gave Ralph the primary responsibility of managing the Gilchrist industries. Born in Alpena in 1877, Ralph had graduated from Harvard in 1901 at the age of 24 and had immediately joined his father in the management of the family enterprises. He was president of the Alpena, Portland Cement Company from 1904 to 1914, and served as vice-president, secretary, and treasurer of the Rust-Owen Lumber Company, the Rust Land and Lumber Company, and the Three States Lumber Company until his death. In addition to founding Gilchrist & Company Limited in 1914, he became president and director of the Dominion Sugar Company at Chatham, Ontario, and purchased the Hecla Cement Company of Detroit, all in the sane year. In 1918, after the death of his brother Frank, he became president of the Gilchrist-Fordney Company, but later gave this post to Stewart M. Jones, reserving for himself the role of director and trustee. In 1924 he became president of the Detroit and Windsor Perry Company, and the following year founded the Gilchrist Timber Company at Gilchrist, Oregon. He served on the directorate of the Thunder Bay Limestone Company of Alpena, and held financial interest in the Crittall Casement Window Company of Detroit. His banking and financial interests included service on the directorate of the Detroit National Bank and the First National Bank until 1932. He also served on the Board of Directors of Commonwealth Securities Incorporated of Cleveland from 1929 to 1930, and he managed successfully that company's financial interests during the fall of the stock market in October, 1929. He was one of the principal depositors of the First National Bank of Detroit and lost over two million dollars when it was forced to close its doors in 1933. As a businessman and financier, he was aggressive and respected, although in the words of one editorialist, he always "preferred to regard himself as a lumberman, rather than as a sugar manufacturer, a steamship man, a capitalist, or a banker, as others sometimes thought of him." He died at his home at Alpena in 1936.

Ralph's death led to the liquidation of most of the Gilchrist enterprises. Gilchrist-Fordney closed its operations in 1937, and Gilchrist & Company Limited followed in 1944. What remained of the family businesses were managed by Henry E. Fletcher, husband of Grace (Gilchrist) Fletcher; Frank W. Gilchrist II, the only son of Frank Rust Gilchrist; and Frank J, Foley, long-time family agent. Fletcher served briefly as president of Gilchrist-Fordney and shared many of Ralph's financial interests. Frank Gilchrist served as secretary-treasurer of Gilchrist-Fordney and supervised its dissolution. He then moved to Gilchrist, Oregon, where he became president of the Gilchrist Timber Company until after the Second World War. Foley, who served under Ralph Gilchrist as secretary of the Detroit and Windsor Ferry Company and as an assistant in the Thunder Bay Limestone Company, acted as an agent to the younger Frank in dissolving the Gilchrist Fordney Company.

Acquisition Information:

The Gilchrist papers came to the Michigan Historical Collections as a gift from Mrs. Ralph Fletcher of Alpena, whose husband was a son of Harry and Grace (Gilchrist) Fletcher. The gift (Donor No. 4672 ) was made in a single grant in 1968.

Subjects

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Subjects:

Banks and banking -- Michigan -- Alpena.
Beet sugar.
Business records.
Ferries.
Lumbering -- United States.
Mines and mineral resources -- United States.
Shipping -- Great Lakes.
Logging -- United States.

Names:

Fletcher family.
Potter family.
Gilchrist, Frank Rust, -1917.
Gilchrist, Frank William, 1845-1912.
Gilchrist, Ralph, 1877-1936.

Places:

Alpena (Mich.)
Minnesota.
Mississippi.
Missouri.
Ohio.
Oregon.
Wisconsin.