Iron Millionaire: Life of Charlemagne Tower

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Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

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IRON MILLIONAIRE

Life of Charlemagne Tower

By

HAL BRIDGES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Dedication 5

Foreword 6

Introduction 8

Illustrations 10

1 — The Emperor’s Namesake 11

2 — Country Boy at Harvard 18

3 — Learning the Law 25

4 — In the Steps of the Giants 38

5 — A Man and His Family 47

6 — Civil War 54

7 — Millions in Coal Lands 63

8 — Northern Pacific 71

9 — С. Tower, Educator 82

10 — Occupations for My Mind 87

11 — Mesabi 95

12 — Vermilion 107

13 — Battle of the Lawmakers 119

14 — My Dear Father— 128

15 — Mining in the Wilderness 138

16 — July 31, 1884 145

17 — Money Hunt 152

18 — Troubles at the Top 162

19 — We Cannot Both Rule 171

20 — Six Million, or Else 178

21 — End of Tenure 191

Notes 194

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 195

Dedication

TO

LOIS, L. H., and ALICE BRIDGES

Foreword

ONE OF THE central figures in American civilization is the businessman, whose free enterprise system stands today so sharply opposed to the communist economies of Russia and Red China. Charlemagne Tower was a businessman, an entrepreneur extraordinary in the nineteenth-century Age of Enterprise. Through his private papers, so rich in intimate detail, I have tried to achieve in some measure an impartial case study of an American businessman. I have tried to see his world through his eyes and to present him in action, not only as a remarkably interesting human being whose distinctive achievement was the pioneer development of the Minnesota iron fields, but also as a guide toward a better understanding of what James Truslow Adams has called our business civilization.

Tower left a voluminous collection of manuscript letters, letterbooks, ledgers, contracts, and other business documents. These papers lay unused in a Philadelphia bank vault until in 1946, at the suggestion of Professor Allan Nevins of Columbia University, they were deposited in the Columbia University Libraries. This was done through the co-operation of Mr. Roderick Tower and Mr. Lawrence Tower of New York, Mr. Alfred Putnam of Philadelphia, and the beneficiaries of the Tower estate, to all of whom I am most grateful.

I owe a large debt of gratitude to Professor Nevins, who gave me the opportunity to make use of the Tower Papers, and provided constant help and guidance during the preparation of this biography. His final act of kindness has been to interrupt a busy schedule to write the introduction. My thanks are also due to Professor James G. Van Derpool, Avery Librarian of Columbia, and his staff, for the many courtesies extended to me during three years of work on the Tower Papers.

In addition to the main collection of papers there are numerous Tower family letters and documents in the possession of Mr. Geoffrey Tower of Waterville, New York. I wish to express my thanks to Mr. Tower for permitting me to examine them.

To the following persons I am grateful for assistance in obtaining material and checking sources: Miss Lucile Kane, Curator of Manuscripts, and Miss Lois M. Fawcett, Head of Reference Department, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul; Miss Corah L. Colbrath, Secretary of the St. Louis County Historical Society, Duluth; Mr. Joseph H. Jordan, Director of Public Relations, Oliver Iron Mining Company, Duluth; Miss Edith Patterson, Librarian of the Free Public Library of Pottsville, Pennsylvania; Mr. Edwin D. Griffin of Tower City, North Dakota; Mr. George Westcott, publisher of the Waterville Times; and Dr. S. K. Stevens, State Historian of Pennsylvania.

I am also indebted to the custodians of these records and collections: United States General Land Office Records, and War Department Records, National Archives; Tract Books, in the United States Bureau of Land Management, Washington; George de В. Keim Papers, and Robert T. Lincoln Collection, Library of Congress; Jay Cooke Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and Harvard Archives.

Dr. William A. Owens of Columbia and Dr. George Cook of Wagner College helped improve the literary style of the manuscript. Dr. Reinhard H. Luthin of Columbia gave freely of his wide bibliographical knowledge. Finally, to my wife Alice I am especially grateful for literary criticism and unfailing help and inspiration.

Introduction

PROFESSOR BRIDGES has written a book which is of compelling interest from three points of view: as a story of business adventure, as a study in the character of an eminent entrepreneur, and as a chapter in the economic history of the Northwest. Founded on a large body of previously unused manuscript materials, it supplies elements of vital importance to our knowledge of the development of the iron and steel industry in the United States.

Viewed simply as an example of business enterprise and skill, the career of Charlemagne Tower stands almost unique in the record of nineteenth-century business. Here was a man who devoted approximately forty years to the law, achieving a remarkable success; who then, at a time when his contemporaries were going into retirement, turned to large business affairs; and who in the eighth decade of his life carried to completion one of the spectacular feats of our industrial history, the opening and development of the Vermilion Iron Range in Minnesota. The story of how the elderly lawyer sent out expeditions to explore the iron deposits in these remote hills; of how, undaunted by legal and other difficulties, he obtained title to the key areas involved, with large tracts on Lake Superior; of how he organized an iron company and a railroad company; of how he opened shafts, built docks, and laid across broken terrain a seventy-mile railway, with roundhouses and machine shops; of how he provided ore-carrying equipment on land and lake—this is a fascinating tale, to which Dr. Bridges does full justice. In 1884, at the age of seventy-five, Tower had the satisfaction of bringing the first boatloads of his rich hematite ore down the inland waters to be distributed to the hungry steel mills of Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Here obviously was an industrialist of keen mind, iron determination, and real vision. Tower had as a matter of fact many remarkable personal qualities, which gave him equal distinction as lawyer, as financier, and as business organizer. He proved the incisive keenness of his mind during the long decades when he became perhaps the leading attorney in a singularly intricate field—the litigation over land titles in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, where the ownership of properties of tremendous value had to be conclusively settled before they could be properly developed. He proved his financial skill as a member of the board of directors of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in whose construction he played no unimportant role. He gained managerial experience in various coal companies and other enterprises. In the years just after the Civil War, in fact, he was a prominent representative of a relatively new group in American affairs, the corporation lawyers with one foot in the courtroom, the other in the business office. The great Vermilion undertaking was no accidental coup; its success rested on long preparation. As a businessman, Tower shared the general outlook of his time; his ethical principles and practical methods were in part those of a very rough-and-tumble competitive era; but there can be no question as to the constructive nature of most of his work. And he had some creditable intellectual tastes. He liked to remember that he was a classmate of Charles Sumner at Harvard; he served as an overseer of his alma mater; he delighted in collecting volumes of colonial laws and other rare books.

In the rapid rise of the United States between the Civil War and World War I to first place among the industrial nations of the globe, the iron fields that rimmed Lake Superior—the Gogebic, Vermilion, Mesabi, and others—were of indispensable value. They gave the nation an unequaled wealth of ore, which in general was easily mined and which could be cheaply carried down the Great Lakes to mills situated on or near inexhaustible sources of coal and coke. The beds which Charlemagne Tower led in making available were from forty to a hundred and fifty feet thick; they furnished ore that came near to yielding 70 per cent of iron; and they became available before the middle of that decade of striking business expansion, sandwiched between two depressions, the 1880’s. That was a decade of energetic railroad construction, practically completing our national transportation system, a decade of rising production of machinery, a decade in which the net value of our manufactured goods leaped (1879-1889) from $1,972,000,000 to $4,102,000,000. Tower, laboring strenuously at an age when most men have folded their hands in rest, made a memorable contribution to the growth, well-being, and power of the nation. The story which Dr. Bridges tells with such scholarly care and narrative verve is one which should interest all students of our past.

ALLAN NEVINS

Illustrations

Charlemagne Tower in Middle Age

Reuben Tower

Locomotives

Charlemagne Tower Jr. in Middle Age

1 — The Emperor’s Namesake

YOUNG REUBEN TOWER was poor, but had no intention of staying poor. He worked hard on his farm in Paris Township, New York. He was ambitious. There was not a more ambitious man in all Oneida County.

When his wife Deborah gave birth to their first child, a boy, on April 18, 1809, Reuben Tower enlarged his ambitions to accommodate his son. This bit of humanity lying in his wife’s arms would one day grow into a stalwart man and embark upon a brilliant career. He would go far. He would be wealthy, famous. To that end Reuben would spare himself, and his son, no pains.

Deborah Tower, too, doubtless built her dreams into the future. Her son would march proudly and successfully through life, for did not the blood of royalty flow in his veins? It did, as surely as she was a Pearce, descended from Richard Pearce, whose ancestry went back to old England, through numerous dukes and lords, to Charlemagne himself, King of the Franks and Emperor of the West from 800 to 814.{1}

The fact that by 1809 the royal strain must have spread out pretty thin seems not to have bothered Deborah. She was a strong-minded woman for all her delicate prettiness, and not one to let mathematics shake her faith in a proud old family legend. At least it seems reasonable to assume that the legend, coupled with the young parents’ ambitions for their son—and perhaps, too, Reuben’s habit of reading history—explains why a little American boy, born on a farm in backwoods New York, was named Charlemagne Tower.

Whatever the explanation, it is certainly true that Charlemagne Tower’s unusual first name left its mark upon him. It set him apart from others, and he was proud of it. As a boy he brooked no shortening of it, but insisted on being called by all three syllables. When he signed a letter he wrote it in full. As a grown man he did abbreviate his signature to C. Tower in order to save time, yet he guarded Charlemagne as jealously as ever, taking pains to correct people who misspelled it in their letters to him, especially if they happened to have spelled the last syllable mange. Moreover, he bestowed the name on his own son, who in turn gave it to his son, and so it has come down to the present day.

Probably it was Deborah Tower, more than Reuben, who taught Charlemagne to be proud of his royal name. Reuben Tower was not so much interested in a man’s ancestry as in what kind of character he displayed here and now. He himself came of plain common stock, being sixth in descent from John Tower of Hingham, England, who in 1637 crossed the ocean and settled in Hingham, Massachusetts. From there John Tower’s descendants, many of whom were farmers, migrated west and south to the fertile lands of interior Massachusetts and New York. Reuben Tower was born at Rutland, Massachusetts, February 15, 1787. His father, Jeduthun Tower, moved to Paris Township toward the turn of the century.{2}

Some nine years earlier, Stephen Pearce, the father of Deborah, had brought his wife and four children to the same rich farming region from Little Compton, Rhode Island. Reuben Tower while still a boy in his teens became acquainted with dark-eyed Deborah Taylor Pearce. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday by marrying her.

It was evidently a happy marriage, one of love and compatibility. Deborah was a year and seven months older than Reuben, having been born at Little Compton on July 6, 1785. Like him, she was intelligent, and apparently her education was the equal of his, though at the age of nineteen he had had the advantage of a year at Hamilton Oneida Academy, now Hamilton College. At least her command of English, as revealed in her letters, was as good as his. Both were earnest young persons. Deborah liked to remark, in a devoutly melancholy way, that death was imminent—as it certainly was in those crudely medicated, cholera-ridden times—but occasionally she would veer into evanescent humor. Reuben indulged in neither type of frivolity, girding himself always in stern self-discipline for the daily battle with the tasks at hand.

He was not a big man, standing only slightly above average height and tending toward thinness, but he had energy enough for two, and determination to match his ambition. It showed in his face: the level gaze, the firm line of his mouth, the very tilt of his head seemed to say, Reuben Tower will succeed.{3}

But at first this was not so easy. Finding farming a slow route to prosperity, he moved shortly after Charlemagne was born into the near-by village of Waterville, where he opened a little store. Waterville, situated in the southern tip of Oneida County, some eighteen miles southwest of Utica, had a population of about two hundred. Its unflattering local name was The Huddle. Today that rolling hill region south of the Mohawk River produces beans, peas, and milk for New York City. In Reuben Tower’s day it was given over to cattle grazing and the growing of grain and hops, which the rich, reddish soil produced in abundance. Gristmills and whisky distilleries did a brisk business. Waterville also had a sawmill or two, and in 1816 acquired a cotton factory. The little community on the banks of Big Creek was a thriving business center, but Reuben Tower’s store was a failure. When the War of 1812 began he gladly abandoned merchandising, took the place of a local man who had been called to serve as a sergeant in the militia, and marched away to the eastern shore of Lake Ontario to defend his country.

Serving from spring until September 1812, he became a sergeant major, and in the battle of Sackett’s Harbor, on July 19, commanded one of five shore guns that helped the American brig Oneida repulse four British men-of-war led by the flagship Royal George. Following his discharge September 1 and a brief visit home, he went back to Sackett’s Harbor, New York, and clerked for six months in a store there. When he returned to Waterville in the spring of 1813 he had enough savings to enter the distilling business with a partner, Stanton Park.{4}

And now he began to satisfy that driving urge to get ahead in the world. The whisky business was profitable. Within a few years he was able to sell out to Park and buy a distillery of his own. Then he branched out into cattle grazing, fattening beef cattle on a farm near Waterville in partnership with an assistant named Erastus Jeffers, who drove them south in herds of seventy-five and one hundred and sold them in New York City. This too was a profitable enterprise. Reuben Tower acquired a reputation as an able businessman, honest and upright, but a close calculator...very exact in all his business transactions. Ten years after returning to Waterville with his wartime savings in his pocket he had become one of the well-to-do men of the county.

As a public-spirited citizen whose views on all subjects were liberal and elevated, he had from the beginning taken a leading role in village affairs, campaigning successfully in 1811 to obtain a post office for Waterville. In the years that followed, his public activities increased. He served as a member of the village library committee, as treasurer of the school district, as a colonel in the militia, as justice of the peace, and as a leader of the Jacksonian party in Oneida County. When the businessmen of the region began agitating around 1826 for the construction of the ninety-five-mile Chenango Canal from Utica to Binghamton, they chose Reuben Tower to present the project to the state assembly. From then on he spent much of his time in Albany drawing up petitions and buttonholing legislators. He believed in the Chenango Canal with all his heart and soul, and it was owing largely to his fight for it that it was finally built, in 1834-37, at a cost of two million dollars.{5}

His long stays in Albany while carrying on the canal fight made Deborah Tower unhappy. In January 1827 she complained that he appeared to have said adieu to home for this winter. I know of nothing but the walls of a prison which might hinder a man from visiting his own dear home when within a days ride. She addressed him at the beginning of her letter simply as Mr. Tower, but signed it from one who is most truly your own.

More and more, as he immersed himself in public affairs while continuing to labor as furiously as ever at his expanding business interests, she worried over his health, fearing that he would work himself to death. Telling him of her increasing anxiety on this score, she reminded him that his life was as dear to me and the family as my own. My feelings you know better than pen can paint...perhaps you may say this is female weakness, she quickly added, though she knew as well as he did that she had good reason to be afraid. He was driving his thin body too hard, refusing it adequate rest. He suffered from recurring spells of sickness, the cause of which he did not know but dismissed as dyspepsia.

Neither bad health nor overwork, however, kept him from discharging what he deemed to be his most solemn duty as a father: the strict guidance and education of the boy with the imperial name whom he meant to mold into a famous man. Nor did he neglect the other children who had followed Charlemagne into the world at intervals of two and three years. In order of birth they were Julius, Henrietta, Fayette Bartholomew, DeWitt Clinton, James Monroe, Francis Marion, and Reuben. Altogether Reuben and Deborah Tower had seven sons and one splendidly isolated daughter. Henrietta never tired of reminding Charlemagne and the other boys that she was their only sister.{6}

During Charlemagne’s boyhood the steady arrival of new additions to the family rather overcrowded the Tower home, an unpretentious farmhouse that stood on the crest of a wooded hill in the western outskirts of Waterville. Reuben Tower enlarged the house once or twice as more space became desirable; but it was not until 1830 that he had it thoroughly remodeled. While Charlemagne was growing up it was still a small place, in which family life was close-knit and intimate.

As eldest son, Charlemagne displayed toward the younger members of the family a warm affection intermixed at times with a stiff parental attitude. He was a precocious youngster, an attractive little boy with deep-set blue eyes, a straight thin nose, and his father’s high, rounded forehead. In his lectures on conduct to the other children he strove to emulate Reuben Tower. Especially did he lord it, at times, over Julius, his junior by two years, and a constant, good-natured companion who never seemed to resent it when his faults were catalogued for the good of his soul. With Julius, Charlemagne played soldier, went fishing and swimming in the summer, coasting and ice-skating in the winter. But not all was play, not by any means. Home provided an endless round of chores to be done—wood to chop, water to fetch, cows to milk, chickens and hogs to feed—and Reuben Tower was the kind of father who saw that chores were done on time.

He saw to it, also, that lessons were learned; for one of his chief concerns was his children’s schooling. Never having had all the education he wanted for himself, he was determined to provide it for them, especially for Charlemagne, whose quick intelligence plainly revealed itself as soon as he began attending common school. So rapid, in fact, was his scholastic progress that Reuben Tower sent him when he was not quite thirteen years old to the academy at Oxford, New York, taking care to impress upon him how grateful he should be for this opportunity to better himself, and how earnestly he should strive to make the most of it.

He was there, his father informed him, to work. If he indulged in recreation it was not to be for idle fun but for health and strength. If he wrote a letter home it was to be a concise report of his progress and conduct and in addition an exercise in composition and penmanship. Laxness of any kind Reuben Tower criticized severely in hastily written letters. He lectured also, on general principle, against lying, playing cards, and associating with bad companions, and warned against judging a classmate by money or social rank instead of solely by merit. Always he hammered on the absolute necessity to study and excel. In one letter he wrote:

I assure you Charlemagne that you cannot be too industrious—apply yourself early and late—Whatever great men’s history you have read you must recollect that in all of them it is told that they at an early day in their lives applied themselves to obtain a solid education—recollect how young General Washington was a surveyor—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, DeWitt Clinton and many other distinguished American gentlemen have earned their fame and do owe it to their judicious choice of a way of life and their steady application....Recollect also that Napoleon neglected the usual pastimes of boys of his age...that verry early in life he was well acquainted with ancient history and the languages....Charlemagne in whatever branch of learning you undertake you must not let any other boy go before you.

And in another:

You inquire whether you shall study Saturday afternoon—by usage the afternoon is yours to play yet it is quite uncertain whether you would not do better to study.{7}

And Deborah Tower, in her gentler way, echoed:

My dear son...Let study be your object...time is becoming more valuable to you every year of your life next Friday is your birthday whilst you are pleased with being fourteen years of age recollect that you have spent another year of your life. Review it and wherein you have done Amiss reform in the year to come.

Charlemagne loved his father and mother. In after years he never referred to them without some expression of reverence or devotion. As a boy he coveted their praise and approval. When they exhorted him to excel in his studies, he obeyed. His first letters to his mother conveyed the information, along with a request to send me some more of them cakes, that he attended class six hours a day, played one hour, and studied four. Later he wrote that he had largely given up this hour of recreation. He played very little now, he said, adding, Please take good care of the old great hen and Tom. Tell Fayette, Henrietta and Julius not to go to the brook and get drowned.

That he was telling the truth about his studies was verified by reports from the head of the academy, David Prentice. The boy had uncommon proficiency in learning Latin, Prentice wrote soon after Charlemagne’s arrival. For the short time he has been with us he has far surpassed any student we have ever had at this academy. Months later the schoolmaster reported that by falling in with extra classes, Charlemagne had uniformly studied and recited one, and sometimes two lessons more in a day than the other students. As to his conduct, it was excellent. If I have any complaint to make against him, it is too close an application to study.

The price Charlemagne paid for his scholastic achievements was weakened health and the sacrifice of normal companionship with other boys at the school. His classmates regarded him with mingled amazement, envy, and contempt for his hermit-like existence. Still, despite his unusual ways he made two loyal friends at Oxford, Joseph Stringham and George R. I. Clark, who continued to exchange letters with him long after academy days were over.{8}

Charlemagne spent a year at Oxford and then became a schoolteacher. He taught two consecutive years, at the ages of fourteen and fifteen, in the common schools of Oneida County. In 1825 he was assistant teacher in the Utica Academy. There and at Clinton Academy he also carried on advanced study in preparation for entrance examinations to Harvard College. In addition, he clerked for a short time in a general merchandise store at Utica, for his father believed that every boy should have early business training. But when it came time for him to study in earnest for Harvard, Reuben Tower took him, in 1826, to Cambridge and placed him under the tutorship of the Reverend Caleb Stetson.

In Cambridge, Charlemagne boarded in the home of his father’s friend Dr. John Williams. His sister Henrietta was there too, studying under Dr. Williams’ younger daughter Eliza. Henrietta, a bright, lively little girl, was not at all pretty. When she grew a bit older she learned to joke about her plain face. Once, describing an enjoyable party she had attended, she marveled that she had been "called handsome for the first time to my knowledge. I do not boast of it, but speak of it as a wonder."

She was fond of Charlemagne, and while at Cambridge worried about the way he overworked. He was studying harder than ever, for he found that he still had much to learn before he could take his college entrance examinations with confidence. He decided that it would be unwise to try to enter as soon as his father wished.

Notwithstanding my superiority over my classmates in Greek I don’t think myself fit to enter college this year, he wrote home in August 1826. If he did he would have a very low rating, he explained, and dramatically he declared: "The idea of being the poorest or even the second scholar in College is one which I never can, nor never will brook, so long as a drop of blood continues to flow in my veins, or my heart to beat, without making my utmost exertions to excel."{9}

This was more than boyish exaggeration. Reuben and Deborah Tower had