Nonetheless, the firm prospered, although it ceded the primary ranking among New York's investment banks to more ambitious firms like J.P. Morgan & Co. and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Nonetheless, by the late 1890s, when the New York office began compiling annual reports on its operations, it had more than 40 employees. Over the decade and a half that followed, the firm's reports paint a picture of a firm that found itself with an ever-increasing number of business opportunities that required, in turn, increasing numbers of employees. At the same time, the firm was more and more cramped, and complaints about "want of space" appeared frequently in the reports.
The firm managed its need for more employees by becoming willing to hire new groups: namely, women and young, non-“native stock” men. Within months after the firm hired its first three female stenographers in 1897, partner James Brown declared “I can scarcely understand how we did our business without
women stenographers” and rejoiced that the firm was no longer sending out “badly written, badly composed letters.” [
4] In the firm’s 1902 report, manager C.F. Dellinger mused that the firm should consider hiring “five or six small boys” to serve as messengers for the firm on the streets of the financial district who “would not be subject to promotion into clerkships except one was found particularly bright and useful.” [
5]