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• 1 2018-01-27T23:55:38+00:00 History of Brown Brothers & Co. 2 plain 2018-05-24T01:24:15+00:00 Brown Brothers was one of a group of interlinked firms initially established by Scotch-Irish linen merchant Alexander Brown in the early 1810s. By the Civil War it had grown to encompass banking offices in Liverpool, London, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and was one of the primary firms overseeing the marketing of cotton grown on Southern slave plantations in Great Britain.[1] The firm diversified out of cotton on the eve of the Civil War and remained profitable in the postbellum years. It built its own office building at 59 Wall Street, on the corner of Hanover Street, a "marble palazzo" originally built to its specifications in 1865 expanded in the late 1880s from four floors to seven. [2]
  
  Most of the partners were members of the Brown family by birth or marriage, or else longtime employees who had garnered enough trust to be invited to become partners (or their descendants). The firm's reliance on a bicontinental management structure and the conservatism of its British partners meant that it hesitated to participate in the railroad and industrial booms of the early Gilded Age. “Opportunities for profitable business were passed by,” the senior American partner, John Crosby Brown, lamented in his history of the firm, written in 1909, “and others… reap[ed] a rich harvest in which the firm would have shared.”[3]
  
  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]