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George Pullman
George Mortimer Pullman (March 3, 1831 – October 19, 1897) was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town in Chicago for the workers who manufactured it. This ultimately led to the Pullman Strike due to the high rent prices charged for company housing and low wages paid by the Pullman Company. His Pullman Company also hired black men to staff the Pullman cars, known as Pullman porters, who provided elite service and were compensated only in tips.
Struggling to maintain profitability during an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he halved wages and required workers to spend long hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents and goods in his company town. He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission was appointed to investigate the strike, which included assessment of operations of the company town. In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.
Pullman was born in 1831 in Brocton, New York, the son of Emily Caroline (Minton) and carpenter James Lewis Pullman (known as Lewis). His family moved to Albion, New York, along the Erie Canal in 1845, so his father could help widen the canal. His father had invented a machine using jack screws that could move buildings or other structures out of the way and onto new foundations and had patented it in 1841. By that time, packet boats carried people on day excursions along the canal, plus travellers and freight craft would be towed across the state along the busy canal.
Pullman attended local schools and helped his father, learning other skills that contributed to his later success. In 1853, Lewis died, and George took over his business at the age of 22.
Pullman was a clerk for a country merchant. Pullman took over the family business. In 1856, Pullman won a contract with the State of New York to move 20 buildings out of the way of the widening canal.
During the 1850s, the streets in Chicago often resembled a swamp, as the city had been built to too low an elevation on the shore of Lake Michigan. The city undertook to re-engineer its sewage system to clear the surface of the unwanted and often pathogenic standing water. This project necessitated the raising of the street level an average of over a metre.
As the streets rose above the front doors of the adjacent buildings, the buildings needed to be demolished and rebuilt or else physically raised so as to adjust to the newly raised level of the street. In 1859 Pullman and his Albion-based business partner Charles Moore moved to Chicago to raise one such building, the Matteson House, a large brick hotel. Pullman and Moore went on to raise several more Chicago buildings before becoming part of a consortium that raised the entire ninety-eight-metre-long block of four and five storey brick and stone buildings on the north side of Lake Street between Clark and La Salle Streets, a feat depicted by Edward Mendel in a large lithograph. In 1861 Pullman contracted with the Ely and Smith partnership to raise the six storey high Tremont House. Pullman contracted to raise these and many other large buildings in Chicago, and his firm raised the buildings on average six feet without causing them any damage and often times while the buildings were still fully operational, with people entering and exiting them and conducting business within.
Pullman developed a railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper or "palace car". These were designed after the packet boats that travelled the Erie Canal of his youth in Albion. The first one was finished in 1864.
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George Pullman
George Mortimer Pullman (March 3, 1831 – October 19, 1897) was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town in Chicago for the workers who manufactured it. This ultimately led to the Pullman Strike due to the high rent prices charged for company housing and low wages paid by the Pullman Company. His Pullman Company also hired black men to staff the Pullman cars, known as Pullman porters, who provided elite service and were compensated only in tips.
Struggling to maintain profitability during an 1894 downturn in manufacturing demand, he halved wages and required workers to spend long hours at the plant, but did not lower prices of rents and goods in his company town. He gained presidential support by Grover Cleveland for the use of federal military troops which left 30 strikers dead in the violent suppression of workers there to end the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission was appointed to investigate the strike, which included assessment of operations of the company town. In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.
Pullman was born in 1831 in Brocton, New York, the son of Emily Caroline (Minton) and carpenter James Lewis Pullman (known as Lewis). His family moved to Albion, New York, along the Erie Canal in 1845, so his father could help widen the canal. His father had invented a machine using jack screws that could move buildings or other structures out of the way and onto new foundations and had patented it in 1841. By that time, packet boats carried people on day excursions along the canal, plus travellers and freight craft would be towed across the state along the busy canal.
Pullman attended local schools and helped his father, learning other skills that contributed to his later success. In 1853, Lewis died, and George took over his business at the age of 22.
Pullman was a clerk for a country merchant. Pullman took over the family business. In 1856, Pullman won a contract with the State of New York to move 20 buildings out of the way of the widening canal.
During the 1850s, the streets in Chicago often resembled a swamp, as the city had been built to too low an elevation on the shore of Lake Michigan. The city undertook to re-engineer its sewage system to clear the surface of the unwanted and often pathogenic standing water. This project necessitated the raising of the street level an average of over a metre.
As the streets rose above the front doors of the adjacent buildings, the buildings needed to be demolished and rebuilt or else physically raised so as to adjust to the newly raised level of the street. In 1859 Pullman and his Albion-based business partner Charles Moore moved to Chicago to raise one such building, the Matteson House, a large brick hotel. Pullman and Moore went on to raise several more Chicago buildings before becoming part of a consortium that raised the entire ninety-eight-metre-long block of four and five storey brick and stone buildings on the north side of Lake Street between Clark and La Salle Streets, a feat depicted by Edward Mendel in a large lithograph. In 1861 Pullman contracted with the Ely and Smith partnership to raise the six storey high Tremont House. Pullman contracted to raise these and many other large buildings in Chicago, and his firm raised the buildings on average six feet without causing them any damage and often times while the buildings were still fully operational, with people entering and exiting them and conducting business within.
Pullman developed a railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper or "palace car". These were designed after the packet boats that travelled the Erie Canal of his youth in Albion. The first one was finished in 1864.