CHAPTER 3Early Ventures

George Pullman first traveled to Chicago during the mid-1850s in search of work. Known locally as Mud Lake, with streets one Dutch visitor described as having “dirt and dung everywhere,” the settlement had little more than promise to recommend itself to the budding entrepreneur.¹ Topography constrained and liberated, deprived and fed the region. The lake to the east and the Mississippi River to the west meant the area could serve as a trading center uniting the interior of the continent with New York and New England through the Great Lakes.

Capital, human and financial, circulated in and around the city as businesses and governments constructed docks, grain elevators, financial institutions, and railroad lines to generate and then meet the demand for long-distance bulk transportation. The city sat, geographically and socially, at the edge of an amorphous and shifting world, slowly but surely sending its iron tentacles toward the Mississippi River in search of the resources and wealth of the new American empire. The tracks carried trains east to Cleveland, New York, and Boston; west to Burlington, Galena, and Rock Island; south to Springfield and St. Louis; and north to Milwaukee and Madison.

In their quest to rival New York City and other East Coast economic engines, Chicago's boosters loudly proclaimed the boundless possibilities of their young metropolis and the rich land to its west. Fortunate in sitting on a lake with ample riverine access inland, they caught railroad fever. But the state of Illinois overextended itself in a flurry of railroad construction in 1837, risking bankruptcy and laying almost no rail. By 1848, the boosters had recovered their self-assurance and financed what proved to be a sustainable network of lines. As the tracks spread west, spanning rivers and plains into the supposedly empty American desert, Chicago fed the national imagination, profiting from the resources and futures explorers, adventurers, conquerors, and bankers had long suspected could be taken from Indigenous peoples. Onto this mission, the Pullman brothers grafted themselves.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the city had grown rapidly from the small trading settlement established in the 1830s, but its streets remained little more than channels of mud onto which human and animal waste were indiscriminately deposited, making passage tedious and unpleasant.² At the time of George's arrival, Chicago needed expert building lifters, a Pullman family specialty. Owners had been moving their buildings since at least 1837, when town trustees drew plat maps, discovered structures erected outside property boundaries, and forced their relocation inside the lines. But lifting was a bigger challenge.

Poor drainage flooded streets and basements. Pushed by reformer Ellis Chesbrough, the Common Council installed a gravity-based sewage system that drained into the Chicago River but had the unfortunate side effect of poisoning the drinking supply.³ To accommodate sewers, the streets of the central city were raised by as much as sixteen feet. Property owners thereafter faced the prospect of elevating their buildings to the new street level or looking out at walls of dirt.⁴

Touting his experience with the simple but dangerous procedures involved, George signed several building-lifting contracts. He and Charles Henry Moore, a fellow New Yorker, transferred their partnership from the towpaths of the Erie Canal to the shoreline of Lake Michigan.⁵ On route to Chicago from Albion in 1859, George stopped off in Grand Rapids, where he found Albert's business failing and his family unhappy. Albert's finances had yet to recover from the Panic of 1857 and George saw in him an experienced supervisor for the building-lifting venture. Following his brother's advice, Albert left Michigan and joined Pullman & Moore in Chicago.

The Pullmans responded to the ebb and flow of opportunity, becoming part of the rush to get rich on the dusty streets of the city on Lake Michigan. Albert and George quickly gained prominence in Chicago's still-small business circles. They used a highly systematic, relatively fast method of raising and, where necessary, relocating private homes and businesses. In addition to the lifting trade, some homeowners sought to move their houses away from the bustling, smoky business district, increasing the Pullman & Moore workload. In the process, the partnership gained a considerable reputation for innovation and reliability.

In 1859, Pullman & Moore won the contract to raise the Matteson House, a downtown hotel, to street level. The building was owned by Joel Matteson, a former governor of Illinois who was the driving force behind completion of the railroad between Chicago and Alton, a port located on the east bank of the Mississippi River twenty miles above St. Louis.⁶ His hotel was “the largest building yet raised in the city” and success would give the nascent firm “an excellent card on which to have future operations.” Timing was crucial: the building had to be elevated and a new basement installed before the spring travel season commenced.⁷ Even more important for Albert and George's future was the connection to Matteson, whose railroad would provide them with the facilities to build and operate their first sleeping car.

Pullman & Moore met their deadline and customers sought them out. The Democrat building, owned by the Chicago newspaper of that name, was just one of many prominent contracts they signed, providing Albert early access to the editors and journalists he later cultivated assiduously to promote Pullman cars.⁸ The growth of Pullman & Moore was all the more impressive given the competitive market in which they operated. Chicago boasted nine other “house movers” on the eve of the Civil War.⁹ Sometimes large jobs had to be shared, as in April 1860, when Pullman & Moore cooperated with Brown and Hollingsworth to elevate a full block of four-story commercial buildings on Lake Street. The work proceeded smoothly, the lifters raising the block four feet in a month without interrupting the merchants inside—whose business was improved by spectators marveling at the whole process—or the journalists avidly reporting on the scene.¹⁰

Albert's experience with building raising in Albion and Grand Rapids proved valuable to Pullman & Moore. In Chicago, he served as George's second-in-command. They raised buildings by turning screw jacks, Albert scrambling underneath to ensure that the jacks and the workers hired to turn them were in place and ready. Albert blew his whistle, George answered, and the laborers simultaneously gave their screws a one-quarter turn. The system proved steady and reliable, and the partnership flourished to the extent that Pullman & Moore bought out one of their competitors. But George remembered his Erie Canal experience and saw building lifting as a temporary occupation, a source of capital for his next project. Besides, there were numerous competitors and George loathed competition, preferring to operate in a field he could monopolize.¹¹

That turned out to be the sleeping-car business. It is not clear how George landed on this particular industry, although afterward he would tell people that he thought of ways to improve overnight travel after enduring an uncomfortable train journey in upstate New York. It is just as likely that the idea came to him in conversation with Benjamin Field, a New York politician who invested in sleeping cars in the east and knew the Pullmans from Albion. Whatever the truth, entering the sleeping-car business proved an inspired decision. Albert's carpentry skills and amiable disposition combined with George's business expertise and dogged determination provided a lasting source of wealth for the Pullman family.

The phrase “sleeping car” is something of a misnomer, suggesting a railroad vehicle devoted solely to nighttime use. The high costs of building and hauling railroad rolling stock meant the cars had to work day and night to turn a profit. The first sleeping cars did double duty as coaches with wooden planks used to convert benches into rough beds. These early efforts proved unpopular with passengers because they were dirty, dark, uncomfortable, and smelly. Rows of brass spittoons placed next to each sleeping plank added to passengers’ discomfort and fear of disease. The first car carrying something like beds appeared in 1838 on the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Named Chambersburg, it ran between Harrisburg and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Benjamin Field supplied sleeping cars of this type to the New York Central Railroad, operating between Albany and Buffalo. George Pullman, imagining something more luxurious and aware that Albert's assistance would help him realize that vision, partnered with Field to build comfortable sleeping cars for use in the Midwest.¹²

Railroad executives and investors recognized that comfortable carriages would find a ready clientele. Passengers complained about the Spartan conditions of long-distance travel in the early years of the industry. Trains were inconvenient and dangerous enough during the day but downright nasty at night. Most passengers sat upright, leaning against each other for stability. Worse were meal stops, where “a mouthful of indigestible food, consisting of railroad oysters, railroad pie and railroad coffee” could be had for fifty cents.¹³ Any innovation that increased the quality of the cuisine and the comfort of the journey would doubtless succeed. A relaxing ride combined with edible food was “a desideratum the force of which none deny.”¹⁴ The challenge came in converting the standard day coach into a hotel on wheels.

Pullman & Field entered an expanding market at a time when railroads recognized the growing demand for palatable journeys and the earning potential of longer runs. For those reasons the Indianapolis, Pittsburgh & Cleveland Railway inaugurated sleeper service in 1858 by charging an extra fifty cents for a bunk.¹⁵ The Great Western of Canada added sleeping cars to its service from Niagara Falls to Detroit across Ontario in the same year. The Great Western built a sleeping car for thirty-six passengers, allotting extra room for three-tier berths placed at each end of the car, its wide tracks allowing relatively spacious quarters.¹⁶ None of these early efforts offered much more than a quickly converted chair or bench. The economic and operational feasibility of turning a comfortable seat into a commodious bed emerged a year later from the fertile mind of Theodore T. Woodruff.

Woodruff worked for the Terre Haute & Alton Railroad, operating across southern Illinois from the St. Louis area into Indiana. The Terre Haute contracted with the Wason Car Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, to build vehicles using patents Woodruff owned. The new sleeping cars proved so popular that he left the railroad and went into business for himself. By 1859, Woodruff had expanded sufficiently to supply the giant Pennsylvania Railroad with sleeping cars. Most important for the future, Woodruff patented a system for converting seats into beds, a concept the Pullmans would copy.¹⁷ Though still little more than narrow bunks enclosed by curtains and requiring a trained mechanic to operate the complicated mechanism turning chairs into sleeping berths, Woodruff's cars offered improved comfort and a modicum of privacy. George took note.

Shortly after raising the Matteson building in 1859, Pullman & Field became the seventh manufacturer of sleeping cars in the United States by signing a contract to supply them to Matteson's Chicago & Alton line.¹⁸ Passengers on the Alton, like those on many railroads in the West, would welcome a luxurious car in which a good night's sleep was theoretically feasible. Alton trains covered the 282 miles from Chicago through Springfield to East St. Louis—where passengers transferred onto a ferry for St. Louis—in approximately thirteen hours.¹⁹ The line was poorly built and haphazardly operated, plagued by debt and financial misdeeds in its first years, but it met a growing demand for travel between the lakefront metropolis, the state capital, and the Mississippi River trading center.²⁰

To construct their car, Albert and George traveled to Bloomington, Illinois, a key junction where the Alton Road crossed the Illinois Central Railroad. The Alton's president, Joel Matteson, allowed the Pullman brothers to use one of the Alton's workshops, which would become the standard practice Pullman employed elsewhere in the United States and later in Europe. The brothers hired a craftsman, Leonard Seibert, who helped them choose two existing cars, numbers 9 and 19, for conversion into sleepers. Working with a mechanic and a car builder, Seibert stripped the Alton cars down to their shells and, with Albert's guidance, rebuilt them as sleepers.

Without blueprints but with Albert and George Pullman in attendance, Seibert installed twenty bunks, the upper ten pulled flush with the roof during the day and lowered for the night by a complex rope-and-pulley mechanism patented by Eli Wheeler and C. M. Mann. There was nothing new in this, but the Pullman brothers did replace conventional hard benches with upholstered seating, the first of many improvements they would pioneer.²¹ The inaugural run, a twelve-mile jaunt on the Illinois Central between Chicago's Van Buren Street station and the depot at Summit on August 15, 1859, convinced railroad executives that the Pullmans were onto something from which they could profit.²²

Albert and George's timing could hardly have been better. Chicago was expanding rapidly, and transportation was key to that growth. A settlement of barely 4,000 people in 1840, railroad development pushed it to 30,000 in 1850 and 112,000 by 1860. Chicago competed with St. Louis for grain and livestock conveyance, a process initially facilitated when the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked the Illinois River with Lake Michigan.²³ Speed and year-round service quickly demonstrated the utility of trains. Unlike canals, railways did not freeze and passengers could travel at speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, five times faster than canal boats. When the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad bridged the Mississippi River, the first line to do so, the railroad race to the West Coast commenced. Long-distance railroad travel fostered sleeping cars. Pullman & Field placed their first two on the Alton and built a third for the line from Freeport to Fulton, Illinois, the Galena Air Line, a branch of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad.

As interest from other railroads grew, the young partnership needed additional capital for an improved car to meet increasing passenger demands and to separate Pullman from its competitors.²⁴ George noticed reports of gold strikes in the Rocky Mountains filtering into the Chicago press. Attracted by the possibilities of what were called the Kansas goldfields, Pullman and Charles Moore created a new partnership with Chicago entrepreneur Robert Graham to purchase a pulverizing mill to release gold by smashing rocks. Graham took the machine to the Colorado territory, where Pullman and Moore opened two gold mines and sold the valuable commodity.²⁵ In June 1860, following completion of the Lake Street raising contract, George traveled on “one of ‘Pullman's Elegant Sleeping Cars’” (as he put it in a letter home) from Chicago to Alton and joined the Colorado gold rush.²⁶

By the time of his trip to Colorado, George Pullman was something of a Chicago celebrity and the press reported his departure “for the auriferous regions.”²⁷ He arrived in Denver City in late June, where one could “gaze off on the snowy range of the Rocky Mountains” and, he wrote his mother, attend Methodist church services. Though cautious because of conflicting reports regarding the amount of gold found in the Pike's Peak region, he felt confident that “a splendid opportunity is presented to enterprising men with a fair amount of capital to realize a fortune in a few years.” He formed a partnership—the fourth of his nascent entrepreneurial career—with a fellow New Yorker he met on the stagecoach between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Denver. James Lyon agreed with Pullman that profit could be had in supplying miners with food and goods, and the two men opened a store in Central City, the principal town in the new gold-mining district, “far removed from the borders of civilization.”²⁸ But civilization did not remain at arm's length for long, and by April 1861, George reported home that a “general feeling of gloom is apparent among our citizens occasioned by the present terrible state of political affairs at home.”²⁹ Civil War loomed.

While George ventured West and the country teetered on the edge of conflict, Albert returned to Grand Rapids and styled himself a “building remover.” Emily and their daughters Nellie, now aged five, and Emma, aged three, welcomed him.³⁰ For the next year or so, he alternated between Grand Rapids and Chicago, where he boarded at the Garden House. He stayed in Michigan from June 1860 until early in the new year, returning to Chicago to supervise the lifting of the Tremont House, the hotel celebrated as the headquarters of Abraham Lincoln's presidential campaign. This project, Pullman & Moore's most prestigious undertaking, entailed lifting the six-story building six feet to the new street level and adding a brick foundation. The dining room was to be enlarged and first-floor shops would get plate-glass windows. A new office and a freight elevator were installed in the areas opened up by the raising.³¹ Pullman & Moore hired five hundred workers and evenly spaced them around the one-acre site, their efforts elevating the building by a foot daily for a week. Work proceeded so smoothly that residents were “coolly pursuing their ordinary avocations, undisturbed by the curious transitions their shells were undergoing.”³² Supervised by Albert, the job went off without incident.³³

FIGURE 1. George Mortimer Pullman. Reproduced by permission of the Chicago History Museum, ICHi-040036.

Though George, in Colorado at the time, would later place himself at the center of the narrative, the Tremont lifting demonstrated Albert's competence, a lesson not lost on the younger brother.³⁴ Field vanished and Moore withdrew, so George gave Albert ever-more responsibilities, asking him to “look after my sleeping car business.”³⁵ Albert met with George's railroad contacts, helping to coordinate Pullman affairs during the younger brother's absence from Chicago.³⁶ Albert returned to Grand Rapids for the winter of 1861–1862, but neither furniture making nor house raising could pay the bills. He took a job installing new lathes in the Comstock furniture factory, contributing to the dilution of the very skills he possessed.³⁷ This was a common theme of the time as industries mechanized: skilled workers watched and even, as in Albert's case, participated in the erection and operation of equipment destined to render their skills obsolete.

In May 1862, with Emily expecting their third child, Albert traveled to Chicago, where George needed him to supervise the raising of more buildings on Lake Street. As the summer progressed, additional projects demanded his attention.³⁸ Albert returned temporarily to Grand Rapids but was soon back in Chicago, writing that the remaining building-lifting contracts meant he “had plenty of business on hand since George left” but complaining that “the city is full to overflowing and rents are exorbitant.” He planned to visit Grand Rapids again but, despite missing Emily and their daughters, he was juggling multiple tasks in Chicago, writing to his mother that “the Sleeping Cars are doing a flourishing business.”³⁹

George never stopped expressing his interest in and concern for those sleeping cars, requesting weekly accounts.⁴⁰ George expected Field to monitor the business, but it would be Albert who sent monthly financial summaries to him in Colorado and alerted him to new opportunities.⁴¹ Always seeking additional contracts, George met with officers of the Great Western Railway of Canada while returning to Colorado from a family visit in Albion. He spent several hours walking through the company's shops in Hamilton, Ontario, “making notes of the various improvements” he observed. Of a car built for the exclusive use of the Prince of Wales on his visit to Canada, George wrote, “its elegance and beauty far surpasses the power of my pen to describe even if I had the time.”⁴² Seeing this piece of rolling stock appears to have been crucial to George Pullman's decision to improve the interior of Pullman cars.

To earn contracts and justify building more cars, Benjamin Field spent the summer of 1862 in Bloomington working to convince the Alton Railroad to add more Pullmans to its fleet.⁴³ With his political career calling him to Albany, Field then expressed growing disinterest in the daily affairs of the partnership. As early as January 1863, Albert complained to George that Field was not communicating with him on money matters, rendering him unable to offer balance sheets to George or order supplies for the growing fleet. M. B. Hayes, the Alton freight manager who served as the conduit between the Chicago & Alton Railroad and Pullman & Field, echoed this concern.⁴⁴ Hayes was loyal to Field, who had first contacted the Alton Road about providing sleeping cars, but this attitude would soon change as Hayes realized the depth of the Pullman brothers’ passion for the project.

The Pullmans kept a particularly close eye on the financing and operation of Car 40, renamed Springfield to identify it with its principal destination. At least once a month, Albert wrote to George sharing his sense of how Springfield was faring, as part of a summary of the financial status of the company. Other cars were built to meet demand. No detail was too small to escape Albert's notice, including the positive reception given by passengers to new bedding and interest from other railroads in buying or leasing sleeping cars. Albert's power was not unlimited because of his poor track record as a businessman in Michigan. He deferred to George when railroads approached him for contract details and usually reported contact with railroad executives to his brother.⁴⁵

The largest group of passengers for Springfield were Illinois politicians traveling from Chicago to the state capital. Albert noted competition for their business from the Great Western Railway, which operated through central Illinois and Indiana and provided an alternative route for the trip from Springfield to Chicago.⁴⁶ On this occasion, Hayes implicitly criticized Albert for remaining in Chicago too long before traveling to Springfield to sell tickets. Hayes complained to George that “a little judicious management would have put $100 into your pocket.”⁴⁷ Hayes later wrote that Albert was traveling “down the road” to accompany a group of excursionists to Chicago.⁴⁸

Albert learned firsthand about railroad operations from men like Hayes, including who should and who should not receive passes for free travel in Pullman cars. Early recipients of passes included newspaper editors receptive to Albert's stories and hotelkeepers likely to send business their way.⁴⁹ Meeting journalists and hoteliers and handing out passes was more to Albert's liking than communicating finances to George, and perhaps he was choosing which job to undertake. His position in the company gave him a fair amount of latitude, and his work required him to travel on several railroads to prepare them for Pullman car operations.⁵⁰ Thus, a reciprocal relationship developed, one which brought Albert into contact with the managers and agents of all the railroads leaving Chicago. His networking had begun in earnest.

In Colorado, George recorded the changing fashions and fortunes of various commodities. The general store was a reliable source of income, but the gold mines did not produce consistently enough for his taste. He was arranging for wagon trains of ten to fifteen vehicles to bring staples—flour, cornmeal, cheese, butter, lard, coffee, sugar, and other lucrative commodities—to sell while financing a sawmill to exploit the abundant lumber resources around Central City. George hired laborers and charged them for room and board as they crushed quartz, milled wood, and sold supplies. Cotton and hay also filled his letters as he explored different avenues to amass the capital needed to fund sleeping-car construction, even selling the wagons bringing commodities out to him in Colorado.⁵¹ George estimated the supplies, into which Lyon invested $13,000, would bring a 12 percent profit. When the production of gold dipped, he sold the mines.⁵²

The first few years in Chicago gave the brothers vital experience with the construction and operation of railroad cars. George developed a business model in which railroad companies rented the cars and gave the extra fare to the Pullmans. The cars were becoming popular and profitable. Albert had demonstrated his effectiveness as a manager, first raising buildings and then supervising sleeping cars. He and George shared a vision of growth that Benjamin Field, distracted by his political career in New York, did not. Field and George would invest in real estate together, but Field's active role in the Pullman Company was ending.⁵³ Albert staffed the office, watched the cars, and provided George with financial information. His responsibilities grew as the car-building operations expanded.

Albert did not emulate his brother's capacity for saving money, however, preferring to spend it almost as soon as (and sometimes before) he earned it. He enjoyed material comfort and good food. As soon as he moved to Chicago, he searched for a house to buy, a symbol of the wealth and permanence he and Emily craved. Their future seemed to belong in Chicago and so Albert rented houses, first on Monroe Street and later on West Randolph. While visiting her husband, Emily expressed her dislike for both homes, and Albert moved a third time.⁵⁴ Social status and physical comfort were important to them: one of Albert's first purchases upon locating a house was a horse and buggy, for which he hired and housed a coachman. Settling into their new home on Ashland Avenue and urged on by Emily, the couple began a concerted search for stability, status, and social prominence.