Executive Suite

by Cameron Hawley

  The coroner obligingly reported that Orrin Tredway had been killed by the accidental discharge of a pistol that he had been cleaning. No one was fooled. Everyone suspected suicide. A month later they knew for sure. By then the motive for self-murder was clearly evident. Orrin Tredway was bankrupt. He had squandered his entire personal fortune and all but ruined the Tredway Furniture Company in order to build the Tower. It had been a colossal financial blunder, the senile floundering of an old man who, in the last years of his life, was trying desperately to fulfill the promise of his ancestry. There had been great men in his lineage, men who had left their mark on Pennsylvania since the days of William Penn, but the strong blood was gone before it came to Orrin Tredway’s veins. He was the last of the line. There was no Tredway to succeed him as president of the company.

  The people of Millburgh had bowed to the anticipated loss of the Tredway Furniture Company as another inevitable downward step in the slow disintegration of the city’s industry. It had been going on for a long time. The days of Millburgh’s greatest glory lay so far back in its history that there was no man still alive whose memory could span the years. There were those who could recite the facts, but their recitations came from legends preserved in the mice-smelling rooms behind the public library that served as the headquarters of the Millburgh Historical Society.

  There were even people living in Millburgh—as horror-stricken members of the Historical Society were occasionally made to realize by papers at its first-Friday-after-the-first-Thursday meetings—who did not know that Millburgh had not been named for the mills that once lined the Susquehanna, but for John Mills of Liverpool, England, who had established the riverside settlement that eventually became Millburgh.

  In either 1747 or 1748, the exact date being as unverifiable as it is unimportant, John Mills sailed up the Susquehanna with a party of British traders who were intent upon buying iron from the furnaces that had recently been established in the river hills. Along most of the river, the hills came down sharply to the water edge and there was little flatland, but the Mills’ party discovered one place where prehistoric erosion had cut back the hills to leave a flat half-moon of lowland. It was almost three miles across the river face and, at the center point, there was over a mile between the water and the steep-cliffed palisade of the cutaway hills. It was here that the party stopped and began the building of a warehouse for the collection of iron until it could be loaded on the barges that were to float it down to Baltimore for shipment to England.

  What scanty historical evidence still remains indicates that John Mills was more generously endowed with the spirit of private enterprise than with loyalty to his British employers. A year later he was in business for himself, contracting with furnace owners to supply the large quantities of charcoal that were used in the production of iron.

  From the cutting of wood for charcoal to the cutting of wood for lumber was an easy step and by 1752 the sawmill that John Mills erected on Cutlass Creek was reputed to be one of the three largest in the colonies.

  Much of the lumber was hauled overland to Philadelphia. Hauling required wagons and John Mills started to build them. It was a logical enterprise. The wood came from his own sawmills and the iron forges to make the necessary metal parts were close at hand. He had already acquired a controlling interest in one forge and was a partner in another.

  The tide of emigration to the West had started to flow in earnest and the fame of the covered wagons that were built at Mills Landing spread through the taverns up and down the Eastern seaboard where men gathered to plan their treks to the lands beyond the Susquehanna. They came to Mills Landing to buy wagons and John Mills saw the chance to sell them other things as well. Great stone warehouses were built along the waterfront to house all manner of goods, but John Mills was a manufacturer at heart, not a trader, and soon there was a mill for the weaving of hempen canvas, a tannery and a harness factory, a pottery near the claybank on Cutlass Creek, and all manner of smaller shops. The wagon works suggested a natural expansion into agricultural implements and the Mills plow became as famous as the Mills wagon.

  A letter written in 1761 by one W. Crayton to his waiting compatriots in Philadelphia, describes the Mills Landing of that year.

  HONOURED SIRS:

  This is to send you the intelligence that you should come with All Haste and it is in no ways necessary to burthen yourself for this part of the journey since all that is needed by us for our westward venture can be Purchased Here to good advantage from Mr. John Mills who is the Proprietor of such as I am sure will Amaze you. The shops are of a magnitude that is beyond belief and the sound of the smiths so great and constant that is as if a great Battle was being fought even into the night.

  Our two waggons have been promised for the 9th instant but both taverns are crowded with those who wait before me and I do not view the date with Certainty. To hasten our departure I have ordered of Mr. Mills such articles as you will find on the list which I beg you to examine for your approval. The axes and scythes are of Superior Design and the chests are Iron Bound and most Nicely Made.

  There is one matter in which I do not feel free to act without your counsel and it is about Horses. On his plantation, which is on the high level above the town, Mr. Mills raises a fine beast which is called the Conestoga Horse and there are teams of such which are yet for sale although I cannot perceive if all will not soon be boughten by others which is one cause why I implore you to Hasten here.

  Do not Speak of this next matter to Mary but I have six jugs of Spirits made in Mr. Mills’ distillery. It is of Uncommon fineness and I mention it to add to your Haste in coming.

  It was in the same year as Crayton’s letter was written, 1761, that the town was formally laid out and renamed Millburgh. Prior to that time everything at Mills Landing was owned personally by John Mills, including more than two hundred stone houses which he had built for his employees. The favored workers were the English wheelwrights and carpenters whose emigration from England had been arranged by John Mills, and he carefully managed the sales of houses and lots so that all of his countrymen lived in the northern half of the town. The south half, where the mills and shops fronted the river, thus became the home of the German and Swiss ironworkers and was soon called “Dutchtown.” The two main east and west streets were named George and Frederick, recognizing the reigning kings of Great Britain and Germany.

  George Street and everything north became the “best” section of Millburgh. Social standing began to be measured by distance from the river. The mansion houses of those who grew rich from John Mills’ favor were built along North Front Street and they became known as “North Front families,” the top of Millburgh’s social scale.

  South of Frederick Street, in Dutchtown, the houses that were built by the workers were of red brick instead of gray limestone, huddled closely together on small plots of land, many being built in the row fashion of Philadelphia and Baltimore with no division between them except a common wall.

  John Mills held himself aloft from the rabble of the town. His plantation of over three thousand acres completely surrounded the cliff-edged bowl of Millburgh and, centrally on the rim, so that all of his domain could be seen from his veranda, he built the great mansion of Cliff House. It was started in the spring of 1760 but, according to a legend which the house still stands to verify, the elaborateness of the interior woodwork demanded nine years for its completion. John Mills was one of the richest men in the colonies and he lived on a scale to fit his purse. When he died in 1784, a contemporary account records that more than two hundred house servants and plantation workers followed the casket on foot.

  James Mills, John’s eldest son, carried on in his father’s tradition and continued to expand the factories. Whether through wisdom or good fortune, his greatest expansion was in the lumber business and it was there that he laid the foundation for the high-water mark in Millburgh’s economic history.

  After the War of 1812 the British flooded the Americ
an market with ironwork and agricultural implements priced so low that the Millburgh forges and factories could not compete. The lumber business took up the slack. The local timber had long since been cut, most of it to make charcoal for the iron furnaces, but now great rafts of white pine came floating down the river from the upper reaches of the Susquehanna. The Millburgh sawmills were waiting and the town became the center of lumber supply for Philadelphia and all of southeastern Pennsylvania. It was a lusty, rip-roaring, money-coining period. Millburgh had been a boom town since its birth but there had never been anything to match this. On South Front Street, raftmen stood six deep at the tavern bars. On North Front Street, the militia guarded the mansion dwellers from the drunken roistering rivermen who recognized no limits in their quest for port excitement. Every month there were more mansions to guard. New fortunes were being made so fast that the old designation of a “North Front family” had already begun to lose some of its meaning.

  The lumber boom lasted well into the eighteen-thirties. By then the upriver sawmills at Williamsport, Lock Haven, and Renovo began to take the business away and Millburgh’s tide had turned. The iron and steel industry moved West and the farm implement business trailed the ironmasters. The old Mills Plow Company dwindled into insignificance. The tannery closed and the kilns at the brickyard crumbled into ruins.

  The Civil War brought a respite in the city’s declining fortune but, with the Reconstruction years, the downward course continued. Only three local industries of any importance survived the panic of 1873—the Mills Carriage Works, with which no descendant of John Mills was any longer associated, the Mills Iron Foundry, now owned by the Krautz family, and the Everett-English Cotton Mill, which was the lineal inheritor of the weave shed where John Mills had woven the flaxen canvas for his covered wagons.

  The Tredway Furniture Company could not then be listed as an important Millburgh industry but its advertised claim-phrase, “Established 1788,” can be historically justified. Josiah Tredway, a cabinetmaker by trade, came from England in 1766 to carve the decorations on the fireplace mantels of Cliff House and stayed on to make Millburgh his home. In 1788 he opened a shop on the alley behind Cromwell Street between George and Frederick, the present site of the Tredway Tower, for “the makeing of tables, chares, and cabinets in the style of England and of the best qualities.” The shop was carried on by his son, George, and during the early years of the nineteenth century was one of dozens of little one-man furniture shops in Millburgh, a natural outgrowth of the fact that many of the men John Mills had brought from England for his wagon works were cabinetmakers. From 1788 forward, various Tredways were continuously listed as “cabinetmakers” on Millburgh assessment rolls. The designation of “factory owner” does not appear until after Oliver Tredway’s name in 1874.

  Aided by the depression of values brought on by the panic of 1873, Oliver Tredway managed to acquire one of the old stone warehouses that had been built more than a hundred years before by John Mills, equipped it with discarded machinery from one of the old sawmills, and gathered a complement of skilled woodworkers from the bread lines that formed daily on South Front Street. The company prospered and by 1910, when Orrin Tredway became its head, it was Millburgh’s largest industry, a distinction that it had acquired not only through its own expansion but also from the default of its rivals. The panic of 1907 closed the Mills Carriage Works. Shortly afterward the cotton mill owners uprooted their machinery and transplated it to North Carolina. Only the Krautz Steel Company—the former Mills Iron Foundry—remained and its days were numbered. In an attempt to compete with the Pittsburgh steelmakers, George Krautz had kept wages low and fought the unionization of his employees with the same unyielding independence that had kept him from selling out to one of the big steel combines. The eventual result was a strike that dragged on and on, frequently flaring into violence. One morning after a man had been killed in a picket-line brawl, old George Krautz climbed to the roof of the office building and shouted to the mob of men below that unless they went back to work that very day he would close the mills forever. The announcement was greeted with derisive catcalls. George Krautz was a man of his word. The mill never opened again. The machinery was moved away and the ghostly skeletons of the buildings, eaten away by the red cancer of rust, slowly dropped their sheet-iron skins into the weeds of the yard.

  The Tredway Furniture Company that Orrin Tredway inherited from his father, Oliver, was a sound and substantial concern. In the 1910 edition of Whittaker’s Index it was ranked eighteenth in size among the furniture factories of the nation. If there had been a listing based upon profits, its rank would have been higher. Oliver Tredway had something of a genius for extracting gold from wood. Few men have made fortunes from furniture manufacturing. Oliver Tredway was one of the few. Much of his success was attributable to his mechanical ingenuity. During most of the first quarter-century of the company’s existence, furniture of the rococo Turkish and French styles was in vogue and Oliver Tredway invented machine after machine to reduce the cost of the elaborate carving, turning, and scrollwork. When the buying public finally revolted against overdecoration and turned to the severely plain Mission style, Oliver Tredway mechanized manufacture to an extent never before seen in the industry, reducing his labor costs so drastically that a number of other factories bought from him because, even after Oliver Tredway added a generous profit, his selling prices were still under their own production costs. In common with many of the industrialists of the period, Oliver Tredway’s prime interests were centered in the factory. His office was seldom used. He spent most of his working day wandering through the factory, frequently removing his frock coat and yellow doeskin gloves to lend a hand at tinkering some new piece of machinery into production. The gloves were a concession, as all of his intimates knew, to the propriety that a big factory owner should not have grease on his hands. When Oliver Tredway wore his gloves, no one could see the unremovable stains.

  Orrin Tredway inherited little from his father except his wealth and the control of the company. Father and son were almost as temperamentally dissimilar as it is possible for two human males to be. Millburgh explained it by saying Orrin “took after his mother,” which was seldom spoken as a criticism, for Orrin’s mother had been an Elwood and the Elwoods were one of the oldest and most distinguished of the North Front families. She had wanted Orrin to follow his maternal forebears into the law as a steppingstone to high governmental service, but his years at Harvard revealed that what talent young Orrin Tredway had was better suited to the life of a dilettante in the arts than to an attorney. After college he spent most of his time abroad, and the back draft of occasional bits of rumor linking his name with famous artists and writers made him something of a local celebrity. Afterward he deserted the arts and took up international society. He was the only resident of Millburgh who had ever been the house guest of an English duke. His return to Millburgh after his father’s death was delayed, so it was said, because he had been asked by a member of the royal family to stay in England until after the coronation of George V.

  There were some people who were surprised that Orrin Tredway returned to Millburgh at all, more who predicted that he would never take over the active management of the Tredway Furniture Company, and still more who prophesied catastrophe if he attempted it. The happenings of the first few years confounded the critics. Not only did Orrin Tredway step in as president of the company but he made an auspicious start at the job. While in England he had seen the decline of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement and realized that the pendulum of public taste was due for another swing. He guessed that it would be toward colonial reproductions and, against the advice of his father’s former associates, forced through a sample line that was strongly influenced by Sheraton and Hepplewhite. It was a great success. The next year he scored again with the introduction of new furniture woods, particularly with black walnut, which had hardly been used at all by American furniture makers since the end of Medieval and Goth
ic fashions in the eighteen-eighties.

  Orrin Tredway proved as much a dilettante in business as in the arts. In a few years his interest flagged. In 1915, through the influence of his maternal uncle who was an ambassador, he was appointed to a governmental commission and from that year until well after the end of World War I, he spent less and less time in Millburgh. The affairs of the company drifted, but profits were still high until the depression of 1921. It was rumored that the company lost almost a quarter of a million dollars that year. Orrin Tredway came back to his desk. Half of the factory was closed, more than half of the men were laid off. He rose to the emergency, using his political connections to get furniture contracts for government buildings. Even more important to the future of the company was the employment of a young salesman named Avery Bullard who, having quit his job with the old Bellinger Furniture Company, had walked in with the order for all the furniture for a chain of hotels.

  The men came back to work in the factory and Orrin Tredway drifted away in search of a new interest. He found it through his appointment as General Chairman of a committee to arrange for the celebration of the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Millburgh. The hero of the occasion, of course, was to be John Mills, and Orrin Tredway conceived the idea of restoring Cliff House, the old Mills mansion. It was hidden away in bramble-laced thicket of second-growth brush, untenanted for over fifty years, and in a very bad state of repair. The committee saw no hope of financing the restoration, so Orrin Tredway took over, bought the property, spent almost two hundred thousand dollars on it, and moved into Cliff House as his own home. Not only did he adopt John Mills’ home, he also adopted his extravagant manner of life. Business boomed as the years of the twenties went by. The Tredway Furniture Company’s profits were large but not large enough to keep pace with Orrin Tredway’s spending. He was an old man now, fog-brained with delusions of aristocratic grandeur, and it was then that he decided to build the Tredway Tower. No argument could stop him, as no argument could have stayed the finger that touched the trigger of the gun that ended his life.