The Filleys: 350 Years of American Entrepreneurial Spirit

By Donald G. Southerton

The Filleys: 350 Years of American Entrepreneurial Spirit provides snapshots into American entrepreneurship history for a broad readership through a series of biographic essays. These stories, centering on the accomplishments of one family, provide vivid insights into entrepreneurialism in America, spatially across the country and temporally over three centuries.

Author Don Southerton guides the reader through multiple generations of the Filley family beginning in 17th century Puritan New England. The saga includes the rise of the Yankee trader, land speculation, and the development of American manufacturing.

The Filley business endeavors represent a slice of the American entrepreneurial experience. Moreover, this experience was shared by many thousands of other Americans whose families can be traced to colonial times. Together, they raised families, embraced capitalism, and built this country. The portraits of people and events in this saga provide us with a revealing and instructive glimpse into times long gone, and allow us to connect vicariously to a part of our collective past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 10, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595799558

Donald G. Southerton

Don Southerton is a life-long student of entrepreneurialism and business history. His current academic research focuses on American business endeavors with South Korea. In addition, Southerton oversees a consulting firm that globally provides cross-cultural training, coaching, and consulting to major North American and Korean corporations.

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The Filleys 350 Years of American Entrepreneurial Spirit

Copyright © 2005 by Don Southerton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

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Index by Donald G. Southerton

Cover art and design by Anna Cash-Mitchell

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-35462-7 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-79955-8 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-35462-9 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-79955-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

For my parents and generations of Americans who came before…

CHARTS—THE FILLEYS

Chart 2.1 First Filleys in America

Chart 2.2 The third generation

Chart 3.1 Daniel Filley

Chart 3.2 Filleys in French and Indian War

Chart 4.1 Revolutionary War Filleys

Chart 5.1 The sixth generation

Chart 5.2 Filley cousins

Chart 5.3 Captain Oliver Filley and family

Chart 6.1 Augustus and Amelia’s children

Chart 6.2 Elijah Filley’s family

Chart 6.3 Young William’s siblings

Chart 7.1 O.D. and Chloe Filley’s family.

Chart 7.2 Giles and Maria’s family.

Chart 8.1 Elijah and Emily’s family

Chart 8.2 Nebraska cousins

Chart 9.1 Frank Herbert Filley

Chart 9.2 Mary and Frank Herbert and their children Giles and Joan … Chart 9.3 Giles, Mary, and their four sons

TABLES

Table 2.1 Residence and Wealth

Table 7.1 Average Weekly Wages: Excelsior Stove Works, 1869

FIGURES

Fig. 5.1 Tinware shop

Fig. 5.2 Crooked-Spout Coffee Pot

Fig. 6.1 Captain Oliver Filley House

Fig. 6.2 Letterhead for Harvey Filley’s Philadelphia store

Fig. 6.3 Cover page The Indian Captive (1867)

Fig. 7.1 Bill of lading (1832)

Fig. 7.2 Portrait of Giles Franklin Filley

Fig. 7.3 Charter Oak Stove, 1878 model

Fig. 7.4 Eads Bridge (1873)

Fig. 9.1 Mary Elizabeth Colt Filley (1925)

Fig. 9.2 Frank Herbert Filley (mid-1940s)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The mature mind gives without thinking and receives without forgetting.

In the process of crafting this work, I have benefited enormously from many. My first thanks must go to Professor Mark S. Foster of the University of Colorado at Denver. His enthusiastic support, experience, and erudition proved invaluable in the research, writing, and editing of the manuscript. I also owe a special thanks to Dr. Christopher M. Filley and the Filley family. I am particularly indebted to their assistance, encouragement, and interest in the manuscript, especially the wish to share their saga with others. In addition, I would like to express my deep appreciation to University of Colorado at Denver History Department Professors: James E. Fell, Jr., Thomas Noel, Michael Ducey, James Whiteside, Myra Rich, and Pamela Laird, all of whom read portions of the manuscript or offered suggestions and comments.

While researching the manuscript I received assistance from: Sharon Steinberg at the Connecticut Historical Society, the staffs at the Denver Public Library and Auraria Campus Library, Connecticut’s Windsor Historical Society and Wintonbury Historical Society, and the Jackson, Michigan Public Library. I would like to express my gratitude to all of them. I, too, would like to thank Phyllis Witrup, Jane Mitchell, and Herman Mitchell for their thoughtful encouragement. Finally, from the time the book was conceived until its conclusion, Anna Cash-Mitchell provided never-ending assistance, copious editing, and useful, constructive comments, for which I will be always be grateful.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This book seeks to provide snapshots into American entrepreneurship history for a broad readership through a series of biographic essays. In some ways this work is a return to the narrative, once the backbone of cultural historical scholarship. To this end, the narrative focuses on members of a highly entrepreneurial family, the Filleys, and their direct involvement in a number of key collective experiences in American history, including Puritan settlement in New England, the Great Migration, the Colonial wars, Yankee trading, the movement west, abolitionism in Missouri, homesteading in Nebraska, and the rise of American manufacturing and commerce.

The saga begins with William Filley, who crossed the Atlantic, settled in Puritan Connecticut, and began to acquire land during the early seventeenth century. His progeny, continued to boost their landholdings, attended the religious revival meetings of the Great Awakening, fought in the French and Indian War, and waged war against the British in the fight for American independence. By the early nineteenth century, two branches of the family had developed. One followed the New England approach to the Jeffersonian model of the yeoman farmer. These Filley sons and daughters both cultivated and speculated on land, some kin remaining in Connecticut, and while others venturing west to Michigan and then to homesteads in post-Civil War Nebraska. The other branch of the family embraced the Hamiltonian model and became Yankee traders.

After developing a flourishing tinsmith business in Connecticut, they expanded to New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. The St. Louis Filleys were ardent abolitionists, supported the North during the Civil War, and became key participants in the struggle for Missouri to remain with the Union. After the war, their business ventures flourished; the Excelsior Manufacturing Company became the largest stoveworks in the country with its Charter Oak Stoves heating homes and cooking meals for tens of thousands of Americans. The twentieth century found Filleys active in light industry. Ninth generation Frank Herbert Filley entered the rope manufacturing business in St. Louis and grew the firm into one of America’s top suppliers. The fruits of his labor and vision employed hundreds of workers, while it also allowed his children and grandchildren to obtain college educations and seek socially beneficial work and careers outside manufacturing in medicine, science, and the arts.

The early chapters of The Filleys: 350 Years of American Entrepreneurial Spirit seek to create a framework for describing entrepreneurialism in America, spatially across the country and temporally over three centuries. Chapter Two, after supplying background on the Puritan movement in Britain, traces the exodus of colonists to the New World, and the settlement and acquisition of land in the early river town of Windsor, Connecticut. Then, through the lives of Windsor settler William Filley and his family, we explore town life, the early colonial farm, local government, and constant land acquisition. This chapter pursues the question: did opportunity drive individuals such as William Filley and his wife to settle New England? Chapter Three considers the impact of newly centralized government, land control, commercial endeavors, the Great Awakening, and war, all of which altered daily life for the once isolated river town of Windsor. In contrast, Chapter Four seeks to connect the economic effect of the Revolutionary War years on the Windsor community.

The narrative begins in earnest with Chapter Five, when the lineage of Oliver Filley Jr. surfaces and historic details of his business endeavors abound. Ambitious and successful, Oliver established a thriving Connecticut trading and tinsmith business and then expanded the enterprise across the new nation.¹ In Chapters Six, and Seven we trace the family as it moves away from the ancestral home of Windsor, Connecticut and embark on new economic ventures. In the course of their westward trek, the Filleys are exposed to the rigors of travel and the wilderness, including an episode of Indian abduction. More profound is the family’s St. Louis business successes that include becoming one of America’s top cast iron goods manufacturers. Chapter Eight finds the Filleys as homesteaders in Nebraska, surviving pestilence, disease, rural isolation, and summer drought. Inspite of these challenges, entrepreneurialism still emerged and prevailed. Chapter Nine highlights highly successful manufacturer Frank Herbert Filley’s and his long and well spent life. And finally, this work’s last chapter provides an insightful summary into early American entrepreneurialism.

To conclude this brief introduction, the Filleys and their business endeavors represent a slice of the American entrepreneurial experience. They share this experience with many thousands of other Americans whose families can be traced to colonial times. Together, they raised families, embraced capitalism, and built this country. The portraits of people and events in this saga provide us with a revealing and instructive glimpse into times long gone, and allow us to connect vicariously to a part of our collective past.

CHAPTER TWO

A NOTION OF HEAVEN

God Sifted [sic] the whole nation that he might send choice Grain [sic] over into the wilderness, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller.

In the spring of 1639, Reverend Ephraim Huit, an ousted Anglican minister, left his Warwickshire parish in England with a few loyal followers. He traveled into the neighboring counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Dorchester, gathering a group to take with him on the ten week voyage to America, in search of a New Jerusalem. After arriving in Boston the group grew in number, adding other people already in Massachusetts, and set out for a new destination—Windsor, Connecticut—deep inland in the Connecticut River valley at the confluence of the Farmington and Connecticut Rivers. It is here during the early settling of Connecticut that the story of twenty-four year old Englishman William Filley begins. He was the first of the Filleys in America.

We know nothing of William before his arrival in Windsor, Connecticut, but having been born in the early seventeenth century (1615), he would have witnessed many of the events and trends of his day. This chapter examines William Filley’s world, in both England and the British America.¹ An interesting aspect of this episode is that it looks deeply into the popular myth that Puritanism was the driving force behind New England’s settlement. This work suggests that the quest for landholdings and opportunity was equally compelling.

Nevertheless, Filley’s Puritan world was fascinating and peculiar when compared to our modern society. Labor was sacred and grounded in communal behavior. William’s experiences in the New World would be in a unique moral-cultural system. New England Puritans developed a society to control itself: it encouraged private ownership, but kept it checked and balanced in moral restraint.² When Filley arrived in America he was of modest means; however, through hard work he progressed socio-economically. It was upon this base that generations of William’s descendants built their fortunes. Before we begin our study into the life of William Filley, this book will first look at the early settlement of the New World, specifically the Connecticut colony, and the country the colonizers left behind.

The Puritans

English businessmen operating joint stock trade companies in the early 1600s were primarily responsible for establishing many early settlements in the New World. The crown granted trade companies an exclusive right to develop a region economically. The British monarchy derived its claim to the New World from John Cabot’s 1497-98 discovery of New England and the king’s status as a Christian monarch.³

England’s first permanent colony in the Western hemisphere was Jamestown Plantation, in 1607. A second colony, Plymouth Plantation, was founded in 1620, south of present day Boston. Although, the Spanish were the first Europeans to exploit the Americas, the French, Swedish, and Dutch also established early settlements and trade companies; they too were eager to solidify their countries’ claims in the New World.

Many of these countries recruited people, through advertising and offers of free land, to settle or plant in the colonies. Some sought fame and fortune, some looked for religious freedom, and many fled poverty and hunger. The New England area attracted Puritan English Congregationalists—Separatists and non-Separatists—and between 1629 and 1640 thousands immigrated to this region.

Calvinism and its belief in predestination and a divine covenant with God influenced these radical Congregationalists. Predestination, in the Calvinist doctrine, argued that the human state was one of sin and that most people were irrevocably hell-bound, except for an elect—the visible saints. Therefore, since no one was sure who was one of the chosen, the Congregationalists tried to act as if they were bound for heaven. This led to a strict morality that dominated the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies. In fact, the Separatists, who settled the Plymouth Colony in 1620, felt the Church of England (also known as the Anglican Church) was so corrupt and evil that they must separate themselves from its dark influence. In contrast, the Puritans, mostly from the middle strata of English society, felt they needed to purify the Church through reform. They sought to bring the church to a state of purity and return Christianity to what it had been during Christ’s time. The Puritans believed that the Anglican Church had not carried the Reformation far enough and that church must be stripped of its ceremonies and vestments. These religious beliefs led Puritans to be viewed by the Crown as radicals and non-conformists.

Moreover, from England’s pulpits, Puritan ministers lectured their congregations on the sins of the Anglican Church—church idolatry, superstition, and failure to keep the Sabbath sacred. In the ministers’ self-righteous eyes, an evil epidemic was spreading across the kingdom, one in which the people blasphemed, committed adultery, and fornicated.⁴ Their opposition to the established Anglican Church proved costly, and many Puritans suffered torture, whipping, and ear removal.⁵ By opposing the Church, which was headed by the king, the Puritans were seen as a threat to the state and the monarchy, too. The Puritans’ radical beliefs, their challenge to the authority of the Crown, and the efforts by the Church and Crown to suppress them, motivated Congregationalists to seek the promised land.

Exodus

Four factors drove Puritans from England during the mid-seventeenth century. The first was the monarchies of King James I and his son Charles I. James I succeeded the popular Elizabeth I in 1603 and longed to rule England as an absolute monarch.⁶ James and his son ruled England in constant conflict with their Parliaments. Much to the dismay of many English, both monarchs dissolved Parliament numerous times. In 1629, Charles prevented Parliament from convening, and it was eleven years before it met again. Ultimately, by mid-century the English Puritans rose up against Charles in civil war.

Second, the Puritans did not agree with the religious politics of their kings. James I, angered by the futility of trying to the force Puritans into conformity, stated, If this be your party [sic] hath to say, I will make them conform themselves or else I will harry them out of the land or else do worse.⁷ Puritan persecutions increased, with 300 clergy forced from their parishes and fines levied. Upon Charles’s succession in 1625, he intensified this persecution. Charles opposed the Puritans more than his father, and he had even married a Catholic. The new queen, Henrietta Maria, was the daughter of King Louis XIII of France. Catholic priests and servants were soon seen in the English court. This suspected papal influence further upset Puritans and non-Puritans alike. Some Puritans (and many Anglicans) were infuriated by the rise of Catholicism in the royal courts and saw it as an evil omen that heralded the end of the world.

In 1629, William Laud, noted for his love of ceremony and his strict adherence to the Anglican Church rites, was appointed Bishop of London.⁸ He began promoting religious programs he called the beauty of holiness, a return to ritual and the high church. More importantly, Laud began a campaign of persecuting those opposed to the Anglican Church—the Catholics and Puritans. As time passed, Charles relied more on Laud in dealing with the radical Puritans. After Charles promoted him to Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud set to work barring Puritan ministers from their churches.⁹ Furthermore, Laud visited churches and required them to conform to Anglican edicts, and overruled Puritan customs that prohibited work on the Sabbath. He also re-instituted fining parishioners who did not attend Anglican Church services. Those who openly opposed him endured imprisonment and torture.¹⁰

The third factor that drove the Puritans from England was that Charles drifted into war with both France and Spain.¹¹ The English leader aggravated the French king (his father-in-law) by harboring ousted French Protestants, the Huguenots. Charles also began excluding the queen’s Catholic entourage from the English court. Although these actions might have gained support for Charles among the Puritans, in order to fund the unpopular war, he began to tax his subjects. Charles raised £8 million but sent those unable to pay to prison, further maddening English citizens.¹²

The fourth and final factor was economic. The Agrarian History of England and Wales noted that the period between 1620 and 1650 was one of the most terrible in English history.¹³ Food prices rose, wages dropped, and the cost of living and taxes increased (especially on beer and tobacco).¹⁴

Cumulatively, these events prompted a mass exodus called the Great Migration. This began in 1630, when fourteen ships and over 1,500 settlers, under Puritan John Winthrop’s supervision, sailed for the New World.¹⁵ This group’s jurisdiction came under the Massachusetts Bay charter, a different entity than the Virginia Company that established the Jamestown and Plymouth Plantations.¹⁶ Eventually the Boston based group would absorb their neighbors in Plymouth and expand into Connecticut.

Also aggressively laying claims in New England were the Dutch. Initially, the Dutch West Indies Company established trading post settlements in what are today New York City and Albany. They then began to move up the coast to Connecticut. In colonial policy and objectives, the New England English Puritans and the Dutch differed substantially; the main goal of the Dutch was trade with the American Indians, whereas the English Puritans were looking for a permanent home.

In the 1630s the Massachusetts Colony population grew rapidly with the arrival of nearly one hundred ships and tens of thousands who had fled oppression, a poor economy, and massive governmental upheaval (which eventually resulted in Charles I’s beheading). By the mid 1630s, the Bay Colony inhabitants began to expand inland and into Connecticut—a name derived from the American Indian word for long tidal river. Several factors contributed to groups of Bay settlers moving inland. One was the Bay area’s poor farming conditions that resulted from numerous marshes and wetlands. This lack of good agricultural land prompted farmers to seek the abundant farm-lands inland. The second reason for the movement out of the area was the Bay Colony’s oligarchic government, controlled by a few select Puritans. Some of the rival Puritan group leaders felt restricted under Governor Winthrop’s version of Puritanism. All of these factors motivated these groups to move inland so they could practice their version of Calvinism with their own «gatherings.»

Early Windsor

The Connecticut River Valley began to be settled by several Anglo groups including the Dutch, and the English Separatists and Puritans. The Dutch had first explored the Connecticut River region in 1614 and hoped to establish trade with the local tribes of American Indians.¹⁷ The Dutch traders settled in the Hartford area after buying a strip of land from the regional Pequot Indians in June of 1633. Jacob Van Curler led