Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXXVI

Deep River had ship building and quarrying among its other ventures, but it wasn't a company town like Sam Comstock's Ivoryton.
 
The street across from the redbrick Pratt, Read factory built in 1882 is the road where ivory tusks were brought up from the river landing in horse-drawn wagons.
 
The major employer was Pratt Read and the center of the town's life.  In 1881 a fire destroyed the factory, along with 15 tons of ivory, and everything but the company safe.   Approximately 150 men were on the payroll and at a meeting a few days later, townspeople voted to offer the company a major abatement to rebuild in Deep River.
 
Accounts of Pratt, Read and competitor Comstock, Cheney praised company leaders for the rigor of their work ethic and for their "native Yankee shrewdness".  Taking a raw material imported from halfway around the world, the ivory workers applied artisan-level craftsmanship and precision machine work.  This was the new American style of industry.  The result: a high-volume, high-quality product that brought two company contracts from throughout the country.
 
Early summer of 1876 saw letters showing Comstock, Cheney supplying ivory keys to more than a dozen piano and organ manufacturers.  The old letters also show a brisk business in billiard balls, combs, & many other objects made of ivory, the plastic of its age.
 
For more than a century Connecticut was a center of ivory knowledge, the center of ivory manufacturing in America, and a world leader in the business.  It's known that 75 percent of the total of the thousands of tons of ivory that passed through Zanzibar during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to Connecticut.
 
David Shayt, Smithsonian curator, who's extensively researched Connecticut's ivory industry, has estimated that between 1884 and 1911, nearly 10 million pounds of unworked ivory were brought into the United States.   On the New York market the per-pound price ranged from $1.80 to $4.00.  That's a minimum figure of nearly $18million, or about $310 million in today's currency.
 
A lot of money, a lot of elephants, and a lot of black people carrying ivory to a port called Bagamoyo, which, in Swahili, means:
 
"LAY DOWN YOUR HEART."
 
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Bibliography
 
Smithsonian curator....today's currency: Shayt, "Elephant under Glass," p. 40.
 
Malcarne, "Ivoryton, Connecticut", p. 286
 
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery: COMPLICITY, Farrow, Lang, and Frank, Ballantine Books, New York, pp. 205-206