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William Colgate & Company
| Name | William Colgate & Company |
| Ortssitz | Jersey City (N.J.) |
| Straße | Grand Street |
| Art des Unternehmens | chemische Fabrik |
| Anmerkungen | Lage: Ecke Grand und Hudson Street. Sitz der Gesellschaft in New York. Fabrikation seit 1847 in Jersey City. Von 1806-1858 "William Colgate & Company", dann bis 1928 "Colgate & Company". 1928 nach Zusammenschluß mit der "B. J. Johnson Company", Milwaukee, WI ("Palmolive") und "Peet Brothers", Kansas: "Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company", seit 1953 "Colgate-Palmolive Company" |
| Quellenangaben | [Jersey City of to-day (1906) 69] |
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Zeit = 1: Zeitpunkt unbekannt
| ZEIT | um 1906 |
| THEMA | Beschreibung |
| TEXT | The corner of Grand and Hudson Streets has seen more of Jersey City history than any other spot in town, for it is the site not only of the first house but also of the first brick building in Jersey City, and on it has recently been completed the city's first reinforced concrete structure. From 1764 to 1907 is a long time, but it is no greater gap than between the tavern built at what was then called Paulus Hook and the eight-story, all-cement and steel factory now completed by Colgate & Co. If you had landed at Jersey City, or Paulus Hook rather, when George the Third was king, you would have disembarked from your sailboat ferry at the foot of Grand Street and spent the night at Michael Cornelissen's tavern before taking the morning stage to Philadelphia. Later, after the Associates of the Jersey Company bought the site of the city and the ferry rights, you could have put up at the new brick
hotel built in 1805, and this, enlarged and renamed the "Hudson House," would have received you had you come
ashore from a Cunarder in the "roaring Forties. " To-day, tax receipt for the year 1806 of $6.64. At the 100th anniversary dinner a year ago, celebrating a Colgate century of soap-making, it was stated that besides their 160 toilet soaps, and their laundry, shaving and special soaps, the firm made 600 and odd varieties of perfume, and with their talc and dental powders, glycerine, vaseline, etc., kept over 2.000 styles in stock. As for soap, those factories made last year enough fine toilet soap to reach cake-end to cake-end from the city's river-front to Chicago's lake-front and very nearly back again, and their 1906 output of laundry soap, if so arranged, would have made an unbroken line of soap cakes between the Hudson River and San Francisco's Golden Gate, with enough left over to reach the Gulf of Mexico. Or to express it in another way, if you would pile this firm's annual product of soaps of all kinds on a city lot 25x100, you would have a solid column 303 feet in height, or five stories higher than the Flatiron Building. But size is not the most remarkable thing about Colgate & Co. on your way from the Pennsylvania ferries, you pass those big blocks of buildings, whose mammoth electric sign nightly challenges the shining windows of the skyscrapers of Manhattan with its "Colgate's Soaps and Perfumes." And as the Paulus Hook of pre-Revolutionary times became the second city in the state to-day, so from small beginnings grew the firm whom Jersey City claims as the oldest makers of fine soaps and perfumes in America and the largest in the world. It is said that three generations ago people used to crowd to see the enormous soap-pan built by William Colgate. Today the "enormous" pan still holds its enormous 43.000 pounds of soap, but a year or so ago Mr. Colgate's grandsons, the present firm of Colgate &Co., put up one that holds its modest million, and with nine of its twenty-five companions it gives Jersey City the ten largest soap-pans in the world. You can still see the card in which Mr. William Colgate advertised, "Soap, mould and dipt Candles for Sale," and "The highest price given for Tallow;" and his Co. There are quite a number of other things. For instance, there has never been either dissensions in the firm or disagreement with its employees. As no department has been closed by a strike, so no factory has been shut down for lack of orders. No judge has handed down a decision against Colgate & Co. The highest rating of the commercial agencies has always been theirs. No employee has been asked to give bond. This would make a remarkable statement in any annual report. But to say it after saying, "We are one hundred years old" ; " We have occupied the same site for one hundred years"; "Every member of the firm is a descendant of the founder", is only less remarkable than that the beginning of the second century should find this same business in the same place in the same family. For a hundred years, with the unities of business, location, and ownership intact, is unique on this side of the Atlantic, if not the world over. And Jersey City may well be proud of such a record. |
| QUELLE | [Jersey City of to-day (1906) 69] |
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