Rochester's Flour-Milling Industry in Pre-Canal Days

Edmond M. Beame

Business History Review, 1957, vol. 31, issue 2, 209-225

Abstract: The early development of Rochester as a flour-milling center demonstrates several themes. Here, as in countless other places, the resiliency of the petty capitalist in the face of natural disasters and violent commodity price swings stands clear. But the early millers, flexible and energetic in entrepreneurial activity, were also, like their product, perishable. The broader and more important pattern is that of the persistence of an industry favored by basic geographic and market circumstances. Individual milk succumbed in rapid sequence, but rapidly they were replaced. Surviving the handicap of limited capital, the milling industry burst its heal bonds and exploited the regional potentialities of water access to Canada. Transition to what then amounted to a national market came in 1823, when the Erie Canal linked Rochester with the Hudson. Thus a new epoch was forecast, when a broadened market would not only stimulate local growth but shape it through complex economic influences hitherto little felt by the millers on the Genesee.

Date: 1957
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