Preface
Once in a great while does the convergence of technological inventiveness, the accumulation of productive genius, and an expanding market need occur at the same point in time. On those rare occasions, the result is often the commercialization of a product so unique in its time that its use changes how society itself functions. Such a product was the Jaybird girder rail, invented by Tom L. Johnson and brought to production by Arthur J. Moxham.
In the late 1880s, urban America was transformed by the development of the electric street railway. Much has been written about the contributions to the urban transportation revolution of engineer-entrepreneurs like Frank Sprague, Charles Van Depoele and Elihu Thomson who developed the electrical systems and car motors that made trolley systems a reality and ultimately transformed the spatial dimensions of America's cities. Far less has been written about the role played in that revolution by the Jaybird rail, the track work on which most of the early railway systems were built between 1885 and 1894.
In its day, the Jaybird, a rolled steel girder rail with peculiar offset flanges, was used in the construction of most street railways all across the country. It was by all accounts the most innovative, the most durable, and the highest quality trackwork of its type available on the market. For those cities building electrified street railway systems from scratch or for others converting their old horse car lines or cable systems to electrification, the Jaybird was the standard choice. In terms of design and workmanship, it defined the field and dominated the market.
The Jaybird was the unique product of the Johnson Company, a small steel rail finisher that began its iron rolling experiments in Birmingham, Alabama and Louisville, Kentucky before establishing its mill operations permanently in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And while the Jaybird made the Johnson Company famous, it was the wide range of the company's supplemental lines of track work and engineering services that made the adoption of the Jaybird almost universal in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. During that time, the steel foundry and finishing shops of the Johnson Company made the finest and most sophisticated specialty railway track work in the country, perhaps in the world. Yet, the history of this company and the men who founded it remains largely unknown.
The Johnson Company existed as an independent business enterprise for only sixteen years, from 1883 to 1898. Its corporate life was short but eventful, marked by difficult early years, a meteoric rise to national prominence in its field, and a rather quiet and unceremonious death. Because it straddled the turbulent last decades of the nineteenth century, the company experienced first-hand the rapid technological developments, the huge financial consolidations, and the revolutionary organizational and managerial innovations that transformed American business into its modern corporate form. Through that period of radical change, the Johnson Company passed quickly, almost unnoticed.
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To place the Johnson Company in context, one must understand the dynamics of the American iron industry in the mid-nineteenth century. During the twenty-year period prior to the Civil War, iron production was dominated by small local mills that had sprung up along rivers in the eastern part of the country where coal and ore deposits had been discovered. Shortly after the War, technological advances in steel production brought the price of steel railroad rails down to the point that they began to displace iron rails in the national market. By the late 1870s, local iron mills had lost most of their share of the rail market to the newer Bessemer steel mills such as Pennsylvania Steel, Cambria Iron, Bethlehem Iron, Lackawanna Steel, and the Edgar Thompson Works.
To remain competitive in the rail market, steel producers invested in larger furnaces in the late 1860s and early 1870s. These were significant but risky investments that would yield profitable returns only if rail prices remained high. However the Panic of 1873 and the economic depression that followed revealed that the steel industry had over-invested in production capacity and rail prices fell. Fearing loss of their capital investments, the largest producers attempted to guarantee their own market shares by forming rail pools in the late 1870s to limit production. When this failed, several moved to secure control of their own market share by absorbing coal and ore mining companies and diversifying production into finishing operations. Capital holdings were further integrated by a series of famous mergers of rail, steamship, mining, steelmaking and finishing operations in the late 1890s, culminating in the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, a billion-dollar holding company, in 1902.
Against this backdrop, the Johnson Company emerged as a small, industrious steel finisher that concentrated its entire effort on the production of cast and rolled steel track work for street railways. In the early 1880s, railway trackwork was a small market with few competitors and the Johnson Company was comfortably profitable. But with the electrification of street railways in 1888, the market for street railway track work exploded and the Johnson Company was uniquely positioned to exploit the advantage. Between 1889 and 1893, the wave of street railway construction in cities all across the country transformed the Johnson Company into a nationally prominent steel finisher with a huge volume of product sales. In short order, it began to export trackwork to Europe and South America as well. Having established a solid national and international market for its products, the Johnson Company was an attractive commodity to basic steelmakers seeking to move into the production of finished steel, and it was purchased by the Federal Steel Company in 1898.
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One might be tempted to view the history of the Johnson Company in just these terms, beginning with its incorporation in 1883 and ending with the sale of its assets to Federal Steel some sixteen years later. But there is much more to the company's history than this. It was actually part of a flow of history and as such can be seen as both the product and the cause of unique interplay between individuals and events. Its story should not be reduced to a chronology viewed in historical isolation. It must instead be viewed as one piece in a complex collage of interwoven stories of real people, actual places, and critical events.
In order to understand the history of the Johnson Company on this deeper level, one must explore its "pre-history" as well, to place it in the context of time and place. After all, the company was a business entity that emerged from and thrived in a peculiar social and economic setting and as such should be considered a reflection of its historical context. At the same time, one must assess the influence of various personalities on the development of the company. Any company, whether a traditional single-product family enterprise of the 1850s or a modern diversified corporation of the 1980s, is to some degree a reflection of the peculiar vision, innovation, direction, and drive of one or more entrepreneurial personalities. In most cases, the entrepreneur himself is a reflection of his peculiar time and context, often making it difficult to distinguish the extent to which the sheer force of his own personality contributed to the dynamic quality of the company.
Consider for example that the Johnson Company spent its entire corporate life in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and most of the residents of that city, many of whom worked at the mill itself, viewed the company and its mill as peculiarly their own. Yet the historical account which follows will demonstrate that the company's origin and indeed its very operating character were largely the result of economic forces unique to Louisville, Kentucky in the 1870s. Furthermore, while the Johnson Company exhibited many of the prototypical characteristics of an early modern corporation, it retained many of the operational characteristics of a mid-nineteenth century family company. To understand the origins and operation of the Johnson Company would then require some scrutiny of the social and economic context of family enterprises in Louisville, the city of its origin.
This account will also demonstrate that although the company always bore the name of Tom Johnson, its operating character and entrepreneurial direction were primarily set by Johnson's partner Arthur J. Moxham. A great deal is known of Johnson because he was a very public man and wrote a fairly detailed autobiography before his death in 1911. Moreover, a good amount of research has been done on his early career as an inventor and entrepreneur and on his later life as a national figure in the progressive movement after the turn of the century. On the other hand, far less is known of Moxham, a very private man on whom virtually nothing has been written. In fact, Moxham accepted a public role only once, as head of the Emergency Relief Committee during the first days following the Great Johnstown Flood. As the following account will reveal, an understanding of the driving force behind the Johnson Company requires a deeper appreciation of the life of the young Welsh ironmaster whose career began in a small Louisville iron mill and included a principal development role in one of the earliest modern corporations - the Du Pont Company.
And finally, while the Johnson Company expired as an independent corporate entity in 1898, its legacy remains visible in many quarters of today's society. History has recorded the dramatic impact that electric street railways had upon the growth and constitution of America's cities, but rarely has the role played by the Johnson Company in the construction of early street railways been considered. Moreover, the company left an indelible imprint on the spatial and economic development of the City of Johnstown and on the many generations of workers who have continued to produce high quality steel track work and castings at the Johnstown mill site. What Johnstown is today is in large measure due to the prominence of the Johnson Company over a century ago.
To a certain degree, this historical account is designed to show that the character of the Johnson Company cannot be understood outside of the flow of both regional and national economic forces of the age in which it was born. It is also designed to document (at least to a partial degree) the role played by that company in the development of electric street railways in the late nineteenth century. And finally, it is designed to demonstrate the company's place in the flow of business history so that those who have been associated with it over the generations can better appreciate its contribution to America's industrial heritage.