II. The Louisville Rolling Mill Company
Like many of the early iron making entrepreneurs in the eastern United States, Thomas Cooper Coleman had come to America from what the old-timers affectionately referred to as "the old sod" as a bright young man in search of opportunity. It was rumored around in Birmingham, Alabama where he had friends and investments, that his exit from his native Ireland had been prompted by a too-close association with the often violent Irish emancipation movement in the mid-1830s, and a hasty relocation of his family and capital was apparently quite necessary.
Born in County Cork in 1800 as the eldest of eight children of a prosperous coal merchant, Coleman completed his education at the University of Dublin by the age of twenty. Shortly thereafter, he and his sister Anne would become guardians for their six brothers and sisters when both their parents died in the early 1820s. Coleman himself married a young Welsh girl named Catherine Dwyer in 1821, and over the next nine years she bore him four children, Thomas, Margaret, John, and Nanno. Coleman engaged in various successful business enterprises in Ireland and by the early 1830s was part-owner of a line of steam packets along the coast. His wife Catherine died in 1830 and Coleman married a second time three years later to Dora Morgan, one of twelve children in the family of John Morgan from Glamorganshire, South Wales.
Coleman had taken care to plan his departure from Ireland in 1834 by setting up the purchase of farming land near Cincinnati, Ohio, and while in transit through France, his first son by Dora, Morgan, was born. Arriving in New Orleans with his wife and five children, Coleman made his way up the Mississippi to Cincinnati to begin his new life as a farmer. But he soon tired of the agrarian life, sold off his properties, and returned to his natural trade by taking a position on a steamboat running the Cincinnati to New Orleans route. Soon thereafter, he placed his capital into the purchase of two steamboats, the SALADIN and the LOUISVILLE, which were based in Louisville, and moved his family there. Once settled, he brought his younger brother John Coleman over from Ireland, and the steamboat lines became a family partnership for the next twelve years.
Based in Louisville, Coleman established extremely successful packet and passenger lines under the charter of the Ohio Line Company, which he capitalized by selling stock at $50 par among hundreds of Louisville citizens and firms. By the late 1840s, Coleman owned and operated four side-wheel steamboats, the two original boats on the more lucrative Louisville-to-New Orleans run, and two new boats built for the Louisville-to-Pittsburgh trade. By 1848, he was financially comfortable and had become quite prominent in the city. In the meantime, his wife had given him eight more children, for a total of fourteen in the large house (referred to by the children as The Castle) on Walnut Street in downtown Louisville.
His eldest son Thomas (who had taken on his father's adopted name of Thomas Cooper Coleman) was taken into the Ohio Line Company as a clerk, and at the age of twenty-five, was given command of the passenger boat SALADIN while the elder Coleman pursued other business enterprises in Louisville. Very shortly thereafter, Captain Tommy (as the younger Coleman became known) etched his name into river lore as the steamboat captain who `kidnapped' President Zachary Taylor. As the story goes, Taylor, a native Kentuckian and old friend of the elder Coleman from Louisville, had been elected President in late 1848 and was preparing to make his way from his Baton Rouge plantation along the Mississippi to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration in March the following year. It was presumed by all that the Coleman line would carry the President-elect from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg, that part of the journey made by boat, but Taylor's escort of New Orleans businessmen purposely booked passage on a rival steamboat line out of New Orleans.
Brash and confident, young Coleman slipped the SALADIN quietly out of New Orleans early on the evening the commissioned rival boat was scheduled to depart. He sped upriver at full steam and arrived at Taylor's private plantation landing the next morning several hours before the official passage carrier was due. To those on the landing, the steamboat was apparently earlier than expected but President-elect Taylor immediately recognized the son of his old friend and was persuaded to board and depart rather than wait for the later boat. The Taylor party scurried aboard what they believed to be the correct steamboat, and the SALADIN pushed away from the landing just as the rival boat became visible down-river, whistles blowing frantically as its captain watched his chance for making history slip away. Understandably, it is the one act for which Captain Tommy was always best remembered in Louisville.
Even before this time, the elder Coleman began to diversify his business interests in the Louisville area. His principal new enterprise was a partnership with William Burke Belknap in 1847 to purchase an unfinished iron rolling mill at the foot of Brook Street by the river. Over the next two years, the mill was completed and then chartered in 1850 as the Louisville Rolling Mill Company. Belknap had been associated with iron manufacturing from a young age, since his father had supervised construction of rolling mills in Pittsburg (in 1817) and later in Nashville. Young Belknap had worked for his father in Nashville, but struck out on his own to develop a merchant trade along the Mississippi. In 1840, he located in Louisville as an successful agent for a Pittsburg ironmaker, selling Juniata boiler plate and nails. In 1847, he decided to invest in local iron manufacturing himself.
The Louisville Rolling Mill Company, with offices and store on the corner of Fifth and Main and rolling mill on Brook Street between Main and River Streets, manufactured extremely high quality charcoal iron that was much sought after in the region. Its main products included boiler, bar, and sheet iron, flue plates, railroad axles, chairs and spikes, bridge bolts, and plowing implements. The heavier products, particularly the railroad bolts, were in great demand by local railroads, including, in the earliest years of their operations, the Louisville and Frankfort, the New Albany and Salem, and the Jeffersonville. By the late 1850s, the Louisville Rolling Mill provided much of the iron hardware for the construction of the new iron railroad bridges for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the main line of which was completed in 1859. The merchandising of the mill's smaller products was handled by either the mill store or by W. B. Belknap & Co., Belknap's own agency which was a family partnership with his younger brother Morris since the latter settled in Louisville in 1849. The Belknap family business, specializing in iron and heavy hardware, continued to prosper through the 1880s.
Though there is evidence that Coleman retained his interest in the SALADIN as late as 1851, he had sold his other steamboats by 1849 and put all of his capital into the completion and operation of the new iron mill. From the outset, he served as the company's President and Belknap, who had actual mill experience, became general manager. Coleman's brother John, who had left to pursue business enterprises in Canada in 1851 but returned in early 1853, became manager of sales and stock, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1875. In 1855, Coleman's son Thomas was moved up in the mill to the position of co-manager of mill operations along with Belknap.
Through the 1850s, the capitalization of the Louisville Rolling Mill Company increased to $300,000 and the Brook Street mill employed up to 135 men. It was considered at the beginning of the Civil War the largest and most prominent enterprise in the city. When the elder Coleman died in 1861, his son, thereafter known simply by his father's name Thomas Cooper Coleman, became President of the Louisville Rolling Mill Company. As the eldest male heir of the Coleman family, young Thomas Cooper Coleman became the head of the extensive Coleman family, and guardian of the interests of his many half-brothers and sisters. His stepmother Dora remained in the large residence on Walnut Street with her nine unmarried children and four domestics.
Thomas himself was married in 1849 to Dulcenia Payne Johnson, then the sixteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Kentucky state legislator, and settled in a house on Third and Walnut near Dora. (Dullie as she was called) would ultimately bear him thirteen children between 1850 and 1876, eleven of whom grew to adulthood. During the Civil War, Coleman also built and maintained a modest country residence on several hundred acres along the main line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad about twenty miles south of Louisville just outside the county seat of Sheperdsville. Called the Meadows, the property included a number of cottages that were inhabited by visiting relatives on most weekends.
During the decade of the 1860s, the rolling mill became almost entirely a family business. At the death of the elder Coleman, controlling stock in the company was inherited by his widow Dora, with some stock dispersed among his older male sons Morgan, Barry, and Edward, all of whom were brought into the mill's operations as they came of age. When Thomas Cooper Coleman succeeded his father as President, his eldest half-brother Morgan became manager of the mill. The company's charter was renewed in 1873, but as with most highly capitalized manufacturing enterprises of the day, the mill fell on hard times during the widespread economic depression following the panic of that year. To survive, many such family-owned and -run businesses were forced to open themselves to outside investors and control, and the Louisville Rolling Mill Company proved to be no exception.
In 1875, it was merged with a newly-incorporated enterprise, the Kentucky Rolling Mill Company, which Coleman himself had co-founded with Alfred V. and Bidermann du Pont, local entrepreneurs who had developed significant coal and iron mining interests in western Kentucky outside Louisville. Bidermann du Pont, manager of the one of the two main horse car lines in Louisville, had married Coleman's half-sister Ellen in 1861, and had for many years been considered part of the Coleman family. The second enterprise, under the management of Morgan and Barry Coleman, established an office on Main Street near Eighth and built an iron rolling mill on Clay Street near the river. Specializing initially in iron hardware, wagon materials, nails, and tools, the mill would soon branch out into the rolling of iron T-rails and tram rails.
In 1877, the expanded Louisville Rolling Mill Company was refinanced in order to secure adjustments in its credit and the du Ponts emerged as major partners. The mills continued to specialize and turn out high grade wrought iron products and were as successful as fluctuations in the market allowed. But while many of Coleman's half-brothers were still in prominent positions in both enterprises, the Louisville Rolling Mill was no longer strictly a family business. It survived the depression years on a large injection of du Pont capital, and in reality, Bidermann du Pont had taken over control of its day-to-day financial management.
By 1879, the Louisville Rolling Mill Company had been converted into a holding company, with Bidermann du Pont as its President. As such, the company began to lease rather than operate the two iron rolling mill properties, the original Brook Street mill and the newer Clay Street mill. This was not an uncommon practice for companies with debt problems. Existing companies could restructure their indebtedness by splitting off part of their operations into newly-created satellite companies, with the parent company (now freed of actual manufacturing obligations and only holding property) leasing those properties to the satellite companies. The parent company was then better able to service its debts (having no operations and markets to worry about) and the satellite companies could lease the properties by floating indebtedness of their own.
In the first year of operation as a holding company (1879), the Louisville Rolling Mill leased the two mill properties to newly-incorporated companies owned and managed by either Thomas Cooper Coleman or Bidermann du Pont. The Brook Street mill was leased to the Coleman Rolling Mill Company, owned and operated by Morgan and Barry Coleman, and manufacturing the same line of products as before the restructuring. That mill site was later leased to the Central Rolling Mill Company, a subsidiary of the du Ponts' Central Coal and Iron Company.
The Clay Street mill was leased in 1879 to the Louisville Iron and Steel Company, of which Bidermann du Pont was the major stockholder. But Louisville Iron and Steel was in many ways a different company than the previous operator of the mill site. Whereas the Brook Street mill was operated both before and after restructuring with the same personnel, the same machinery and the same product line, the Clay Street mill was not. Some of its machinery and most of its skilled personnel (iron puddlers and rollers) were transferred to a new du Pont-financed iron mill operation in Birmingham, Alabama and the Clay Street mill had to be re-equipped and restaffed. The mill continued as a merchant mill until 1886, when it was sold to the Ewald Iron Company of St. Louis. The next year, after a successful run of 27 years, the Louisville Rolling Mill Company paid its last dividend and went quietly out of business.