The Life and Letters of Kate Gleason

8Trailer Cars and Bank Notes

77 CHAPTER 8 Trailer Cars and Bank Notes Clones Pittsford New York Thanksgiving Day, 1915 Dear Friend, This is the Thankfullest Thanksgiving I’ve had so far. You will be glad to hear it and to know that I am wishing you too, Good Luck. What makes me so happy is my new work. It is like having another life given, to adventure into such different fields with the advantage of having with me so many of the friends made in the old one. I hope you can come to see me soon. Very cordially yours, Kate Gleason1 By the fall of 1915, Kate’s horizons had widened well beyond the machine tool industry. Her “Thankfullest Thanksgiving” was as much a celebration of having the means to pursue her dreams as it was of her new life. With war raging on the European continent, machinery orders were pouring in and factories hummed. The calamity engulfing Europe brought prosperity to Gleason shareholders, and Kate’s holdings were large. Her new work focused on three ambitions: promoting the industrial growth of the small community of East Rochester, building low-cost housing for its labor force, and simultaneously developing the manufacture and marketing of trailers pulled by automobiles. Characteristically, she wove these interests into a symbiotic whole with no trace of timidity or second guessing. 78 the life and letters of kate gleason Kate had long been attracted to the idea of constructing small, affordable houses for workers, a goal she had discussed with Augustus Loring in 1914. Now, Kate had the resources to realize her vision in the small community of East Rochester, which was growing rapidly but lacked low-cost housing. In the summer of 1915, she had quietly and relentlessly bought up available properties in East Rochester until the initials “KG” dominated its assessment records for the year. Until the late nineteenth century, East Rochester had consisted of farms bisected by New York Central Railroad tracks. The Vanderbilt Improvement Company, named after the railroad’s president, erected car shops for building and repairing railroad cars and gradually transformed the farmland into the village of Despatch.2 Under the company’s stewardship, it became one of the few planned communities outside Washington, D.C., featuring a handsome railroad station, designed by renowned Rochester architect Claude Bragdon in 1914; a block of three-story buildings housing a department store, bowling alley, and barbershop ; and ten buildings erected by the Foster Armstrong Piano Company for manufacturing pianos. Two of Kate’s friends—Edmund Lyon, vice president of the Vanderbilt Improvement Company as well as one of its founders, and Harry Eyer, president of the First National Bank of East Rochester and a Vanderbilt stockholder—had been instrumental in promoting and developing the community. Lyon was a particularly talented and self-effacing individual. An attorney trained at Columbia University, he was also a businessman, inventor , and philanthropist. As managing director of the Northeast Electric Company, which eventually became the Delco Division of General Motors, he had invented a mechanism for starting automobile engines that eliminated the need for a hand crank. Lyon also devised a locomotive turntable powered by the train engine itself, a breakthrough that was of great importance to the railroad industry. In addition, he invented devices to aid the deaf and blind—including one that he specifically designed for Helen Keller—and collaborated on many projects with his good friend Alexander Graham Bell, who remembered Lyon as a “big-hearted and big-headed” man who “took my heart.”3 In 1916, Kate honored Lyon’s contributions with her own philanthropic gesture. After acquiring seven acres of swampy land in East Rochester, she developed it into a leafy park, which she presented to the community with the requirement that they name it for Edmund Lyon. No one was more surprised at the honor than the unpretentious Lyon, who would have preferred that the town name the tranquil green after Kate Gleason. Trailer Cars and Bank Notes 79 Kate was continuing to acquire property in East Rochester. In April 1916, she and Harry Eyer purchased a thirty-acre tract and a thousand building lots. According to newspaper accounts, Kate had contracted to build three fireproof factories on the thirty-acre parcel and already had occupants for them, including the Erie Mop and Wringer Company, the Merkel Motor Wheel Company, and the E. N. Bridges Photo-Mount Company. She also transferred 315...