Cotton, Fire, and Dreams: The Robert Findlay Iron Works and Heavy Industry in Macon, Georgia, 1839-1912 (review)

This book poses a quandary for any historian to ponder: is it possible to write a useful, authoritative history of a business firm with essentially no original records from the firm under study, or from its owners, managers, and workers? In his history of the Robert Findlay Iron Works, Robert S. Davis Jr. attempts to overcome this huge deficit by consulting nearly every other source of even tangential relevance. The bibliography testifies to Davis’s dedicated sleuthing; it seems more suited to a multivolume dissertation than to the short master’s thesis that was its starting point. For all the love and labor Davis has expended on this effort, however, he never surmounts the source problem. In the end the book is somewhat useful, although it offers up more conjectures than facts, and it can only hew to conventional analytical frameworks instead of contributing to or challenging them.

After apprenticing as a joiner, twenty-year-old Robert Findlay emigrated from Scotland to Philadelphia in 1828. His precise trade and employer(s) during his Philadelphia sojourn are unknown, but a decade later he delivered a new Baldwin locomotive to Macon, Georgia, for the Monroe Railroad. As Davis shows, Findlay had a knack for seizing the main chance, leaving Philadelphia just as the 1837 panic hit, leaving the ailing Monroe soon after his arrival, and joining a partnership in 1839, the Macon Brass and Iron Works and Machine Shop. Two years later he owned the small firm outright.

As its name suggests, Findlay’s shop would make just about anything a customer desired; its ads mention everything from steamboats to plows. In new construction, it appears that the firm mostly sold horsepowers and cotton-processing machinery to planters and other agricultural customers. It also did a substantial business in stationary engines and machinery—most likely for local grist mills, saw mills, and textile mills. Repair work for northern-built machinery apparently provided a key source of income as well. Without its records, however, Davis cannot authoritatively describe the firm’s mainstay markets, profits, growth, capital sources, employment, competitive posture, and terms of trade. Thus meaningful comparisons to other firms in the region or elsewhere are difficult.

Nor do we learn much about how this outpost of industrial technology meshed with the dominant influence in the local economy, plantation agriculture, with its large-scale market orientation, lucrative profits, and labor-intensive bias. Did planters buy many of the firm’s stationary engines to power their plantation manufactures? Davis implies that they did, but just who bought Findlay’s output of nearly one hundred engines (through 1858) is unknowable (that those engines also needed boilers is a fact entirely ignored here). Whatever his customers and mainstay products, during the 1850s Findlay apparently took advantage of geographic barriers that protected his prices at least somewhat from competitors in the North and elsewhere in Georgia. He opened branch foundry/machine shops in Atlanta and Griffin, Georgia, suggesting that his Macon operations earned profits sufficient for growth. The satellites indicate he was staking out other local territories, attempting to replicate his Macon success while wisely placing his branches on railway lines to broaden their sales potential. But Georgia’s railway boom of the 1850s, itself a result of the booming plantation economy, would ultimately link customers to the northern machine shops that apparently were far more efficient than Findlay’s small shops.

Robert Findlay died in 1859, a successful industrialist and civic leader. During the Civil War, his old factory became the nucleus of the Confederacy’s Macon Arsenal. To tell that part of his story, Davis plumbed the full range of extant Confederate records, but those archives were not very forthcoming either. In a concluding chapter, Davis narrates the firm’s long postwar decline, mostly using local tax...