Early Life
Eli Metcalfe Bruce was born near Flemingsburg, Kentucky, the son George S. and Sabina Metcalfe Bruce. He was educated at the local schools until 1847 when he began working at a dry goods store in Maysville, Kentucky. Shortly thereafter, he relocated to Northern Kentucky, where he worked at a pork packing factory owned by his uncle in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In 1853, Bruce married Elizabeth Sally Withers, and the couple had three children. The following year, he and his uncle opened an iron furnace business near Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1859, he sold his interest in the iron furnace company and purchased several pork packing plants along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Wabash Rivers. These entrepreneurial endeavors left Bruce a wealthy young man.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)