Steel Car Company
In 1884, the assets — a patent and a half-finished car — of the bankrupt Robbins Cylindrical Steel Car Company were acquired by Byron A. Atkinson (1854-19?? ), a well-to-do Boston furniture dealer with some background as a machinist. To promote his cylindrical steel rail passenger car, Atkinson hired Henry Perky, who had quite a reputation for making money during times that ruined other businessmen. Their firm was the Steel Car Company.
While the railcar was being built, Perky was busy trying to find a place to build a huge plant for building steel cars. He first proposed Chicago, Illinois, but when this didn’t generate significant interest, in 1888 he proposed Lincoln, Nebraska, and there the car would be named the "City of Lincoln". This idea too failed to catch on, so Perky moved on.
Perky finally found backing in St. Joseph, Missouri and there, in late 1888, at a cost of some $70,000, he erected a building on a large plot of land east of the city "beyond Wyatt Park". He also organized an exposition, to be called the National Railway, Electric and Industrial Exposition, but more popularly known as the "New Era Exposition". The exposition was set up on the grounds of the Steel Car Company, with the western portion of its building as the main hall of the exposition.
On the night of 15 September 1889 a fire swept through the main building of the exposition. The ten cars being built, the Steel Car Company plant, all the assets of the Steel Car Company were a total loss. Perky, not one to be easily discouraged, took the original Robbins car (that had been outfitted as a private car for Atkinson's personal use) for a transcontinental tour. Though it attracted a good deal of attention, it attracted no orders.
The cylindrical car was shown at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, but again attracted no orders. Although almost $40,000 had been spent on it, when the exposition closed, the railcar was abandoned on the fairgrounds and later sold by the firm that dismantled the Exposition.
Read more about this topic: Henry Perky
Famous quotes containing the words steel, car and/or company:
“There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in black women. It’s as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Fifty years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account, or what your clothes looked like, But the world may be a little better because you were important in the life of a child.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in The Winning Family, by Louise Hart, ch. 1 (1987)
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)