The Company
First located at No. 69 Barclay Street and then at 92, 94, 96 and 98 Chambers St. — and from 1886 at the new Mercantile Exchange at Hudson and Harrison with his warehouses at Hudson and North Moore Streets in Manhattan — E. C. Hazard and Company opened a large factory after 1883 at Shrewsbury, the latter of which also became the adopted home of the Hazard family.
It was in Shrewsbury that Hazard and Company purchased a 165-acre (0.67 km2) tract on which it built "extensive factories, including handsome offices and one of the best-equipped laboratories in this country." The firm also grew many of its own agricultural produce on this Shrewsbury tract.
Among the consumer goods produced by E. C. Hazard and Company at its Shrewsbury facilities were Hazard's Shrewsbury Brand "Tomatoketchup" (one word), canned tomatoes (which the firm sometimes called by the archaic name "love apples"), canned baked beans and mushrooms, as well as asparagus, okra, peppers, tarragon, jellies, salad dressings, and various sauces.
Perhaps the earliest well-known product it distributed, however, was made by another manufacturer: McIlhenny Company's Tabasco brand pepper sauce, which Hazard and Company helped to introduce nationally beginning in the early 1870s.
Hazard had a devotion to purity of his products and is credited with marketing the first pure and unadulterated ketchup. He was president and presiding officer of the Pure Food Manufactures Association at Madison Square Garden in 1904.
At its peak, Hazard and Company was said to have generated annual revenues in the range of $7 to $9 million. In 1907, however — two years after E. C. Hazard's death — the company suffered in the credit panic. By the end of the year, it was forced into bankruptcy by his widow, Florence A. Hazard, to wrest control from the former partners and two of her children. Eventually the firm went out of business entirely.
Hazard's son-in-law, Harry Lord Powers of New York, and his wife Elizabeth Robinson Hazard, bought Shrewsbury Manor, the forty-bedroom manor in 1911, and the factory and more land in 1913. Hazard's widow and Powers fought in court for many years over whether Powers had bought just the factory, and not the recipes and business.
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