The Bigelow Tea Company – American tea manufacturer

Bigelow Tea was founded by Ruth Campbell Bigelow, when she created “Constant Comment” in her kitchen in 1945.

Ruth Campbell Bigelow, started the company in her kitchen when her husband, David Bigelow lost his publishing job and the interior design business she ran was decimated by the Depression.

The first specialty tea in the USA, Constant Comment is a black tea flavored with orange rinds and sweet spices. The first production facility was in the Bigelow’s New York brownstone apartment.

After Bigelow Tea was formed, David oversaw all the finances, ensuring that he and Ruth watched their pennies so that the fledgling business could survive.

With their growing tea business, in 1950 Ruth and David E. Bigelow sold their home in the city and moved to Connecticut. There they bought a small factory in the center of Norwalk, CT alongside the Norwalk River.

In 1957, the Bigelow’s moved their business a mile away to a classic New England brick factory building on Merwin Street in Norwalk, CT. It was not until 1958, a year after Bigelow moved to a larger plant in Norwalk, that the company bought its first tea bag machine. It was also in the late 1950s that the company began to make the transition from specialty shops to the supermarket.

In 1960, their son David joins the company. Ruth Bigelow died in 1966, followed by her husband in 1970. David Bigelow had already assumed leadership of the business in 1963.

David, with the unwavering support of his wife Eunice, lead the company with integrity, passion, intelligence, kindness and a spirit of determination to its current prominence as the country’s #1 specialty tea company.

Sales grew slowly but steadily, taking off in the 1970s when Bigelow began packing their teabags in folding cardboard boxes instead of tins.
The Bigelow Tea Company – American tea manufacturer

North American Aviation

North American on December 6, 1928 by Clement Melville Keys as a holding company that bought and sold interests in various airlines and aviation-related companies. Its founder intended for it to invest in a range of aviation businesses rather than become another aircraft manufacturer.

It brought together interests in Curtiss Aeroplane, Douglas Aircraft and Transcontinental Air Transport. The holding company later purchased aircraft manufacturer Berliner-Joyce as well as the General Aviation Manufacturing Co.

However, the Air Mail Act of 1934 forced the breakup of such holding companies. Its manufacturing capabilities, represented by Berliner-Joyce and General Aviation (Fokker), were consolidated into a single manufacturing company, which was incorporated on Jan. 1, 1935, as North American Aviation Inc. run by James H. "Dutch" Kindelberger, Kindelberger, who had been recruited from Douglas Aircraft Company.

Its first planes, the GA-15 observation aircraft and the GA-16 trainer led to the O-47 and the NA-16 (also called the BT-9), a low-wing monoplane that won the 1934 Army Air Corps trainer competition.

The BC-1 of 1937 was North American's first combat aircraft; it was based on the GA-16. [1] In 1940, like other manufacturers, North American started gearing up for war, opening factories in Columbus, Ohio , Dallas, Texas , and Kansas City, Kansas.

During the WWII, the North American Aviation facility in Los Angeles was one of the most efficient in the world and set a single-type production record when it delivered 571 P-51s in just one month.

In 1946, North American produced its first FJ-1 Fury jet fighter. The next year, it was redesigned into the XP-86, first flown on October 1, 1947. Its test pilot, George "Wheaties" Welch, became the first pilot to fly the plane at Mach 1 in routine flight.

In 1955, North American spun off its Rocketdyne division, which would become the premier American producer of liquid-fueled rockets.

Through a series of mergers and sales, North American Aviation became part of North American Rockwell, which later became Rockwell International and is now part of Boeing.
North American Aviation

Butter production in American history

In 2001, American consumed an average of 4.9 pounds of butter per person almost five four-stick packs.

Butter, one of the most traditional of women’s crafts, began the nineteenth century as a product hand-churned by women and ended the century as the factory-made product of a commercial marketplace.

For much of the century, and especially in rural communities, butter remained an important part of a women’s economy – produced from surplus milk and sold or exchanged at a local marketplace for other necessary family goods.

The first creameries or butter factories appeared in Upstate New York in the late 1850s and early 1860s. These were small plants that generally co0ntained a springhouse, filled with pans for separating cream form skim milk, and a churning area.

Around 1850, farm families began to sell their cream to larger, centralized creameries, rather than making butter in their home dairies. From about 1859 on, there has been a constant increase in factory butter production, and this was included in the census of manufactures for the first time in 1879.

This increase in factory butter output has been accompanied by a decline in farm butter production. The industrialization of butter production truly took off in the last decade of the nineteenth century, promoted by the invention of the mechanical cream separator.

Factory production of butter rose from 29 million pounds in 1879 to 627 million in 1909 to over 1 billion in 1921.
Butter production in American history

Coors Brewery of Golden, Colorado

In 1868, a Prussian brewery apprentice named Adolph Herman Joseph Coors found his way to the United States.

He and his partner Jacob Schueler established Adolph Coors Brewing Company 1873 in Golden, Colorado.

Schueler, a Denver businessman put up most of the money and Coors provided the brewing knowledge.  Coors and Schueler chose to build their brewery in Golden, Colorado, a site with access to underground springs and a railroad line that served several towns to the west.

The business thrived and by 1880s Coors was able to buy out Schuler and become the sole proprietor of Adolph Coors Golden Brewery. He renamed the company the Coors Golden Brewery. The company was incorporated in 1913.

During the next decade, Coors’s production in increased from 3500 to 17600 barrels annually, and the brewery continued to prosper until Colorado adopted prohibition in 1916.

During that time, the company produced near-beer, dairy products, and malt products, becoming the country’s third-largest producer of malt products.

In the 1950s, Bill Coors and his staff invented the first aluminium beverage can and became the first company to put the invention into practice.

In 1978, Coors Light was introduced and is now the brewery’s largest selling label. In 1981, Coors products became available easts of the Mississippi River for the first time, and by 1991 Coors products were available in all fifty states.

As part of expansion, Coors built a packaging plant in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1985 and acquired a brewery in Memphis in 1990.

In 2005, Coors merged with Canada’s Molson brewing company to create Molson Coors, and in 2008, the company entered into a joint venture with SABMiller, creating MillerCoors.
Coors Brewery of Golden, Colorado

German Mills American Oatmeal

In 1850, German immigrant Ferdinand Schumacher opened a grocery store in Akron, Ohio. His major customers were German and Irish immigrants and they bought a lot of oats - which, at the time, most Anglo-Americans considered animal feed.

Demand for his product was high and in 1856, he set up the German Mills American Oatmeal Factory in Akron, Ohio. The factory produced 20 180-lb barrels of oatmeal daily with a water-powered stone mill.

Sales were brisk, particularly to cities with large immigrant populations, so Schumacher opened additional mills to meet the increasing demand. His preoccupation with oat eventually branded him ‘The Oatmeal King.’

A Schumacher employee, Asmus J. Errichsen, developed a method of producing the millstones and was the first significant modernization in oat milling.

In 1878 Schumacher imported porcelain rollers from England to manufacture rolled oats.

In the early 1860s, the Civil War was a shot of adrenalin for his venture: the government found oats to be relatively inexpensive, accessible and nourishing and order hundreds of barrels from him to fortify the Union troops.

Soon he became the largest oat miller in America.
German Mills American Oatmeal