George Pullman

 

Born in Brocton, New York, on March 3, 1831, George Mortimer Pullman was a financier and railroad executive whose business acumen and dogged determination changed the way wealthy Americans travelled.

 

George Pullman created luxury railroad cars and rented them to railroads across the United States and in Europe. He began by improving two railroad carriages from the Chicago & Alton Railroad in 1859, converting them into sleeping cars with ten separate sections featuring comfortable upholstery and double berths. Slowed by the Civil War, Pullman constructed an extravagantly appointed car, Pioneer, which garnered press attention when it was placed on one of the trains accompanying President Lincoln’s body from Chicago to Springfield, Illinois. Though not an immediate success, it marked Pullman as a formidable competitor in the railroad-equipment market.

 

Incorporated as Pullman’s Palace Car Company in 1867, a combination of clever marketing and increasing demand for long-distance travel boosted the young firm. Railroads rented Pullman cars, which carried a conductor and a porter on each vehicle. A train of specially constructed Pullmans took New England business leaders from Boston to San Francisco in 1870, the first ever coast-to-coast railroad trip. Expanding from sleeping cars, the company also built dining cars and parlor cars along with freight vehicles. So successful did Pullman become that it was for several years the only manufacturing company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

To meet the growing demand for its products, the company built Pullman, Illinois, a factory town fourteen miles south of Chicago. Employing at its height over 5,000 workers and housing many of them in company-owned residences, the town became both an efficient plant and a tourist attraction. As the economic depression of the 1890s deepened, however, dissatisfaction grew and Pullman workers struck in May 1894 when George Pullman refused to reduce rents despite lowering wages. This precipitated a violent nationwide railroad stoppage and damaged the Pullman brand. Despite this action, however, the company George Pullman created continued to set the standard for luxury travel and redefined what it meant to take a railroad journey.