Telegraph Entrepreneur

Background.

Hiram Sibley, the man who more than any other single figure knit together a national telegraph network and monopoly, spent his youth and early business career working in a series of mechanical and manufacturing ventures in western Massachusetts and upstate New York. He was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and attended village school there before working in a shoemaking shop. As a young man he moved to the Genesee Valley region of New York and found work as a machinist in a cotton factory until he started up a machine shop of his own. He also operated a wool carding business in the region. By the time he moved to Rochester in 1838 he had amassed a solid fortune, which he deployed in banking and real estate. It was a career that placed him squarely in the context of the early New...