(This is the story of a man who, at forty-five, had seemed...)
This is the story of a man who, at forty-five, had seemed to have lost most of his battles - and who fought on to win the war. He has faced defeat many times - defeat by sickness, by lack of schooling, by betrayal of his trust, by human greed and by the perils that beset all new business ventures. What had looked like a permanent success when he was forty-three crumbled overnight. Two years later he was fighting more than $150,00 of debt. In five years he was on his feet. In twenty years his product's brand-name had become the proverbial household word in millions of homes. In thirty years it had gone around the world. In forty years his organization led its field in production and sales. He had become successful - and all over America were thousand of farm homes into which prosperity had entered because he proved that cows could be bred to give four, five, ten times the amount of milk they gave in the nineteenth century. The knowledge he acquired, the stock he bred and raised, he shared fairly with anyone who wanted to go along with him and prosper as he has prospered. He found a little, haphazard, discouraged milk industry and turned it inot a flourishing empire until the thin trickle of 1900 became the golden flood of the twenties and thirties and forties.
Elbridge Amos Stuart was a rich American businessman from North Carolina.
Background
Elbridge was born on September 10, 1856 in Guilford County, North Carolina, near Greensboro, United States. He was the seventh of eight sons and twelfth of thirteen children of Amos and Matilda (Hadley) Stuart.
He was christened Amos Elbridge, but around the age of ten persuaded his parents to reverse the names. His mother was of Irish Quaker background. His father, a farmer, was a great-grandson of Alexander Stewart, who came from Scotland to Pennsylvania about 1697.
When Elbridge was five, Amos Stuart took his family to Indiana, where he continued to farm, first as a tenant, then on his own place in Henry County.
Education
The boy attended nearby Spiceland Academy, attaining the equivalent of the eighth grade. Troubled with rheumatic fever, he went that fall to live with his brother Jehu, a physician in Lawrence, Kansas. There he attended high school for a year and considered a medical career, but the witnessing of a postmortem caused him to change his mind.
Career
In 1871 Elbridge and an older brother, Addison, set up a small produce commission house in Indianapolis. The business failed the following year, and for a few months in 1873 Elbridge drove a team and wagon for the United States Express Company in Richmond, Indiana.
The next winter he worked as a day laborer, then went to western Kansas as a bookkeeper for a railroad contractor. He was back in Lawrence in 1876, clerking in a dry goods store, and remained there until 1880, when he worked briefly in New Mexico as a line grader for the Santa Fe Railroad and as timekeeper and commissary manager for a grading company.
In January 1881 Stuart, now twenty-four, joined with a partner to open a general store in El Paso, Texas. Originally Stuart & Sutherland, then Stuart & McNair, and, finally, E. A. Stuart & Company, the enterprise evolved into a wholesale and retail grocery firm.
In search of a climate beneficial to his wife's health, Stuart transferred his interests in 1894 to Los Angeles. There he became a member of the firm of Craig, Stuart & Company, wholesale grocers, but he left the concern in the spring of 1899 because of lack of harmony with his partners. Not finding another opportunity to his liking in the grocery business, in August of that year he reluctantly joined Thomas E. Yerxa in purchasing an abandoned condensed milk plant in Kent, Washington, near Seattle. The concern was chartered as the Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company in 1900.
In 1916 it became the Carnation Milk Products Company, and in 1929 the Carnation Company. As president, Stuart was largely responsible for the company's success. He assembled a group of loyal suppliers, chose the brand name "Carnation, " and personally persuaded retailers to stock his company's product. Demand for "Carnation Cream" in the Alaska gold fields boosted sales.
By 1906, when a Chicago advertising agency suggested the slogan "Milk from contented cows, " Stuart's firm had five plants. During World War I the firm's sales quadrupled and Stuart extended his operations into Canada.
In 1919 Carnation took a controlling interest in the American Milk Products Company (later the General Milk Company, Inc. ), established to sell canned milk in foreign markets. When Stuart resigned the presidency of the Carnation Company in 1932, the firm had plants in eighteen states and Carnation was the largest selling brand of evaporated milk in the world. Moreover, the company had extended into fresh milk and ice cream processing and distributing and, through purchase of the Albers Milling Company in 1929, into the processing and distribution of cereals and feeds.
Stuart continued as chairman of the board and of the executive committee of the Carnation Company until his death. As early as 1910 he established Carnation Farms in Washington's Snoqualmie Valley for the purpose of breeding cows that would give high milk flows.
In 1920 a Carnation cow, the first of many Carnation champions, established a new world record for milk production.
Stuart made his home in Seattle from 1899 to 1930, when he moved back to Los Angeles. He died of pneumonia in that city in his eighty-eighth year .
Achievements
Elbridge Amos Stuart was famous American milk industrialist and creator of Carnation evaporated milk and its famous slogan, that it came from "Contented Cows". Perhaps Stuart's most important accomplishment was the improvement of dairy herds in the United States and abroad.
