Frank Hutchison Peavey was born on January 18, 1850 in Eastport, Washington County, Maine, United States. He was the son of Albert D. and Mary (Drew) Peavey. His father, who died when Frank was nine years old, and his grandfather were engaged in the lumber trade and ran a line of coasting vessels. They were considered wealthy, but as a boy Peavey determined to make his own way.
At the age of fifteen, on money which he had earned, Frank Hutchison Peavey went to Chicago, where an uncle found him a job as messenger for a grain firm. The next year he worked in a bank, broke down physically, visited his home in Eastport, and in the spring of 1867 was back in Chicago where, in the post-war depression, jobs were scarce. Hearing of an opening in a bank at Sioux City, Iowa, he went to that frontier town, one hundred miles from the nearest railroad. In 1870 he became a partner in an implement firm, Booge, Smith & Peavey, which suffered severe loss by fire the next year. Reorganized as Evans & Peavey, the concern added the buying and selling of grain to its dealings in agricultural implements, and built a small elevator. When, in 1875, the Dakota Southern Railroad reached Sioux City, Peavey, having bought out his partner, extended his grain business and his elevators, obtaining from Minneapolis millers the agency to purchase grain for them. As railroad communications extended, Peavey's elevators increased.
Taking Edgar C. Michener as a partner in 1881, and operating as F. H. Peavey & Company, Frank Hutchinson Peavey established the headquarters of the firm in Minneapolis, but did not remove thither himself until 1884. In the next sixteen years he built up a line of elevators, including one of five million bushels' capacity at Duluth, along the railroad lines of that section. In 1899 he organized the Peavey Steamship Company which, by the summer of 1901, was operating four of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes. He made it a rule "never to embark in an enterprise unless he could control it, " and at the time of his death he was the dominating influence in nineteen different concerns --elevator, grain, steamship, land, and piano companies; he was also a director on the boards of two railroads and one large bank. It was his idea that his firm, into which he took his son, George W. Peavey, and his sons-in-law, Frank T. Heffelfinger and F. B. Wells, should survive him; to this end he insured his life for a million dollars, payable to his estate, so that his death might cause no embarrassment to the business. "His mentality was so strong, his energy and business acumen so great, that he insensibly dwarfed his associates. . He was the Elevator King, and undoubtedly controlled larger interests in this line than any other man in the world".
In a time when consolidation was the order of the day, Frank Hutchison Peavey saw and grasped the opportunity to build up in the Northwest a powerful combination of elevators and their appurtenances. He took little active part in civic affairs, although he was a member of the Minneapolis board of education for two years and for a time stood back of a Newsboys' Fund, which was calculated to inculcate thrift. He died suddenly of pneumonia in Chicago on December 30, 1901.
In 1872 Frank Hutchinson Peavey married Mary, daughter of Senator George G. Wright of Des Moines, by whom he had three children.
