George William Quintard was an American manufacturer of marine engines.
Background
George William Quintard was born on April 22, 1822 in Stamford, Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Isaac and Clarissa (Hoyt) Shaw Quintard. His younger brothers, Charles Todd and Edward, became bishop and bank president respectively.
Education
At the age of fifteen, after attending the public schools, George went to New York, which was thereafter his home.
Career
After working for grocery and ship-chandlery firms, George Quintard became a ship-chandler on his own account. Three years later, at twenty-five, he entered the iron works of T. F. Secor & Company on the East River at Ninth Street. In 1850, his father-in-law got control of this plant, which he called the Morgan Iron Works, and by 1852, since Morgan was busy with his shipping operations in the Gulf, Quintard was in full charge. The latter seems to have been more of a business executive than a technical innovator like his rivals Cornelius H. Delamater and John Roach. The firm made iron pipe for the Chicago water works in 1853, but its specialty was marine machinery. The recent mail subsidies had centered the building of ocean liners in New York, and although Hogg & Delamater, Allaire's Works, and Stillman, Allen & Company's Novelty Iron Works had already equipped most of the first crack liners, the Morgan works by 1867 had built engines for some forty ocean, coastwise, and lake steamships. Most of these were paddle-wheel, walking-beam affairs, for the New York works were notorious for conservative prejudice against the screw propeller.
During the Civil War, in addition to the Seminole, which they had equipped in 1859, the Morgan works supplied machinery for thirteen naval vessels, including the large screw cruisers Ammonoosuc, Idaho, Ticonderoga, and Wachusett; the side-wheel "double-enders" Algonquin, Ascutney, Chenango, Mahaska, and Tioga, for river work; and the small screw gunboats Chippewa, Kineo, and Katahdin. Quintard himself contracted for the twin-screw, double-turret monitor Onondaga, having T. F. Rowland construct the hull in Brooklyn. Analysis of the records shows that of some thirty-five concerns on the coast engaged in building engines for the navy, Quintard's easily stood first in point of numbers, although his numerical primacy might be offset by the size and importance of the engines Delamater built for the Monitor, Dictator, Puritan, and other Ericsson ships. In 1863, Quintard also built engines for the Italian frigate Re d'Italia, sunk in 1866 by the Austrians at Lissa.
In 1867, he sold the Morgan Iron Works to Roach, and inaugurated a line of four steamships to Charleston. He later established a line from Portland to Halifax. By 1869, however, he had returned to his marine engines, founding, with James Murphy of the Fulton Foundry, the Quintard Iron Works, two blocks above the Morgan plant. He was active in this concern for more than thirty years, although in 1882, following the family custom, he made his son-in-law president. N. F. Palmer, Jr. , & Company, as the firm was called, was gradually overshadowed by the Cramps and Roach, who were building hulls as well as engines and gaining most of the contracts for the "New Navy" and the largest liners. Quintard's firm contracted for the gunboats Bennington and Concord, having the hulls built by Roach at Chester, and also made the engines for the illfated Maine. Prominent in New York financial circles, Quintard was a director of numerous corporations and head of a company which for a while mined nearly a million dollars worth of silver a year in southern Chihuahua.
In 1873, he was appointed a commissioner of immigration and he also served as a park commissioner during a period of active park expansion. Just before his wife's death, he built a mansion at 922 Fifth Avenue where he himself died twenty years later, on April 2, 1913.
Achievements
Connections
On February 15, 1844, George William Quintard married Frances Eliza, daughter of Charles Morgan. His daughter Fannie had died when about to christen the Onondaga. He had a son and another daughter.