John Flack Winslow, Sr. was an American businessman and iron manufacturer, who was the fifth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Background
John F. Winslow, Sr. was born on November 10, 1810, in Bennington, Vermont, the fourth child of Richard Winslow and Mary Corning. His father had come to Vermont from Lyme, Connecticut, and was a descendant of Kenelm Winslow, who emigrated to America about 1629. When John was five years old his parents moved to Albany, New York.
Education
Winslow, Sr. was educated at select schools until he was seventeen.
Career
He then entered a commercial house in Albany as a clerk, and after several years there secured a position in a commission house in New York, where he remained until he was twenty-one. For a year he was agent for his company in New Orleans, and in 1832 returned North and secured the management of the Boston agency of the New Jersey Iron Company. In the two years that he held this position he is said to have worked diligently and mastered its details. At all events, late in 1833 he went into the iron industry on his own account and for four years engaged successfully in the production of pig iron in Bergen and Sussex counties, New Jersey.
In 1837 Erastus Corning, head of an extensive hardware enterprise in Albany, undertook to add to his business the production of iron. Winslow, Sr. upon invitation, joined Corning in this venture, and the ensuing partnership of Corning & Winslow continued under various firm names for upwards of thirty years. They controlled both the Albany and the Rensselaer iron works, which under their direction became the largest producers of railroad and other iron in the United States. Winslow, Sr. made Troy, New York, his residence during this thirty years' period. In conducting the business he was most progressive and showed an almost uncanny sense of what would prove successful in his adoption of new processes. It was Corning and Winslow, Sr. , for example, who delegated Alexander L. Holley in 1863 to purchase in England the American rights to the Bessemer steel process, and subsequently to design and build at Troy a Bessemer steel plant, which, put into operation in 1865, was the first plant of its kind in America. Again it was Winslow, Sr. who, seeing the merits of John Ericsson's design of iron-clad war vessels, appeared in 1861, in company with John A. Griswold of Troy and C. S. Bushnell of New Haven, Connecticut, before President Lincoln and the naval board and secured a contract for the construction of one vessel.
Winslow, Sr. risked both reputation and money in manufacturing the machinery and iron plating for the vessel and in financing the whole undertaking, but the brilliant success of the Monitor in its engagement with the Merrimac, March 9, 1862, fully vindicated his faith. Throughout his residence in Troy he was much interested in local politics and in social and benevolent enterprises. From 1865 to 1868 he was president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was also a director of several banks and the director and president of the Poughkeepsie and Eastern Railroad. In 1867 he retired from active business and removed from Troy to Poughkeepsie, where he resided until his death. John Flack Winslow, Sr. died on March 10, 1892, in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Achievements
Connections
On September 12, 1832, John F. Winslow, Sr. married Nancy Beach Jackson, by whom he had a son. On September 5, 1867, he married Harriet Wickes. They had two daughters.