Moses Herman Cone was an American merchant and manufacturer. He was also a philanthropist and used his wealth for many educational causes.
Background
Moses Herman Cone was the son of Herman Cone, who was born in 1828 at Altenstadt-on-the-Iller, Bavaria, and came to America as a youth, settling at Richmond, Virginia. Here he married Helen Guggenheimer, who as a child had come with her parents from Wiirtemburg, and settled near Natural Bridge, Virginia, where her father was a merchant. Herman Cone later engaged in the retail general merchandise business at Jonesboro, Tennessee, where his son Moses, eldest of thirteen children, was born on June 29, 1857. Herman Cone moved to Baltimore in 1870 and, after two partnerships in the wholesale grocery business, he bought a business of his own and associated his four oldest sons with him in the firm of H. Cone & Sons.
Education
Moses attended the public schools of Baltimore.
Career
Cone entered his father’s business at an auspicious time for his later career. Baltimore then enjoyed the bulk of the Southern wholesale trade, and the South was on the eve of the industrial development which has since become conspicuous. Among the customers of H. Cone & Sons were many Southern cotton-mills which maintained mill villages and company-owned stores for trade with the operatives. The connection between the Cones in Baltimore and the Southern cotton-factories began in the incidental acceptance of bale goods by the wholesale grocers in payment of accounts of mill stores. Gradually mills came to ask the Baltimore firm to sell their product through the South on commission, and this increased the intimacy of Moses Cone with the cotton manufactures of the section. He was struck with the lack of standardization and the difficulties attending the marketing of “plaids, ” a favorite product of the Southern mills.
He spent the year 1890—a year of marked depression in the cotton-goods trade—in the first significant attempt to combine Southern mills in a selling organization intended to control the product to the extent of making the goods more uniform and improving the styles. The Cone Export & Commission Company was consequently formed in 1891, establishing its office in New York City. After much organizing work and many disappointments on the part of Moses Cone, about forty mills in the Carolinas and Georgia and other Southern states joined the venture. The wholesale grocery firm in Baltimore was dissolved, Herman Cone joining his sons in the new undertaking.
The selling agency did not succeed in the completeness with which it was planned, but the Cones soon began to acquire interests in Southern cotton-mills, the first being at Asheville, North Carolina. In 1893 the main office of the Cone Export & Commission Company was established at Greensboro, North Carolina, and two years later Moses Cone, particularly in association with his brother Caesar, began the erection of denim-mills on a large tract on the edge of the town. These are now the largest denim-plants in the world. The company has been conspicuous for the extent and completeness of its welfare work in the villages established for its operatives. In 1901 he acquired an estate of 3, 750 acres at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and was one of the pioneers in the western part of the state in the growing of apples on a large scale.
Achievements
Moses Cone became one of the most prominent and successful textile manufactures in the United States. He was credited for the foundation one of the largest mills in the S. His company became one of the major suppliers of textile products to Levi Strauss and Company. Moses was also instrumental in the development of Watauga Academy, now known as Appalachian State University.
Connections
Cone married Bertha M. Lindau of Baltimore in 1888.
