Thomas Dickson was an American capitalist, the head of Dickson & Company, president of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company. He became one of the outstanding figures in the American industrial revolution.
Background
Thomas Dickson was born on March 26, 1824 in Leeds, England. He was the son of James Dickson, a Scottish millwright of Lauder, Berwickshire, and his wife, Elizabeth Linen. When he was eight years old, the family moved to Canada, and two years later to Dundaff in northeastern Pennsylvania. James Dickson finding farming distasteful he sought employment elsewhere, leaving the farm and his large family in charge of his wife and Thomas, the oldest son. These early strenuous experiences constituted Dickson’s principal preparation for life.
Education
Almost immediately after his schooling began it was abruptly ended by a violent quarrel with the village school-teacher.
Career
In the meantime his father had secured employment as a millwright with the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, and the boy’s first job after leaving school was with the same company, guiding a mule in drawing coal from the mines. It happened that this company, with which Dickson’s fortunes were so closely interwoven, had been organized in 1824, the year of his birth. In various minor positions he saved a portion of his wages, and characteristically added to his hoard the money sent by his grandfather to defray the cost of a visit to Scotland. At length he accumulated savings enough for a venture of his own, under the firm name of Dickson & Company, a manufacturing enterprise organized in 1856 at Carbondale, but soon established at Scranton.
Scranton was the center of a region with immense possibilities and potential needs in the rapidly developing mining, lumbering, manufacturing, and transport industries. The crudest of methods prevailed, but these were being supplanted.
The basic resources of the region were particularly important in their relation to other regions, and the early tapping of these resources was largely the work of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company.
Dickson’s ingenuity and enterprise in furnishing the company with needed equipment led to his being offered, in 1859, the post of superintendent. This he accepted, while retaining for about ten years the headship of his own company. The latter was reorganized in 1862 as the Dickson Manufacturing Company.
Under his direction the two companies rapidly developed the anthracite coal industry and other enterprises in the Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys. The expansion of business led to his resignation as head of his own company and to his being made president, in 1869, of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company.
In the meantime he had become associated with a number of other enterprises, including the First National Bank of Scranton (1863), and the Moosic Powder Company (1865), the latter merging later with the Du Pont projects.
When Dickson first became interested in the development of Scranton, there was little more than the beginning of a town. By means of his foresight and business acumen he became the principal molder of the city’s fortunes. His influence extended beyond the Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys, not only in the direction of New York and Philadelphia, but northward as well. He promoted, for instance, the extension of a railway line to Canada.
Outside of his business life, he was a man of limited attainments. Aside from his boyhood migration to America, his travels were very slight until shortly before his death, when he spent almost a year in a tour of the world.
He had virtually no formal schooling. He nevertheless accumulated a choice library, established a circulating library, read extensively, and even cherished literary ambitions. He acquired a remarkable knowledge of law. His associations, aside from his numerous business connections, were slight. His principal benevolences were connected with conventional religious and social groups.
Achievements
Connections
On August 31, 1846 Dickson married Mary Augusta Marvine. His daughter, Elizabeth Linen, became the wife of Henry Martyn Boies, another Scranton capitalist.