Consumer History | Procter and Gamble — The Partnership Signed at Sixth and Main
· 1837-10
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Consumer History | Procter and Gamble — The Partnership Signed at Sixth and Main
kevin
People treat Procter & Gamble as a riverside campus that arrived already named Ivory.
The partnership was signed here, at a storeroom on the corner of Sixth and Main in Cincinnati, on 31 October 1837.
William Procter was an English candlemaker. James Gamble was an Irish soap maker. They had married sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris.
Their father-in-law, Alexander Norris, pointed out that both trades competed for the same hog fat and wood ash in a city then nicknamed Porkopolis. He told the sons-in-law to stop bidding against each other.
Each man put up 3,596.47 dollars in 1837 currency. The city already had fourteen other soap and candle makers. Hundreds of American banks were closing that year.
Gamble collected scraps and ash from houses, hotels, and Ohio River steamboats and boiled them in a wooden kettle with a cast-iron bottom behind the shop. Procter kept the counter.
Candles, not soap, were the first volume product. Cincinnati sat on the hog-butchering trade that fed the Ohio and Mississippi, so the raw material arrived as waste from the packing houses two streets away.
The later floating soap, the national brands, and the towers a few blocks west all come after this corner. The original storeroom is gone. The intersection still marks the first paid address the firm records.
The mechanism is the shared feedstock. Two household trades that look separate on a shop sign are the same chemistry when the city is a slaughter town. Norris saw the cost first. The partnership merely wrote it down.
Photo: Derek Jensen (Tysto), Procter & Gamble headquarters, Cincinnati, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The towers stand two blocks from the 1837 corner.
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