Finance History | M and T Bank — Two Hundred Thousand Dollars at Two East Swan
· 1856-8
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Finance History | M and T Bank — Two Hundred Thousand Dollars at Two East Swan
kevin
People treat M and T as a regional holding company that always lived in a Minoru Yamasaki tower.
The first book opened in a rented storefront.
On 29 August 1856 Manufacturers and Traders Bank began business at 2 East Swan Street in Buffalo, a twenty-by-eighty-foot room that cost one thousand two hundred dollars a year in rent.
Pascal Paoli Pratt, an ironworks owner still in his thirties, and Bronson Case Rumsey, a tannery man with North Buffalo land, had decided on a train ride home from New York that Buffalo needed a bank willing to make long loans to manufacturers.
Existing houses in the city preferred short paper. Grain elevators and foundries needed equipment money that lasted longer than a season.
Thirteen stockholders put up two hundred thousand dollars of paid-in capital in 1856 dollars. Henry Martin, late of the Attica and Buffalo Railroad, took the presidency at a salary of one thousand dollars a year and held the chair for twenty-nine years.
Buffalo that year handled nearly twenty million bushels of grain and ranked as the world's largest grain port. The new bank was the city's sixteenth.
On 1 January 1857 it paid a four-percent dividend. Among the one hundred forty-five stockholders listed was Millard Fillmore, who held ten shares valued at five hundred dollars and received twenty dollars.
The Panic of 1857 arrived months later. The bank survived it and the Civil War, raised capital to nine hundred thousand dollars by 1869, and converted to a national charter in 1902 as the Manufacturers and Traders National Bank.
It outgrew Swan Street within a year and moved to 275 Main. A granite house by Green and Wicks later stood near Main and Swan. The present One M and T Plaza, finished in 1967 on that same downtown block, is the public face of a charter that never left Buffalo.
The mechanism was simple. A canal city full of mills could not grow on call loans alone. Pratt and Rumsey built a book that would wait for iron and leather to turn into cash.
Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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