history of the dennison manufacturing company, part 1

The following article has been edited and pngs. restored from a 1919 resource, originally published by the Dennison Manufacturing Company by K. Grimm

The Founder of the Business.

       The business life of E. W. Dennison from 1844, when he went with his brother Aaron into the box business, until his death in 1886, is practically the story of the Dennison Manufacturing Co. for the same period. In those years he gave every ounce of enthusiasm in him and the best thoughts of an unusually active brain toward the development of the business which he always unselfishly called "Aaron's baby."

       In time of prosperity as well as in times of business trials‚ and there were more of the latter than of the former at the start of things, Mr. Dennison always looked out into the future with a healthy optimism and kept on working.

        His sterling principles of business morality laid down in 1844 have continued to be the Dennison precepts and will so continued as long as the business remained.

       Eliphalet Whorf Dennison was born in Topsham, Me., Nov. 23, 1819, and died at Marblehead, Mass., Sept. 22, 1886. When the company was incorporated in 1878 as the Dennison Manufacturing Co. he became its first president and held that office until his death.

Col. Andrew Dennison's Home, Brunswick, Me.

       The beginnings of our company have been told and retold, but we must make one more record of them for this anniversary book. In 1844 Aaron Dennison, who was then in the jewelry business in Boston, decided that he could make paper boxes better than the imported product. He journeyed to New York, bought a supply of box board and cover paper, and took them to the old Dennison homestead in Brunswick, Me., where his father, Col. Andrew Dennison, lived. There Col. Andrew seated on his cobbler's bench cut out the first boxes made in America, and they were put together and covered by the deft hands of his daughters. The first workshop was in the upper room of the extension between the main house and the barn. In 1920 some Dennison boxes were still being made in that little room by descendants of those who began to work there seventy-five years earlier.

       In the main entrance of the Dennison office building in Framingham sat the old cobbler's bench of Col. Andrew Dennison. Looking at it one is reminded of the tablet to Sir Christopher Wren, the architect, which is in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The tablet said, "If you seek my monument, look about you." So, too, if the work-worn cobbler's bench could speak it would said to those who looked at it, " If you seek a monument to the industry and high ideals of those who began this business, look about you at the great pile of buildings which in 1920 housed over 2600 workers and from which Dennison goods poured out daily to the far corners of the earth."

On this bench the first boxes were made.

       Aron L. Dennison started the box-making business and was responsible for its successful beginning. Then he turned it over to his younger brother, E. W. Dennison. Proudly he watched the younger man develop the sales and manufacturing divisions. He saw the business grow out of the Dennison homestead at Brunswick and seek new quarters; he saw the establishment of stores in the large cities and the taking on of salesmen; he saw countless other items added to the Dennison line. He unselfishly yielded to his younger brother the credit for making the success. E. W. Dennison on his side always acknowledged his debt to Aaron for having begun the enterprise.

       After retiring from the box business, Aaron Dennison devoted himself to the successful development of the machine-made watch. He was called the father of American watchmaking. The later years of his life were spent in England.

       In the old days when they were making boxes in Brunswick they didn't have any time clocks and rules and regulations, and all of the other accessories necessary to the modern factory. If you felt like a piece of pie about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, why you just left your work and got it at a little bakery across the street. When a traveling photographer came along and wanted to take a picture of the "hands," everybody would quit work and stand around the front door. That accounts for the little picture in the "inset" shown here, which was taken in 1870.

       The lower building pictured was the Poland block in Brunswick, in which E. W. Dennison established a box shop on the second floor when his business outgrew the old Dennison barn. About thirty hands were employed there.

       The upper building shown on the Swift block, was another Dennison box shop. It was later operated by E. W. Dennison's capable sister, Mrs. Mathilda Swift.

The man who started the
Box-making Business.

       As more jewelers came to young E. W. Dennison to get their boxes, new quarters had to be found and the business moved into what was known as the " Dunlap block" on Brunswick's main street. There fifty hands were employed and quite a number of men and women still with the concern in Framingham began work in the old Dunlap block. The building was burned on Christmas night, 1879, and was a total loss. Then the block shown just right was erected and Dennison boxes were made there until the box department was moved to the Roxbury factory in 1894.

       The " inset" shows a traveling minstrel show in front of the " old Dunlap block." It was a big night in Brunswick when the "Georgia Minstrels" performed there.

       Aron Dennison and his father had turned out the first boxes by hand, and the instant popularity of the new product brought in orders which taxed the little homestead workshop. Father and son realized that it was production and not orders which would be likely to worry them, so they put their heads together and worked out the first rough box machine. The wooden model of the first machine is shown left, and sitting on top of the model is a paper box made in 1844. The machine was still the standard machine of its kind in all box factories in 1920. Over a score of them are were still use in the box division of the Dennison Manufacturing Co. at Framingham during the early half of the 20th Century.

Above, The Swift Block, Brunswick, Me. Below, The Poland Block, Brunswick, Me. Inset, An Old-time Group.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5