Epilogue

The peppermint oil industry developed under the leadership of three families of peppermint kings that were each prominent during three very distinct moments in the economic history of the United States. The Ranney family dominated the peppermint oil business during the age of peddlers that corresponded with the period typically known as the market transition. The Hotchkiss brothers operated in a changing marketplace where they were pioneers of wholesale distribution and branding, challenged by the changing world of business finance triggered by the recession following the Panic of 1857 and the Civil War. Albert May Todd became peppermint king at a time when historians have described American agriculture as reaching a critical juncture when farmers’ undifferentiated products lacked market power, especially relative to highly capitalized food processors, prompting a Populist reaction. The experiences of each of these families adds valuable texture and nuance to commonly held historical interpretations of rural life during these times.

To review the story briefly, we begin  with the earliest commerce in peppermint oil in Colonial America and peppermint’s culture and distilling in the early republic. From its earliest introduction, peppermint was an inherently commercial crop. There was no gradual evolution from a subsistence-surplus phase of production to a peppermint oil business, because peppermint had no food or fodder value in a subsistence economy. From its earliest days, peppermint oil has always been an item of commerce. The farmers who grew and distilled peppermint deliberately involved themselves in markets, usually distant markets. Rural people involved with peppermint farming and distilling did not live in a pre-commercial state of grace until affected by a market transition imposed from without. The first peppermint growers like the Ranneys, Burnetts, and Vandermarks were deeply embedded in widespread commercial networks. Their commercial activities supplying peddlers and transporting peppermint oil from producing areas to centers of distribution or consumption were more widespread and happened much earlier than many historians have realized.

Although advertising is often depicted as a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, peppermint oil and essence were advertised heavily in newspapers throughout the British North American colonies and the early United States. The earliest advertisements were for imported peppermint preparations, but very quickly domestic peppermint producers began to compete with their British counterparts. Because peppermint oil was an important component of the materia medica used in many medical preparations, it was ubiquitous, indeed required, at any well-stocked apothecary shop. In regions such as the American South where peppermint could not be grown effectively, peppermint oil was imported first from England and later from domestic sources of supply such as western Massachusetts and later western New York. Rural consumers of peppermint oil in nonproducing regions were drawn into networks of commerce and medical information, especially when peppermint essence became widely prescribed not only by physicians but also in popular home-health manuals and among alternative medicine practitioners like the followers of herbalist Samuel Thomson.

The social and religious struggles of rural people in remote Ashfield, Massachusetts, became regionally and nationally important when controversy between the town’s established church and its Baptist minority escalated all the way to the Privy Council of King George III. The use of church membership and taxation as a weapon of class-based battles between poor local Baptists and their prosperous (and often out-of-town) opponents suggests that religious histories of the period might consider both class and urban-rural differences in their interpretations. The resumption of Ashfield’s social-religious strife in the 1830s illustrates that the distribution of secular ideology during the Second Great Awakening was more complicated than is generally understood. Although historians have depicted the evangelical movements of the 1830s as being largely attempts at social control, the “infidel” or secularist challenge is usually considered an urban intellectual phenomenon. Ashfield’s physician, Dr. Charles Knowlton, was a rural intellectual. Samuel Ranney, who both introduced peppermint to Ashfield and helped end its culture there, was a remarkably insightful farmer who had absorbed many of the main ideas explored by Ashfield’s materialist doctor. Neither of Ashfield’s notorious infidels were urban intellectuals. And yet Knowlton wrote America’s first birth control manual, and Ranney changed the fortunes of the entire region when he helped shift peppermint production to western New York.

And even after Samuel Ranney’s departure rural Ashfield remained relevant on a much wider scale. Essence peddlers from Ashfield brought news, ideas, and consumer culture to the remotest farms and villages, connecting rural Americans both to commerce and to American culture and politics in ways that have not been fully appreciated. Hundreds of local men carried trunks of goods and baskets of essences not only to remote farmsteads in their region but south into the slaveholding states and west onto the frontier as well. Social and economic historians have often gauged the transition to capitalism in rural areas by the extent of their production for the urban market. Peddlers made rural populations consumers as well as producers, and in the most remote areas with the least cash-based economies even a small amount of trade with itinerant peddlers was of great cultural significance. And in addition to bringing goods, peddlers connected their customers with networks of news and ideas in an interactive, face-to-face way that could not be achieved by newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Ashfield peddler William Sanderson carried Slavery as It Is with his wares and discussed its contents with his customers. The peddlers’ supplier, Jasper Bement, took time out of a business trip to attend rallies and speak on behalf of the Liberty Party on his way to Detroit. Ashfield’s Yankee peddlers carried both commerce and their politics with them wherever they went. And the men who supplied them, Henry Ranney and Jasper Bement, both represented their town in the state legislature in Boston.

Although historians of western migration have largely put aside the idea first proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier experience reshaped society by erasing people’s ties with home and family, the degree to which families such as the Ranneys maintained their connection has not been adequately appreciated. The Ranney brothers kept up a vigorous correspondence from Massachusetts to western New York, Michigan, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the goldfields of the West that spanned six decades. They visited each other regularly, and their aged mother traveled extensively to divide her time between the homes of her children. And they supported each other financially as well as emotionally, loaning money and doing business across the miles. Historians often characterize this period as one when (especially urban) business transitioned to impersonal association and anonymous, one-off, transactional exchanges, but the Ranneys built their rural business on kinship networks featuring obligation, morality, and long-term commitment. The Ranney migration into the Yankee West suggests not only the cultural continuity asserted by recent historians but also a degree of connectedness even these historians have not depicted. But the Ranneys were not a uniquely close family. The story of the settlement of Phelps, New York, shows that migrants from Conway and Ashfield, Massachusetts, migrated serially and often revisited their old homes. One migrant walked back to Massachusetts to get married, and when his wife died went back again for another. And when peddler Archibald Burnett decided to live in Phelps and marry a local girl, his brother called him back to Ashfield to share the secret of peppermint.

While some rural businessmen such as Ira Cary moved to New York City in order to become successful, even Dows and Cary’s success was based on transporting rural products to city consumers. This is consistent with the standard historical depiction of relatively undifferentiated agricultural goods and raw materials flowing into processing and consuming centers, frequently enriching the centers at the expense of the peripheries. The story of Hiram and Leman Hotchkiss’s rise to peppermint kings challenges the standard trajectory. Peppermint oil was processed on the farm and was highly differentiated based on quality, and the Hotchkiss brothers managed to identify themselves as reliable judges of quality, create brands, and prevent the concentration of market power in the center. After their initial success showing their oil at international expositions, the Hotchkisses shifted from growing and distilling their own peppermint oil to promoting their brand. Although histories of branding tend to focus on modernity and even postmodernity, the campaign of the Hotchkiss brothers to brand their products was one of the earliest in America. Rather than raising their product above a generic mass market that barely existed yet, Hiram aimed at making his peppermint oil the rival of English oil from Mitcham. A merchant’s son from a rural village in western New York, he rightly considered himself a formidable competitor in an international market.

In spite of his rural origin in the commercial and financial periphery, Hiram conducted business by his own rules. He expected his commission agents in New York City to advance money on his peppermint oil shipments, even though the oil market was substantially different from the flour market to which they were accustomed. Hiram expected foreign buyers to consider his peppermint oil equivalent to Mitcham oil because he said so. He expected his creditors to renew his notes indefinitely. He expected people to use his elaborately engraved banknotes and even his promissory notes as money. And in an ironic perversion of the kinship networks the Ranney family business had been based on, he expected his relatives to prostrate themselves on his behalf.

Hiram’s relationship with finance and banking offers a rural perspective that is lacking in histories of banking and business finance. Early in his career, Hiram took advantage of his local bank’s failure by speculating in mortgages and promissory notes he purchased from the bankruptcy receiver for pennies on the dollar. Contrary to the conclusions of historians who describe a growing moralism in public attitudes toward debt and credit after the Panic of 1837, Hiram learned that both value and obligation were subjective and open to negotiation. And contrary to prevailing contemporary belief that New York City was the center of finance, he believed he was the center. Once his flour or peppermint oil was loaded onto canal flatboats, he considered the transaction complete. He had created value—it was someone else’s job to make sure the flour or peppermint oil was sold when it arrived in the city.

The history of American banking is largely told from an urban perspective, partly because after the Civil War control of the U.S. banking system shifted to New York City. But the Hotchkiss brothers’ experiences as bankers under New York’s antebellum state banking laws suggest that the dominance of central banks was not inevitable and that rural bankers had interests and objectives that were not identical to those of the urban bankers who would dominate national banking. Hiram used his Peppermint Bank irresponsibly, primarily as a source of funds for his peppermint oil business. His brother Leman ran his bank on much sounder financial principles and focused on exchange and other business services that survived the elimination of state banknotes in 1866. Thaddeus Hotchkiss succeeded his father at the bank in 1869, and William B. Hotchkiss ran it until the late 1870s. We can only speculate how our present financial system would be different had rural regional bankers retained the ability to issue currency backed by the economic activity of their regions and write mortgages on real estate, but it is clear that the interests of those rural bankers were not considered when the banking legislation of the 1860s was passed. Historians might find that rural bankers’ reactions to the changes enacted during the Civil War shed light on subsequent rural movements for free silver and subtreasuries, and resistance to the money power later in the nineteenth century.

Although historians have stressed the importance of social networks in regulating business behavior, especially in the mid-nineteenth century in western New York’s burned-over district, Hiram was a strong counterexample to the portrayal of an orderly, self-regulating community of entrepreneurs. He was a monomaniacal autocrat who put his own desires before the interests of business partners, friends, and family. He regularly defaulted on debts, often leaving close relatives, including his brother, his wife, and his children, to suffer the consequences. He fled to New York City to avoid his creditors, spending entire seasons living in posh hotels and speculating in the stock market rather than paying his business and family bills. Although he tried to portray himself as a jovial country gentleman (which is how his descendants too tried to present him), Hiram illustrated the capacity of rural people to operate in business with an amorality considered shocking even by city standards.

Like the Hotchkiss brothers, Albert May Todd built a brand for his peppermint oil and festooned his labels with images of the awards his products won in national and international expositions. Unlike the Hotchkisses, however, Todd approached peppermint growing and distilling with the rigor of a scientist. After reading classics at a rural union school, he attended Northwestern University to study chemistry. When he began his peppermint oil business, he identified himself as a manufacturing chemist. He corresponded with other scientists about the chemical properties of peppermint oil and published technical letters to his customers describing the tests they could use to determine the purity and quality of his (and others’) peppermint oil. He was also keenly interested in agricultural improvement. He built extensive company farms complete with their own experiment stations and concerned himself with the welfare of his rural employees decades before urban Progressives developed an interest in country life. And although Progressive reformers ultimately failed to resist the dehumanizing tendency of corporate agriculture, he remained firmly focused on the social and cultural quality of life he provided for workers at his large farms.

Culture and art were a significant priority from Albert Todd’s earliest days. Introduced to the classics by his well-educated mother, Todd left college after a year to travel in England and Europe. During this trip he began an art collection and a library that he expanded throughout his life and shared with his employees and with his neighbors by loaning and donating artworks for public display. He believed that art uplifted rural people and gave them hope. And unlike famous urban industrialists and bankers who became art patrons and public benefactors after death, he did not keep his collection private for his own enjoyment but gave away hundreds of artworks during his lifetime.

Todd entered politics at a time when many rural people were Populists. He organized a fusion of Democrats, Populists, Free Silverites, and Prohibitionists to win a congressional seat in a Michigan district that had not elected a Democrat since before the Civil War. He promoted policies identical with the People’s Party platform, far from the South and West, usually considered the stronghold of Populism. In Congress, he drew on his experience as a rural businessman when he opposed railroads, plutocracy, and the control of the economy by autocratic Wall Street bankers. He also drew on observations of European political economy made on several research trips. He advocated national ownership of natural monopolies such as railroads and telecommunications and expanded his focus to municipal ownership of public utilities when he founded the Public Ownership League of America. He gave generously to support radical causes such as the Rand School of Social Science in New York City. And he built a network of allies that included local and regional activists as well as national figures like Jane Addams, Caroline Rand, and Eugene V. Debs. Unlike rural Populists who are often remembered as being traumatized by modernity, Todd was a successful businessman who was comfortable with technical and financial complexity. And unlike urban Progressives, often depicted as technocrats who approached issues from the top down, he advocated democratic reforms that would put more power in the hands of regular people.

It is possible that Albert Todd was entirely unique in developing a perspective that did not fit easily into the mold of a Midwestern agricultural businessman. It is similarly possible that the interests and concerns of the Hotchkiss brothers and the activities of the Ranneys were so far from typical that they contribute little to our understanding of their times and regions. But perhaps the history of these peppermint kings shines a light on less well-known countercurrents in the general flow of history: eddies in the stream that give the river its distinct character. The peppermint oil industry itself contrasted with most agricultural businesses described by historians, in the highly differentiated nature of its product and the decentralization that resulted when control was maintained near the point of production. The personalities and stories of the industry’s principal actors seem to suggest a richer and more complicated rural history than is currently appreciated. If historians look more closely at the stories of rural Americans, they may well be rewarded with a more nuanced and comprehensive view of American history. They may also discover a new treasury of interesting and compelling stories to tell.

Finally, the common element informing the attitudes and actions of the peppermint kings was their rurality. Although their individual responses to rural life and rural business differed, the peppermint kings are connected by their rurality in ways they are not unified by traditional categories such as politics, culture, ideology, and religion. Although they sometimes battled urban powers, they did not consider themselves characters in a grand narrative organized around urban centers. The agency they displayed as agricultural businessmen pursuing their own goals for their own reasons confutes the widely accepted depiction of peripheral agriculturalists increasingly dominated by centralized economic power.

American rural history has undergone somewhat of a renaissance since Robert Swierenga described the field in 1981 as an “orphan child” of the new social history.^[1] Rural histories such as David Danbom’s Born in the Country have taken issue with the dismissal of rural people and their concerns by consensus historians who had little interest in the countryside once America “moved to the city.”^[2] As Danbom noted in a 2010 article, “Nowadays, rural people are not much different from the rest of us.”^[3] While the accuracy of Danbom’s assessment is evident in the many similarities of contemporary rural and urban life caused by technology and social change, these very similarities hide wide differences in experience of Americans of earlier generations. The story of the peppermint kings contributes to a more detailed, nuanced understanding of the life experiences, interests, and attitudes of rural people and their communities. The Ranneys, the Hotchkiss brothers, and Albert May Todd exhibited a degree of agency that is not present in many histories of rural America. The view into their lives afforded by this book helps establish rural entrepreneurs as significant figures in business history, and the peppermint kings’ other interests and activities incorporate elements of economic, political, and cultural history for a more complete picture of these complex rural characters.

While their activities as peppermint kings illustrate the agency and initiative of rural people, the subjects of this book contribute most to our understanding of rural America in the ways they resisted mainstream American trends. The Ranneys were secularists in a very religious society. Samuel Ranney wrote eloquently about his rejection of organized religion, and his relatives kept up a half-century-long correspondence without once mentioning religious ideas. The Hotchkisses explored banking and regional credit during a period when finance was being nationalized. Their activities shed light on rarely considered elements of rural Americans’ response to the consolidation of the banking industry—a perspective that has generally escaped the view of historians for whom central banks and a national currency are often an unquestioned norm. And Albert May Todd showed how a rural entrepreneur could run a thriving, competitive business and still be a socialist. Populist and progressive opponents of monopoly are depicted in most histories as either poor farmers or academics. Todd enriches the story of resistance to economic concentration because he was a successful businessman himself. He objected to the money power not because he was antibusiness but because he believed the special privileges enjoyed by the financial elite had been attained unfairly and that large corporations behaved unjustly in society. Each of these elements of this book contribute to a more complete view of the issues, and each perspective has escaped the notice of most historians precisely because these characters lived their lives far from the cities that received the majority of attention from contemporary commentators and from historians basing their studies on sources produced by those largely urban contemporaries. In addition to exploring the differences between rural and urban life and its change over time, a new rural history could offer insights into how rural people responded to broader social changes that have often been viewed from a predominantly urban perspective. These insights might make the world we currently inhabit seem a bit less inevitable.