Quincy's brewers and brick makers, contractors and coopers, foundry and factory workers, and diverse other tradesmen made this Mississippi River community an important center of commerce in Lincoln's day. Quincy's businessmen, whose enterprises attracted business from Missouri, a slave state and Iowa, a free state, had learned discretion in their sentiments about slavery. Their businesses flourished. The demand by other regions for Quincy's produce and products had grown so great by 1853 that the Congress made Quincy a federal port. When restrictions on Quincy's trade with Missouri were imposed in 1862 by President Lincoln's administration to weaken the South's Civil War effort, three of Quincy's Lincoln friends urged the president to relax the limitations. Lincoln agreed to the request by U.S. Senator Orville Hickman Browning, Congressman William A. Richardson, and James W. Singleton. Within days of their visit, cross-river traffic resumed. Quincy industries supported the war effort with local foundries producing cannons and carriages and some stores selling military hardware. A new industry emerged in Quincy during the war when Missouri tobacco, whose shipments elsewhere had been blocked by Lincoln, was brought here for tobacco products manufacturing.

Allen Comstock started Quincy's first stove foundry in 1846 on Front Street south of Delaware, and Quincy became one of the first western towns to engage in the stove industry. His business flourished with the small works growing into the large Phoenix Stove Foundry, one of the best in the country. By 1855, A.Comstock & Co. was producing 9,000 stoves a year. Timothy Castle came to Quincy in 1859, purchased an interest in the foundry, and changed the name to Comstock, Castle & Co.

Long-snouted hogs ran like deer in the river bottoms, remember Henry Asbury in his Reminiscences of Quincy. Nathaniel Pease established a pork-packing plant at the foot of Broadway in 1834. Quincy became one of the nation's leading pork-packers after men like Pease bought hogs and sold pork to distant markets. In 1847 Quincy packing houses sent the meat of more than 20,000 hogs, averaging 250 pounds each, to hungry markets. Steamboats and railroads facilitated Quincy's commerce. Western expansion also lifted its growing land-based trade. By mid-century Quincy had become a manufacturing powerhouse. In 1848 German emigrant Heinrich Knapheide began making wagons. Local foundries, including the Quincy Foundry at the corner of Front and Spring, melted metal for manufacturers of farm implements and castings. Others engaged in milling, brewing, distilling, carriage and cabinet-making, machining, warehousing, and tobacco processing.

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Show me all markers in:  Quincy, IL  |  Adams County  |  62301  |  Illinois  |  United States of America

Steamboats and Railroads
Lincoln's Quincy
Downtown Quincy in 1858
Lincoln's Friend Johnston
Douglas' Disciple
Quincy's Judge Douglas
Stephen A. Douglas in Quincy
The Mormons in Quincy
Lincoln Correspondent
Lincoln Promoter

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