The Western Union Telegraph Company was the first U.S. corporation to monopolize a national industry. The company succeeded in doing so through rapid geographic expansion and the acquisition of rivals. While business historians have paid attention to Western Union’s importance as a major Gilded Age corporation that facilitated the rapid circulation of capital and information through space, they have largely abstracted and overlooked the material infrastructure upon which this technology was based. As a consequence, the literature has overlooked the business strategies relating to infrastructure.
Taking up that task, I argue that Western Union initially pursued a business strategy characterized by spatial flexibility, low investment in physical infrastructure, and short office leases. Besides its iconic New York central office, Western Union owned almost no real estate in the nineteenth century; instead, the company ruthlessly pursued low rents, relocating offices (and rerouting wires) to take advantage of more favorable terms of lease. Because of the relatively low investment in its physical infrastructure, telegraph branch lines could be hastily erected and as hastily abandoned.
This business strategy underwent a significant transformation in the twentieth century, when Western Union began investing substantial sums in the treatment and processing of its poles. The most marked consequence of this change was the purchase of real estate for the development of pole yards in locations such as Brisbane, IL, Nashua, NH, and Chattanooga, TN. Pole yards were energy- and capital-intensive sites of industry. Pole yards demanded coal, chemical preservatives, and capital improvements in the form of treatment tanks, perforating sheds, and railroad spurs. They also developed as sites of research and experimentation, benefiting from state-sponsored research in forestry and material sciences, in the context of a perceived crisis in the national timber supply.
This paper explores the reasons behind this significant shift in business strategy, its geographic dimensions, environmental consequences, and the consequences of the shift for labor.