Joseph Dart

Joseph Dart
Joseph Dart, ca 1870
Born	April 30, 1799 East Hampton, Connecticut USA
Died	27 September 1879(1879-09-27) (aged 80)
Resting place	Forest Lawn Cemetery
Occupation(s)	Businessman, entrepreneur, inventor.

Joseph Dart (1799–1876) was an American businessman and an entrepreneur associated with the grain industry. He learned the Iroquois language and his Buffalo-based trading business benefited from the construction of the Erie Canal. Dart is credited with helping to invent the steam-powered Grain elevator.

Biography

Dart was born April 30, 1799, at the Middle Haddam Historic District in the town of East Hampton, Connecticut. His father was Joseph Dart and his mother was Sarah Dart and he was the third son in the family. He received his initial schooling at the local public schools while he grew up. He moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, when he was 17 yeas old and started his business education as an apprentice in a hat factory.

Dart moved in 1819 and worked in the hat business for two years at Utica, New York. In 1821, he then moved to Buffalo, New York. There in the village of under 2,000 he went into the hat, leather, and fur business with Joseph Stocking. Their firm name was Stocking & Dart and the store was at the corner of Main Street and Swan Street. It was strategically located and usually the first place a Native American would visit when they came to Buffalo. Dart learned to speak the Iroquois language to be able to trade with the local Native Americans. He learned various dialects of the members of the Canadian Six Nations of the Grand River (Iroquois Confederacy), which consisted of the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes. Chief Red Jacket visited their store frequently. Dart became known as a trusted businessman and a popular story in biographical notes on him is that whenever these Native American members came to the town they would often give over their valuables into his care while they were visiting there.

File:Dart's historical marker.jpg

Dart's grain elevator historical marker

The Erie Canal opened soon after Dart arrived in Buffalo and developed grain trading from local dealings into a multi-state industry. Since this was more lucrative that what he had been ding before it appealed to him as a businessman. Dart financed the building of the first steam-powered grain elevator in the world in 1842 that was designed by thirty year old mechanical engineer Robert Dunbar. He built the grain elevator building, known as Dart's Elevator in 1842. Dart's experimental grain elevator was constructed on the bank of the Buffalo river where it meets the Evans Ship Canal. It applied the well known elevator and conveyor principle invented by Oliver Evans fifty years before. He faced numerous obstacles and failures along the way in construction, but ultimately overcame them all to get his mechanical apparatus operational. He was the first person to make the application of elevating grain out of transporting ships using mechanical power and it became the system for unloading freighters used throughout the world ever since. Up to this time grains were in barrels or sacks that were moved by hand labor, a time consuming costly process.

Dart’s concept saved time and money for the freighters of grain from the start. An example given by one report is that the schooner John B Skinner loaded with 4,000 bushels of wheat came into the Buffalo port early one afternoon soon after Dart’s elevator was put in operation. It was emptied of the load of wheat using the elevator apparatus and then received a full load of salt. The vessel left the same evening and made her trip to Milan, Ohio, bringing back a second load of grain and unloaded it using Dart’s elevator. On the scooner’s return to Milan again she went with other freighters which came with her on her first trip and which had just succeeded in getting their cargoes unloaded by the old methods. Dart’s enterprise was lucrative soon after starting, as a month from the time his grain hoist was put in operation one of the leading merchants of the port offered Dart double his regular charge for accommodation in an emergency situation where a freighter had to be unloaded immediately and wished to be put on top priority.

The Bennett elevator was later built at this property site where Dart's grain elevator building once stood. The invention of the grain elevator had a profound effect on the city of Buffalo and the movement of grains on the Great Lakes. It developed as a mechanical solution to the obstacle of raising grain out of bulk carrier freighters to storage bins where the grain remained until being shipped out again onto canal boats or railroad cars. The city of Buffalo had become the world's largest grain shipping port in under fifteen years from when Dart invented his grain elevator apparatus. The city surpassed Odessa, Russia, London, England, and Rotterdam, Holland in volume of grain transferred.

Family

Dart married Dotha Dennison of Norfolk, Connecticut in 1830. They had seven children. Their residence was on Swan Street, South Division Street and Erie Street successively, when each was a high prestige area. Dart bought a larger than normal house on the northeast corner of Niagara Street and Georgia Street in 1858 to raise his large family.

Businesses and societies

Dart was a lumber dealer in the Buffalo area. He was a pioneer developer of the Buffalo Water Works, a founder of the Buffalo Seminary, and a member of the Buffalo Historical Society.

Death and legacy

Dart died at the age of eighty on September 27, 1879. His remains are buried in Buffalo's Forest Lawn Cemetery and has a stone marker.

The grain elevator is Dart's greatest legacy. His innovations revolutionized the grain management industry worldwide.

Sources

• Baxter, Henry H. (1980). Grain Elevators. Vol. 26. Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. ASIN B0006EAECY. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)

• Brown, William J. (2009). American Colossus: The Grain Elevator, 1843 to 1943. Lulu.com. ISBN 978-0-578-01261-2.

• Dixon, Laurinda S. (2008). Twenty-first-century Perspectives on Nineteenth-century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg. Associated University Presses. ISBN 978-0-87413-011-9. In 1842, Dart financed the construction of the first steam-powered grain elevator, the name by which these new structures for storing, weighing, and shipping grain came to be called.

• Kane, Joseph Nathan (1997). Famous First Facts, Fifth Edition. The H. W. Wilson Company. ISBN 0-8242-0930-3. The first grain elevator operated by steam to transfer and store grain for commercial purposes was designed by Robert Dunbar and made by Jewett and Root for Joseph Dart, Buffalo, NY, in 1842. The first cargo of corn was unloaded on June 22, 1843, from the South America.

• Mingus, Nancy (2021). Buffalo Business Pioneers. History Press. ISBN 9781467146685.

• Smith, Henry (1884). History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County. Mason & Company. OCLC 170247.

• LaChiusa, Chuck (2014). "History of Buffalo – Joseph Dart". Center for the Study of Art, Architecture, History and Nature. Retrieved October 2, 2015.

• White, Truman C. (1898). Our Country and Its People. Boston history Company. OCLC 36968331.

External links

• History of Buffalo – Joseph Dart