Peter Haulenbeek began work as delivery boy in a grocery store. He entered the coffee business in the sixties in the employ of Wright Gillies, and went into the wholesale coffee-roasting trade under his own name at 170 Duane Street in 1876. His son, John W. Haulenbeek, Sr., came into his father's business in 1887. Peter Haulenbeek died January 15, 1894, and the firm name was changed to John W. Haulenbeek & Co. The business remained in the same building up to 1916, when it was moved to its present location at 393 Greenwich Street. John W. Haulenbeek, Jr., of the third generation, is now active in the business.
A leading figure in the sixties was James Brown, who started as an engineer, rose to a partnership, and retired after the Civil War, a wealthy man. He was a partner with Thomas Reid in the old Globe Mills. He was also associated with B. Fischer in the firm of Fischer, Kirby & Brown, and established the firm of Brown & Scott in Duane Street, where Peter Haulenbeek succeeded to the business. Afterward, he continued in the firms of Brown & Jones and Bisland & Brown, and died in 1898.
Van Loan, Maguire & Gaffney was a formidable combination in the coffee-roasting business in its day. Thomas Van Loan was for thirty years a partner in the firm of W.J. Stitt & Co. (William J. Stitt was in business at 173 Washington Street in the fifties). Joseph Maguire was a practical spice grinder. Hugh Gaffney was with Brown & Scott until the firm retired in 1879, and for ten years thereafter he traveled for B. Fischer & Co. Then he became a member of the firm of Benedict & Gaffney. Ill health caused his temporary retirement; but he returned to the business in 1897 when he organized the firm of Van Loan, Maguire & Gaffney. Joseph Maguire died in 1904.
Thomas Van Loan, New York
Mr. Gaffney died on March 20, 1912, and the name of the business was changed to Van Loan & Co., with Thomas Van Loan as the head of the business, under which name and management it still continues at 64 North Moore Street.
O'Donohue is a well known name in the development of both the green and roasted coffee trade of New York City. John O'Donohue was a leader in the green coffee business in 1830. It was John O'Donohue's Sons in 1873. John B. O'Donohue, son of Peter O'Donohue and grandson of the original John, after leaving John O'Donohue's Sons, formed a partnership with Robert C. Stewart (the present head of R.C. Stewart & Co.) to engage in the green coffee jobbing business as O'Donohue & Stewart. This partnership was dissolved in 1893. For a few years, John O'Donohue was associated with the coffee-roasting firm of Wing Bros. & Hart. About 1898, he formed the O'Donohue Coffee Co. at 284 Front Street. In 1910, this was consolidated with the Potter Coffee Co. and Bennett, Sloan & Co. to form the Potter, Sloan, O'Donohue Co. The firm dissolved in 1915. Ellis M. Potter came to New York from the Potter-Parlin Spice Mills in Cincinnati. Mr. O'Donohue died in 1918.
In the seventies Frederick Akers was proprietor of the oldest and best known trade roasting establishment in New York. The plant was known as the Atlas Mills, and was at 17 Jay Street. Mr. Akers died in 1901. The same year, William J. Morrison and Walter B. Boinest, former employees of Akers, formed a partnership to carry on the same kind of business at 413 Greenwich Street. It is still at that address under the name of Morrison & Boinest Co.
Col. William P. Roome, a Chesterfieldian figure among New York coffee roasters, came into the trade in 1876, when he established the firm of William P. Roome & Co., with T.L. Vickers as partner. In the Civil War that had preceded, young Roome (he was then nineteen) had distinguished himself as a conspicuous hero of the Sixth Army Corps, having entered the service as a second lieutenant in the Sixty-fifth New York Volunteers.