Mr. Arbuckle married Miss Mary Alice Kerr in Pittsburg, in 1868. She died in 1907. His many charities included boat trips for children, luxurious farm vacations for tired wage-earners, boat-raising and life-saving schemes, a low-priced home for working girls and men on an old full-rigged ship lying off a New York dock, which he called his "Deep Sea Hotel," and a vacation enterprise for young men and young women at New Paltz, N.Y., which was known as the "Mary and John Arbuckle Farm." A magazine for children, called Sunshine, was another benevolent enterprise of his.
When John Arbuckle died at his Brooklyn home, March 27, 1912, he had been ill only four days. The New York Coffee Exchange closed at two o'clock the day following, after adopting appropriate resolutions and appointing a committee to attend the funeral. His estate in New York was valued at $33,000,000.
W.V.R. Smith and James N. Jarvie retired from the firm in 1906; and John Arbuckle and his nephew W.A. Jamison continued it as sole owners and partners until Mr. Arbuckle's death in 1912. Mr. Arbuckle died childless and a widower, leaving as his only heirs his two sisters, Mrs. Catherine Arbuckle Jamison and Miss Christina Arbuckle. Mrs. Jamison is the widow of the late Robert Jamison, who had been a prominent drygoods merchant in Pittsburg. William A. Jamison is her eldest and only living son. Following the death of John Arbuckle, a new partnership was formed in which Mrs. Jamison, Miss Arbuckle, and Mr. Jamison became the partners and owners, and that partnership, without change of name, continues. Probably there is no other mercantile establishment of similar size in the country that is carried on as a partnership, and none which after more than sixty years is so exclusively owned by members of the immediate family of its founders.
The Arbuckle business, as it is today, is John Arbuckle's best monument. All that it is he foresaw; for behind those keen, penetrating eyes, there was wonderful vision. Simple in his tastes; democratic in his dress, in his habits and his speech; he was one of the most approachable of our first captains of industry. Many of the younger generation in the coffee business have found inspiration in contemplating John Arbuckle's achievements. As represented in what has been called "the world's greatest coffee business", these include other package coffees, such as Yuban, Arbuckle's Breakfast, Arbuckle's Drinksum, and Arbuckle's Certified Java and Mocha. The pioneer Ariosa brand is still being sold; although it is interesting to note that the demand for ground Ariosa is increasing, marking the swing of the pendulum of public taste away from the original bean package to the so-called "steel-cut," or ground, coffee package. Will it swing back again, some day? Many coffee men believe it will. If it does, good old Ariosa, with its coating of sugar and eggs, will no doubt be on the job to meet it.
Yuban was launched in the fall of 1913. It is a high-grade package coffee, whereas Ariosa is popular-priced. In addition to the package coffee business, Arbuckle Bros. have many other activities. They deal in green coffee as well as roasted coffee in bulk. The wholesale grocery business in Pittsburg continues under the old name of Arbuckles & Co.; while in Chicago, Arbuckle Bros. have a branch equipped with a coffee-roasting-and-packaging plant, also spice-grinding and extract-manufacturing plants, and do a large business in teas. A branch in Kansas City distributes the products manufactured in New York and Chicago. In Brazil, offices are maintained at Rio de Janeiro, Santos, and Victoria, as Arbuckle & Co. In Mexico, Arbuckle Bros. are established at Jalapa, with branches at Cordoba and Coatepec. In season, the warehouses and hulling plants at those points employ as many as 650 hands preparing Mexican coffee for shipment to New York.
Arbuckle Bros. are direct importers of green coffee on a large scale, and are known also as heavy buyers "on the street." The roasting capacity of their Brooklyn plant is from 8,000 to 9,000 bags per day. The cylinder equipment of twenty-four Burns roasters is supplemented by four "Jumbo" roasters of Arbuckle build, each capable of roasting thirty-five bags at one time. The Ariosa package business grew from the smallest beginnings to more than 800,000 packages per day. Individual brands have not held their lead of late years; but the volume of package-coffee business is greater than ever. Many jobbers now pack brands of their own, besides handling the Arbuckle brands.
Distribution of roasted coffees outside Chicago and Kansas City is accomplished through the medium of more than one hundred stock depots in as many different cities of the United States.
To operate the world's greatest coffee business is no small undertaking; and when this is coupled with an important sugar-refining business and a waterfront warehouse-and-terminal business, plenty of room is needed. So we find the plant along the Brooklyn waterfront occupying an area of a dozen city blocks. An idea of the extent and diversity of the activities of the plant may be gained from a brief reference to the utilities, and the trades, and even the professions, that are required to make the wheels go round.
To ship more than one hundred cars of coffee and sugar in a single day calls for shipping facilities that could be had only by organizing a railroad and waterfront terminal, known as Jay Street Terminal, equipped with freight station, locomotives, tugboats, steam lighters, car floats, and barges. City deliveries of coffee and sugar call for a fleet of thirty-five large motor trucks that are housed in the firm's own garage and kept in repair in their own shops. Although motor trucks are fast replacing the faithful horse; and the time will never come again when Arbuckle Bros. will boast of their stable of nearly two hundred horses that were generally acknowledged to be the finest string of draft horses in the city, some fifty or sixty of their faithful animals still are in harness; and so the stable, with blacksmith shop, harness shop, and wagon-repair shops, are serving their respective purposes, though on a reduced scale. A printing shop vibrates with the whirr of mammoth printing presses turning out thousands upon thousands of coffee-wrappers and circulars; and doubtless it will be news to many that the first three-color printing press ever built was expressly designed and built for Arbuckle Bros. Then there is a sunny first-aid hospital on top of the Pearl Street warehouse where a physician is ever ready to relieve sudden illness and accidental injuries. On the eleventh floor there is a huge dining room where the Brooklyn clerical forces get their noonday lunches. This feeding of the inner man (and woman) is matched by the power-house where twenty-six large steam boilers must be fed their quota of coal. In the winter months, when Warmth must come for the workers as well as power for the wheels, the coal consumption runs up as high as four hundred tons per day.
The barrel factory, with a daily capacity of 6,800 sugar barrels, is located about a mile away, where barrel staves and heads are received from the firm's own stave mill in Virginia, made from logs cut on their own timber lands in Virginia and North Carolina. A more self-contained plant would be hard to imagine, and so we find that even the last activity in its operations—that of washing and drying the emptied sugar bags—is also provided for. That this is "some laundry" goes without saying, when it is recalled that in the busy sugar season the firm dumps from eight to ten thousand bags of raw sugar per day, and that these bags are washed and dried daily as emptied. A huge rotary drier of the firm's own design does the work of about three miles of clothes lines.