Norman B. Ream

Norman Bruce Ream was born in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1844, the son of a farmer. He exhibited a commercial sense early on when he nursed a lame duck back to health and sold it for a profit. But the Civil War interrupted his mercantile ambitions. Wounded twice and promoted to lieutenant, he came home a hero. He went west after the war and became a merchant, first in Illinois and then Iowa. His businesses failed. Undeterred, he headed for Chicago and the Union Stock Yards. He worked as a commission merchant, but then traded his mud-caked boots for French kid boots and became a trader at the Board of Trade. His analytical mind was made for the grain and provision pits. Money poured in especially after helping in one of P.D. Armour's pork corners; Ream had quickly become one of the city's best plungers. By the mid-1880s, he was married and the father of several children - and also a millionaire. He lived on Chicago's Prairie Avenue alongside the likes of George M. Pullman and Marshall Field. He began investing in real estate, urban transit companies, and railroad stock. Another millionaire neighbor, John W.Doane, interested him in consolidating and financing industrial enterprises. At the end of the 1890s, Mr. Ream had been involved in the creation of such companies as Glucose Sugar Refining, National Biscuit, and Federal Steel. Finance capitalism, however, was based primarily on Wall Street. So, by the turn of the century, Mr. Ream was traveling to New York City, impressing financiers like J. Pierpont Morgan. He would help Morgan put together the United States Steel Corporation and International Harvester Company, and serve on the board of directors of many enterprises. He would also be at Morgan's side during the banking panic of 1907. After the move, Ream and his family lived in a luxury apartment in New York City and a mansion in Connecticut. But life became turbulent in his remaining years. Public sentiment soured towards Wall Street and the wealthy (to include Norman B. Ream). This, along with social indiscretions from some of his children, kept the Ream name in the press well after his death in 1915. Then, gradually, his life was forgotten.