This month, America celebrates the birthday of one of the country’s earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.
During a time period of America’s existence as a British colony and then a young nation—when communication and transportation faced challenges, to put it mildly—this businessman built an enterprise with international reach. He opened a mill that ground 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was shipped throughout America and, unusual during colonial times, exported to Europe. And in the 1790s, late in his life, he built one of the new nation’s largest whiskey distilleries.
Image: Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (Wikimedia Commons)
