Daniel Pratt

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Daniel Pratt was born in Temple, New Hampshire, in 1799. His father, Edward Pratt, a yeoman farmer, had recently migrated from Reading, Massachusetts, to Temple, after his marriage to Asenath Flint of that place. Daniel was fourth in a family of six children, all of whom were obliged to work on their small New England Farm for a livelihood. The family belonged to the Congregational Church and a few months before Daniel was born accumulated sufficient funds to purchase for thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents "Pew No. 9 in Temple Meeting House". Pratt was reared in a home and society which contained an over-abundance of Puritan rigors and discipline. In later years Pratt’s sister, Mrs. Eliza Holt, declared that Pratt’s parents "required their children to attend church and prayer-meetings and to avoid all vain and trifling conversations on the Sabbath Day...A novel was not permitted in the house." Pratt received limited education in district school no. 4 of Hillsborough County, New Hampshire. This school held winter and summer terms of eight to ten weeks, but after Pratt became old enough to assist on the farm he was denied the summer term because of the ill-health of his father. At sixteen years of age, Pratt, who was mechanically inclined, was apprenticed to John Putnam, architect and friend of the Pratt family, in order to learn the building trade. This was a natural ambition for young Pratt, as his paternal grandfather, Daniel Pratt of Reading, Massachusetts (for whom he was named) had accumulated a small fortune as a joiner. During the time of his apprenticeship, Pratt’s mother, to whom he was devoted, became seriously ill. She died on December 8, 1817, after an illness of several months, during which time Pratt served as nurse and comforter.

The death of his mother, a natural restlessness of spirit, an unbounded ambition, and hope of raising money to pay off the mortgage of his employer’s home, all combined to speed Pratt on a voyage to the South, a region which he regarded as a land of opportunity. He sailed for Savannah, Georgia, in 1819, when twenty years of age. After two years in that Georgia seaport town, he moved in July, 1821, to Milledgeville, Georgia. This was the heart of the new cotton growing area of the state, and for the next ten years Pratt planned and built for wealthy planters, in the vicinity of Milledgeville and Macon, some of the most beautiful and well constructed homes in Georgia. These homes follow the popular classic style of the period and feature large white columns, broad hallways and either spiral or elliptical stairways. Among homes built by Pratt still standing in the nineteen-thirties when the Historical Records Survey made a study of old homes in the area were "Westover" in Baldwin County, "Lowthar Hall" and the "Gordon-Blount-Bowen Home" in Jones County. These homes established Pratt's reputation as one of the leading carpenter architects in the south in the 1820’s.

During the eighteen-twenties Pratt also engaged in the construction of boats on the Ocmulgee River below Macon. He wrote his father in 1827 that "I have continued as yet to work at my trade, although I have got on a different branch at this time which is boat building. I am now in Macon building boats to carry cotton down the river and fetch goods up the river, which is disagreeable and heavy work." In 1825 he became a Georgia landowner when he accepted as part payment for building the Gordon-Blount-Bowen home two hundred and fifty acres of land in Jones County, Georgia. However, he did not engage in planting but rented this land for cultivation.

In 1827, Pratt acquired three slaves, which he used as carpenters in the building trade. The purchase of slaves brought an immediate letter from his Puritan father in New England who wrote on May 20, 1827, condemning his son for the ownership of slaves. Pratt replied:

My slaves which you mention are not numerous. I have but three and it is not probable that I shall keep them long. I did not intend that you should know anything about that as I supposed that you would think that I was ruined eternally. But did you know my situation and the situation of the country I live in you would think differently. I assure you that to live in any country it is necessary to conform to the customs of the country in part. I have bought no man into bondage and I am in hopes I have rendered no man's situation more disagreeable than it was before, but on the contrary I am in hopes that I have bettered it.

Another valid picture of a letter to his father gives a vivid picture of Pratt’s living conditions while building boats in Macon. He wrote:

I keep Bachelors Hall and live in a little log cabin which I built on the bank of the river a little below Macon. My family consists of four Negro men and myself. I almost live a hermit’s life but could enjoy myself tolerably well were it not for the mosquitoes. I am now writing by a candle light and if you will believe me they buzz around me almost equal to a swarm of bees. I am obliged to have my bed covered with mosquito netting to keep them from me.

Pratt evidently soon tired of keeping "bachelors hall" as a few months after he wrote the above letter he married, after a short courtship, Miss Ester Ticknor of Columbia, Conn. She had come South on a visit to the family of her late brother, Dr. Orray Ticknor, who founded Clinton Academy in 1819. Clinton, at this time, was a booming town in the heart of the piedmont cotton growing area of Georgia and the site of Samuel Griswold’s Gin Factory. Griswold was a Connecticut Yankee who converted a tin manufactory to a gin factory. After Pratt’s marriage in Clinton, Pratt and Griswold became friends, the first bond of sympathy being that they were both modern men. In 1831, Pratt came to Clinton as a manager of the Griswold Cotton Gin Factory. It was here he learned the manufacture of cotton gins and received his first experience in their sale and distribution. His mastery of the business was such that after one year he became a partner in the enterprise. However, Pratt was not satisfied with the location of the plant at Clinton. The cotton kingdom was rapidly moving westward and Pratt wished to establish a manufactory nearer its center on one of the greater river systems of the South which would furnish transportation for distribution of the gins throughout the South. The west was virgin territory for the manufacture of gins as there was not a single factory of any size west of Georgia. He was also an ardent advocate of water as the cheapest source of power and the Clinton Factory was run by steam. In 1832, Pratt persuaded Griswold to establish a branch of the Gin Factory on the fall line in Central Alabama but Griswold changed his mind because of Indian uprising in east central Alabama. However Pratt was determined to carry out the plan. Shadrack Mimm, Pratt’s business partner in the early years in Alabama and his first biographer, wrote his decision to move westward: "The indomitable will of Daniel Pratt, that spirit of enterprise which characterized him through life, was not to be daunted nor discouraged by Indian uprisings. He purchased material for fifty gins, put the same on wagons, and, in 1833, he with his brave wife and two African Negroes started for Alabama." He made a temporary stop at a water power site on Mortar Creek, later known as Elmore’s mill site, about twelve miles from Montgomery, Alabama. There he assembled and painted the fifty gins he bought from Georgia, which found a quick sale among the planters of the Alabama Black Belt. After searching for a more permanent site for his factory, he leased for five years a waterpower site on Autauga Creek, known as McNeil’s Mill. Here Pratt lived in a log cabin with a leaning mud chimney propped by poles until he could construct a two story frame gin shop. When completed he moved his family into the upper story and boarded the operatives there. On the lower floor, he began the construction of gins and managed to average a production of two hundred gins annually until his lease expired in 1839. This required a great deal of mechanical ingenuity as he had not yet secured many of the machine tools which were later employed at his Prattville Factory. At this time the gin saws were cut and the holes punched by hand out of sheet steel imported from England by way of Mobile. Each gin required 30, 45, 50, or 60 saws, as these were the most popular sizes in the eighteen-thirties. Other parts from the Alabama Black Belt indicate the immediate popularity of the Pratt Gin. As early as March 24, 1835, Charles Tait purchased Pratt Gins for his plantation on the Alabama River and testified to their merits.

Finding that he must greatly expand his facilities for the production of gins, Pratt purchased in the fall of 1835 from Joseph May, the present site of Prattville, the new location on which he built the house three miles up Autauga Creek from the McNeil Mill site and twelve miles from Montgomery. The price paid was twenty-one dollars an acre or $21,000 (half of which was to paid in cotton gins at prevailing prices) for one thousand acres of heavily wooded land which contained the mill site. Less than a decade before, May had bought most of the land from the Land Office of the United States Government at Cahaba, Alabama at $1.25 an acre. All contemporary accounts described the site as a marsh covered with yellow pine, bay trees, vine of every description, and unfit for human habitation. But the two most important features of the new site for the Pratt Gin Company were its excellent water power and its millions of feet of yellow heart pine for the manufacture of gin stands. In order to help finance this deal Pratt borrowed eight thousand dollars from a friend in New England, giving him a second mortgage on one-fourth of the purchased property and two thousand dollars from the Bank of the State of Alabama, giving as security four slaves, all of whom were listed as mechanics. So profitable was the manufacture of cotton gins that when the lease on the McNeil Mill site expired early in 1839, Pratt has satisfied all these debts and mortgages.

Pratt moved the Gin Factory to its new site in 1839 and began building on the fall line in Alabama the most extraordinary town in the ante-bellum South, a town dedicated to industry on a spot surrounded by large black belt plantations on the South and farms or smaller plantations in the Piedmont area on the north. In ten years he made this marshy one thousand acres heavily wooded land into a thriving manufacturing village of eight hundred people. The New England system of a planned town was followed from the beginning. Before settlement, the land was surveyed, streets and lots marked out , the site of a public square, a school, and other public buildings determined.

The Gin Factory was the economic corner stone on which the new town was built. Profits from the Gin Factory in turn financed the beginnings of other industries, until by the eighteen-fifties, Prattville for its size furnished the most diverse industrial pattern in the United States. Pratt Gin Company became the largest Gin Factory in the world and was renowned wherever cotton was grown. In the eighteen fifties Pratt filled orders for gins from Russia, the British Empire, France, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America.

Before 1850 the demand for the Pratt Gin far exceeded the capacity of the 1839 factory. As a result, Pratt constructed in 1854 a new brick factory which had a capacity of 1500 gins annually. He wrote a friend at this time: "I expect to put in the latest machinery and have the best cotton gin factory in the world." The new factory was 250 ft. long by 50 ft. wide, and three stories high. The first floor was filled with various machine tools used in the manufacture of gins. There was a line of shafting 250 ft. long, on which at suitable distances apart, were seventy drums for driving the various machines. This floor contained the steel and saw department. Here gin saws were cut from sheet steel. Ingenious mechanical machines were used to secure perfect precision in the gin saws, as on their accuracy depended in great part a perfect gin. The sheet steel was first cut into squares, then rounded and lastly teeth were cut. Every gin saw was made uniform, all being the same size, temper and thickness. Machines also cut into specified sizes and shapes the well seasoned yellow pine for the Gin Stand. The gin saws were mounted on one shaft about 3/4 inch apart, the gin brushes made of hog bristle on another. An elevator carried these gins parts, together with iron castings made in Pratt’s foundry to the second floor, where assembly of the gin stand took place. This consisted of placing the mounted gin and brush shafts together with the cast iron ribs and other gin parts made in Pratt’s foundry into the wooden stand. After being tested with seed cotton to see that it was in perfect running order, the assembled gin stand was then carried on the elevator to the third floor where it was painted or varnished and boxed for shipping. The popularity of the Pratt Gin was due in large part to its simplicity and durability. In 1846 Pratt Wrote:

I make first, second and third quality gin stands. The first are made with double-breasted large wing brushes calculated for long flues. These I sell for four dollars per saw. The second quality are single breasted but are are also calculated for long flues. These command three dollars and fifty cents per saw. The third quality is a lighter gin with a sixteen inch breast calculated for short flues. These are sold at three dollars per saw...I make use of Naylor and Company’s sheet cast steel for saws. I have it manufactured to order of a number 21 gauge, and use about 14 tons annually. On the circular saws I make from six to sixteen teeth to the inch, as purchasers may order. My fine tooth gins work slowly, but make fine cotton. When left to my judgment I put ten teeth to the inch, which I think more general satisfaction than any other number. I place the saws on a cylinder three fourths of an inch apart. I make use of cast iron ribs altogether and have been using them now more or less for thirteen years past. I find them to answer a better purpose than any wrought ribs I have ever used...I think I am the first gin manufacturer that ever made use of cast ribs. I have them chill hardened, nearly as hard as glass where the saws pass through them. My gins are made on the most simple plan I can adopt to have them answer the purpose. I have long since learned that a piece of machinery should be simple to go into general use. My object is to make them simple and durable.

Although most of the gins were made to some standard pattern, some were made to order. Wealthy planters of the Mississippi Valley River where Pratt sold seventy percent or more of his gins in the eighteen-fifties often ordered gins of special construction with extras. J. J. Hooper, editor of the Montgomery Mail, who visited the Gin Factory in 1857 wrote that some are "got up in the most elegant and finished style, resembling more furniture for the parlor than a machine for the plantation. We saw many with polished mahogany covers and engraved plates". In some cases all visible parts of screws, bolts, and iron were nickel plated.

Pratt never tired of boasting that all materials in the construction of his gins, except the sheet steel for saws, were southern. The Pratt Gin Company imported the sheet steel for more than forty years from Naylor and Company in Sheffield, England. This was a better grade of steel than could be secured in the United States. The wood for the gin stands came from surrounding country-side. The iron for the gin castings came from Shelby Iron Works, some fifty miles to the north. The Shelby Iron Works papers in the University of Alabama Library indicate that for more than forty years, Pratt was Horace Ware’s best customer. The oldest existing records in collection disclose that Pratt purchased from Ware between June and December 1846, three car loads of pig iron of approximately ten tons each, all of which were delivered on time except the latter which was delayed because Ware simply could not secure railroad cars for shipping. All three orders like hundreds of later orders specify "no 1 foundry pig iron". According to Pratt this was the very best grade of pig iron to be secured anywhere in the United States. It was very soft iron made from Brown ore with charcoal. The Pratt foundry found a soft or very malleable iron necessary in order to mold it into complex castings for the Pratt Gin. Pratt was the first gin manufacturer to use cast iron instead of wrought iron for the gin ribs. He wrote "I find cast iron ribs to assure a better purpose than any wrought iron ribs I have ever used. I have them chill hardened, nearly as hard as glass where the saws pass through them."

He recorded his average monthly labor cost at $2500 in 1860 or $38 per mechanic. But as this included his slave labor cost as well as his hired white labor cost, it does not indicate that the white hired mechanic received only $38 per month. Thirty and forty-five saw gins, popular in the thirties all but disappeared from his listings by 1850, as gins increased in size. His most popular gin in the forties and fifties was a 50 or 60 saw gin and he sold an increasing number of 80 saw gins to large planters in the late fifties. The "Eureka Gin" which Pratt started making about 1858 was a very popular gin in the lowland areas of the Mississippi River where Mastodon or other large boll types of cotton were grown. These gins contained eighty saws and since they were of special construction sold for six dollars per saw.

Pratt made larger profits on his gins because he owned a foundry where he made his own castings. This foundry also supplied orders for many gin parts, such as bolts, gin ribs, and gin gear. In addition, it carried on a large outside trade in casting iron for various purposes. As early as 1847 the foundry received an order for railroad axles, which were made of iron secured from the Shelby County Iron Works.

Surprisingly enough, Pratt secured no patents on his gin until June, 1857. Then his patent consisted as he described it of a gin so constructed that "a spiral movement is given the cotton within the box or hopper, and a fresh surface constantly presented to the saws, so that the cotton will be stripped from the seed without being cut or broken." He improved on this patent when he secured another in December, 1871 and he had even more important patents pending when he died in May 1873. Although Pratt’s patents may not be called revolutionary, he probably contributed more to the gins improvement than any of the gin manufacturers after Eli Whitney and before Robert S. Munger. However, his genius as a gin manufacturer, lies not in patents he secured but in large scale production of a popular and superior gin which he constantly improved during the period when such a gin was necessary if the cotton kingdom was to expand from Georgia to Texas. By 1860 has had placed more than fifteen thousand of these gins in the hands of cotton planters and made thousands of gin parts to service his own and other gins.

So large a production required an intricate system for sale and distribution. Some orders were mailed direct from the planter to the factory and filled without the aid of a middle man. But as was natural, factors who sold the planters cotton and filled orders for his purchases became leading agents in the sale of Pratt’s gins. In the late fifties the following commission houses were authorized agents for the sale of Pratt’s gins: S. Mims and Company, Montgomery, Alabama; Campbell and Company, Mobile, Alabama; Hale, Murdock, and Company, Columbus, Mississippi; Fleming and Baldwin, Natchez, Mississippi; E.M. Apperson, Memphis, Tennessee; Mather, Hughes, and Saunders, Galveston, Texas. There were special orders from other factorage houses. However, as early as 1846, Pratt decided to become his own commission merchant at the largest center of gin sales, New Orleans, Louisiana. He purchased property in New Orleans and erected at 15 St. Charles St. a large three story brick building for storage and sale of his gins, gin parts, and various other products of his manufacture. He brought H. Kendall Carter, whom he had known in Macon, Georgia, and who also invested in the firm, to New Orleans as a partner. The firm operated under the name of H. Kendall Carter and Company, cotton factors and general commission merchants, from 1846 to 1858. In 1858 the firm became Daniel Pratt and Company when Pratt bought the interest of H. Kendall Carter, and became sole owner. By entering the commission merchant business at this large center of trade, Pratt eliminated the middle man’s profits on many of the products of his industry. However, Pratt found it impossible to handle the sale and distribution of his gins solely through commission houses. In 1860 he had fourteen full-time agents in the Mississippi River Valley cotton area alone, each with a certain part of the area assigned to him. These agents were paid either on a salary or commission basis, or a combination of the two, and were both salesmen and mechanics. They installed and serviced Pratt gins and contacted prospective buyers. Pratt advertised his gins in leading southern newspapers and periodicals, and especially in the Agricultural press.

It is interesting to note that Pratt sold very few gins in Georgia and South Carolina. Samuel Griswold and Company of Clinton and later Griswoldville, Ga., (Pratt’s old partner) and Taylor and Company (later Clemons Brown and Co.) of Columbus, Georgia were the main competitors in that area. Pratt sold his gins in Alabama (many delivered by wagon until railroads were built) or shipped them by way of Mobile and New Orleans to the central and western cotton areas. His more important competitors for the trade of these areas were Gullett and Company of Aberdeen, Mississippi, and later Gulletts, Louisiana, and two northern firms, both of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, E. C. Carver and Company and the Eagle Cotton Gin Company. These two Bridgewater factories were the only gin factories located in the north and together never had more than twenty percent of the total southern gin trade, but they furnished live competition in the New Orleans area. By 1849, Pratt’s New Orleans business was so large that he wrote:

I have ten times the interest in New Orleans that I have in Mobile and I say that Louisiana has done as much toward building up Prattville as Alabama.

Other industries established in Prattville before 1850, which Pratt owned in whole or in part were the sash, door and blind factory, a horse mills factory, machine and blacksmiths shops, a wagon manufactory, a tin manufactory, and a flouring mill. The sash, door and blind factory supplied those articles for some of the finest homes in South Alabama and along the Gulf Coast. The wagon manufactory became a well known establishment, manufacturing carts, drays, carriages, rockaways, buggies, and wagons, which several contemporary accounts describe as better than any of northern make. The horse mills factory made mills for grinding corn. The tin manufactory made tin roofing, gutters, cooking utensils, and any kind of tin ware made to order. The flouring mill, built in 1840, had the finest machinery to be secured at the time. DeBow’s Review declared in 1851 that this flouring mill was the first of any note built in Alabama and to its erection may be attributed the great increase in production of wheat in the state and the erection of two other large mills." According to Pratt’s ledger books the combined gross income from these industries alone in 1859 was $93,406.08.

But the most important factory, with the exception of the Gin Manufactory, was Prattville Manufacturing Company No. 1, organized by Pratt and incorporated by the Alabama Legislature in 1846. The company sold $110,000 worth of stock (in units of $1,000 per share) before it began operations. Pratt bought a controlling share of the stock. Other purchasers, all of whom were local, were

agents or mechanics of the gin factory and planters in the area. The corporation was controlled by a Board of Directors which elected Pratt president of the company and continued to re-elect him annually. Under Pratt’s leadership the Prattville Manufacturing Company became one of the most successful and well known of the cotton and woolen mills.

Pratt’s factory was designed to make coarse grades of cloth but made some finer grades in the late eighteen-fifties. The year the Prattville Manufacturing Company was organized Pratt wrote that the mill was "expressly for the purpose of making heavy cotton osnaburgs for plantation use.... I flatter myself that by the first of October next, I will be able not only to furnish the cotton planters with gin stands, but cotton osnaburgs of as good a quality, and as cheap as they can be produced elsewhere. Our machinery is entirely new, and made expressly for heavy goods. When in complete operation I expect to turn out 6,000 yards per day, weighing half a pound to the yard." The first textile mill was wooden structure with 2800 cotton spindles and 100 looms, to which was later added 585 woolen spindles. In the eighteen-fifties the mill consumed annually about 1500 bales of cotton and 120,000 pounds of wool. Both the cotton and the wool were purchased locally; the latter encouraging the production of wool in the area. According to the industrial census of 1850, the mill in 1849 made 540,000 yards of osnaburgs and 344,000 yards of sheeting, both of which sold for near ten cents a yard.

The Prattville Manufacturing Company worked 141 people in 1850, 62 males and 79 females. A few of these from New England but most labor for the factory came from the small farmer class in the surrounding area. Albert J. Pickett, who later wrote the well known history of Alabama, and who visited the factory less than six months after it opened in order to write an account for DeBow’s Review declared:

The persons employed are taken from the country around-- men, women and children-families being preferred-who are furnished with homes at small rent and obtain their provisions at the shops and neighboring farms. Average wages are eight dollars per month. There is no difficulty in getting operatives. Slaves have not been employed because of the abundance of other labor.

Laborers in the factory lived in neat newly built company houses pictured in DeBows’ Review for August, 1851. Each house had its garden plot. Their standard of living was much improved in their new environment. Pratt considered his textile mill not only an economic venture but a sociological experiment. He built schools and churches for them with his own money. A very religious man himself, he taught them in Prattville’s Sunday Schools. Many contemporary accounts tell of his unbounded paternalism toward his workers. He wrote his sister in New England in 1847 that his aim was to "build a respectable village such as will compare with your northern towns in point of good morals and good society. In fact I am not afraid now of a comparison with any village in New England of the same population."

The crucial test for the textile mill came in the first two years of its existence. Two superintendents of the mill failed because of the inability to manage the mill. Some of the weavers quit because the mill ran only part-time. Untrained labor was plentiful but trained labor non-existent locally. However, Pratt like most successful cotton mill operations in the ante-bellum South had New England contacts by which he could secure managerial labor. In September, 1848, he made a trip to Boston in order to secure a superintendent, Gardner Hale, who also brought his son to become manager of the carding room. Soon after Hale’s arrival, all spindles and looms, some of which had never started up, began operations. According to the report of the Board of Directors the business made a clear profit of $14,244.68 during the first fiscal year that Hale was superintendent. By 1854 the company had accumulated a profit of $60,565.04, which was used to buy new machinery and build a new brick factory building.

In 1860 the Prattville Manufacturing Company manufactured the following articles. A cloth made from cotton, designed for sheeting. A heavy osnaburg, 30 inched wide, weighing 10 ounces to the yard, and a lighter osnaburg, 30 inched wide, weighing 8 ounces to the yard, both made of cotton for wearing apparel. They also manufactured goods of mixed cotton and wool. These included a 9 ounce linsey (5 ounces of wool and four of cotton) which they advertised as designed for Negro women and Negro children, and a heavier 12 ounce linsey (8 ounces of wool and 4 ounces of cotton) sometimes called Alabama plains, for Negro men. They advertised a cloth described as "4 treadle, colored, and of select wool" as designed for white men and boys. The Prattville Manufacturing Company also carried on a large business of manufacturing wool on shares. The planter furnished the wool, the factory, the machinery, labor, and cotton, and it was made into linseys of a heavy durable nature for slave wear, or a finer grade, twilled and colored, for white wear, at about two thirds the market price.

In 1855, the committee on textiles at the Alabama State Fair in Montgomery in awarding the prize to the Prattville Manufacturing Company for the best ball of osnaburgs called it "superior to anything of its class either American or European."

Since Pratt was his own commission merchant at the great New Orleans center of trade, his facilities for marketing his cloth were superior to those of most southern textile mill operators. This is important because one of the reasons often given for the failure of southern mills was the refusal of commission merchants to buy southern cloth when they could make greater profits on the cheaper and less durable but more attractive northern cloth. And under the factorage system the cloth could be marketed only through commission merchants. In one six month period ending with October 1, 1854, Pratt’s commission house in New Orleans H. Kendall Carter & Company, sold $24,328.39 worth of Prattville textiles. But he still had to depend on other commission houses to sell much of his cloth. When the firm of Hazard and Green failed in New Orleans on July 23, 1854, it owed the Prattville Manufacturing Company $20,007.74, of which the company collected $10,003.87. Pratt found it necessary on occasion to ship his cloth direct to New York in order to sell for cash. In all southern markets he had to sell on a credit of from six to eight months and wait until his paper matured before he could realize anything from it.

The difficulties of manufacturing and marketing southern textiles is clearly shown in the following letter written by Pratt on April 13, 1849:

Experience has proven that we cannot at present manufacture cotton goods as they can in the eastern states. The raw material at our doors does not compensate for the experience and advantages which they have over us. We have to get our machinery from them, and pay the mechanist as high as their own mills pay. We then have to pay freight and expense on it out. We also employ machinist and superintendents from them at high prices. Our operatives are generally inexperienced, causing two of them to do the labor of one experienced hand. We make better goods because we work better stock. If our merchants would patronize our home manufactories it would benefit our state, give new life to our manufacturing business, without injuring their own interest. But they say we shall sell them at ten percent less than New York prices, which we cannot do. I was compelled to ship some goods to New York last winter, or to make a peddling business out of them, which certainly operates against their merchants.

Pratt lived in a large two story home, which he built in 1842 on some thirty acres of land which he had set aside for that purpose. The whole area was landscaped, although naturally a picturesque setting, with hills behind and Autauga Creek in front of the house. On the hill behind the house Pratt planted a ten acre vineyard. The house, built on the same model as the Gordon-Blount-Bowen home, had large white columns and a spiral stairway. Connected with the house on the back was an art gallery, which contained the largest private collection in Alabama or perhaps in the South in 1860. Much of the art in the gallery was the work of George Cook, the famous Maryland artist, for whom Pratt had built a studio in New Orleans in 1844. Pratt paid Cook large sums of money for each of paintings, the best known of which "The Interior of St. Peters Church in Rome," hangs today in the chapel at the University of Georgia. When Cook died in New Orleans in 1849, his body was shipped to Prattville for burial.

In ante-bellum politics, Pratt was an ardent Whig and then Know Nothing supporting state aid to railroads, industry and all kinds of internal improvements. When Prattville’s first newspaper, the Autauga Citizen which Pratt had financed in the beginning, turned Democratic in 1854, Pratt founded his own Whig paper, the Southern Statesman. He dedicated it to "Southern industry, manufacturers, mechanics and internal improvements." Pratt presided over railroad conventions and invested his money freely in early southern railroads. Although he published articles in defense of the South and slavery, he was a "Bell and Everett man" in the national election of 1860 and a cooperation list on secession.

Pratt was an ardent advocate of the establishment of agricultural and mechanical schools in order to train technical and managerial labor for southern industrialization. In 1851 he worked out a plan for such a school in Alabama. He promised to provide the site and a large endowment, if Alabama legislature would subscribe $100,000 and give annuity of $1,000. In an article in the American Cotton Planter in 1859 he bitterly condemned southern congressmen who voted against the first Morrill Act and Buchanan for its veto.

In 1860, Prattville was a town of 1500 people, most of whom worked in the factories of Prattville or had been attracted there to serve these workers. The latter class included five lawyers, four doctors, seven merchants, one dentist, and seven teachers. The town had a public library (with three thousand volumes in 1854) two schools, four churches and a town hall. Most of the public buildings and factories were constructed of brick. Pratt had built the town and dominated it as a benevolent despot. The local Democratic sheet, the Autauga Citizen, often admitted his benevolence but denounced him as "tyrant", "despot", "The Great I Am", and told him on occasion to return to the "land of wooden nutmegs from when he came."

Although he made 500 gallons of wine from his vineyard in 1860, Pratt was a temperance advocate. He never deeded land in Prattville, all of which of course he owned at first, without placing in the deed this clause "the right of selling and dealing in ardent spirits said Daniel Pratt reserves to himself and his heirs and assigns forever."

The New England influence in the town was very evident. Pratt had brought from New England his managerial labor for the textile mill, and many of his relatives, friends and acquaintances. In 1851, his total gross income was more than half a million dollars.

Pratt’s greatest contribution to industry in the Ante-bellum South was probably as a propagandist for southern industry. He accomplished this in two ways: First, he preached the industrial gospel in scores of letters and articles from his own pen, which were printed in southern newspapers and periodicals. Second, The publicity which he received as the living example of a successful manufacturer in the South encouraged southern industry.

Pratt began publishing articles on southern industry about 1847, stimulated by the fact that the University of Alabama had just conferred on him the degree of Master of Mechanical and Useful Arts, the only one of its kind the University has ever given. Dr. Basil Manly paid great tribute to Pratt on that occasion and it impressed him immensely. Manly said:

Without having devoted your life to literary pursuits, you have attained, in an eminent degree, that which is the end of all letters and all study---the art of making men around you wiser, better and happier.

Shortly after this Pratt wrote a series of articles on southern industry for the Montgomery Flag and Advertiser. In these articles he presented almost every argument ever used for manufacturing. Pratt reasoned that the industrialization of the South should begin in textiles and proceed in iron, coal and other heavy industries. He declared that an exclusive agricultural people would always remain poor. They would never have a home market for their food crops or staples and would never have towns or cities except a few distributing centers. Industry alone could diversify labor in the South, which would greatly strengthen the South economically and her military position in the sectional struggle. Without manufacturing the South would continue to be economically subservient to the east, seeking under the factorage system to be financed in New York from year to year a high rates of interest. Industry alone would create surplus capital with which to establish direct trade routes to Europe, he said. He stated that every southern state should not only remove every restriction on industry but actually give subsidies to industry. He called upon the planters to invest their surplus capital in industry instead of more land and slaves. He declared that the plantation-slavery system under which the planters move from one southern state to another depleted the soil, added no permanent wealth to any state but rather decreased it. The same capital invested in industry would be permanent and would double itself in any ten year period.

Pratt’s industrial activities received attention in such widely scattered and divergent periodicals as DeBow’s Commercial Review, in Charleston. The latter declared in November, 1849 the "no man in the South Alabama has contributed more than Daniel Pratt to its prosperity; none had done more to bring the loom, the plough, and the anvil, into closer proximity." In February, 1851, after several previous articles on Pratt, DeBow presented him in his "Gallery of Industry and Enterprise;" a series of articles on leading Southerners, which also included William Gregg, Hamilton Smith, Edmund Ruffin, and others. Southern agriculture periodicals, including Soil of the South, at Columbus, Georgia, and the Alabama Planter in Mobile, preached southern industry, presenting Pratt’s accomplishments as proof that industry was possible in the South. Ante-bellum Alabama newspapers printed numerous articles on Pratt every year after about 1846, which are copied all over the South and sometimes in the east.

The Greenville News asserted on August 30, 1855:

He has done more to benefit the state than all politicians who ever sat in Congress or in the State Legislature. For while they have been inaugurating a war of epithets and sacrificing principals to localities, he has silently, but effectively been building up her industry, giving employment to her idle population, opening a market to her produce, increasing the demand for food raised at home, and cheapening the fabrics made for domestic uses. The Alabama Journal on October 6, 1855 declared: Daniel Pratt is one of the South Alabama’s greatest men. He has established Sunday Schools, built churches, and constructed model schools in his village. He had financed railroads and opened market for the products of the country. His industries give employment to hundreds of people and pay large taxes into our state treasury. He has been the means of building up a village, which for the refinement of its society, the enterprise of its citizens, the diversity of its industrial pursuits, the neatness of its buildings, and all the advantages of newspapers, schools and churches has no superior in the South