Edward Payson Stoughton
Edward P. Stoughton, the third president of the Millers Falls company, was born in Gill, Franklin County, Massachusetts, on September
21, 1846. One of the nine children of Timothy and Maria Clarissa Stoughton, his father was a prominent farmer, a state legislator,
and president of a lumber company that operated a water-powered sawmill on the banks of the Connecticut River in Turners Falls. The
Stoughtons, interested in a good education for their son, sent young Edward to Williston Seminary, an up-and-coming preparatory school
in Easthampton.
After graduation Edward Stoughton joined the Union Army but was never called to battle, as he was mustered in during the latter part of the Civil War. Stoughton was twenty-one when Henry L. Pratt, a fellow Franklin County native and president of the newly formed Millers Falls
Manufacturing Company, hired him to serve as manager of the firm's New York Office. It was an
excellent choice. Stoughton was gifted salesman and proved especially adept in the international sales arena. In 1870, he booked the company's first export order from Charles Churchill & Co. Ltd., of Birmingham, England. The firms were still doing business ninety-one years later. Edward Stoughton soon became the
point person for the Millers Falls Company's European marketing effort. He invested heavily in the company, and as his share increased, went on to serve as Secretary of the Board of Directors.
On Pratt's death in 1900, Stoughton became vice-president of the company and assumed responsibility for all aspects of the New York office. Although Levi Gunn, a
co-founder of the operation, succeeded Pratt as president, he remained in Massachusetts as his experience in production and management
were better suited to the oversight and operation of the plant in the Millers Falls than to the sales end of the business. That Stoughton considered himself
de facto president can be inferred from his obituary, which lists his presidency as beginning in 1898--two years prior to the death of
Henry Pratt and ignores Gunn's tenure entirely. When Gunn retired in 1910, Edward Stoughton became company president, a position he held
until 1920 when he stepped aside to become Chairman of the Board. Reflecting, perhaps, his background in sales, Stoughton's presidency was marked by an increase in the size of the operation's product line rather than the expansion of physical plant that characterized the tenure of his predecessor. Stoughton continued in the Chairman's position until age eighty-five, making daily visits to the office save for the summer months, when he traveled in Europe. A New Yorker to the core, Edward Stoughton's affiliation with the company ensured that he had the means to maintain a residence with a prestigious Fifth Avenue address and to maintain his frequent European travels. He died October 3, 1938, aboard the Queen Mary, on a return trip from London, as the luxury ocean liner was approaching the dock. A week earlier, he and his wife had celebrated his ninety-second birthday.
Edward Stoughton's first wife was Sara Forker, from Brooklyn, New York. The couple had two children: a son named Howard and a daughter named Edna. Edna Stoughton married Hugh Conover and moved to Steubenville, Ohio. Stoughton's second wife, Grace Wilkins Robson, was English.
Sources
Encyclopedia of American Biography. New Series. vol. 11. New York :
American Historical Society, 1940. p. 597.
Stoughton's obituary: New York Times, 4 October 1939, p. 25, col. 5.
First export order: "Did you know --" Dyno-mite (June 1961), p. 8.
Illustration: Hardware Dealers Magazine, January 1915.