William Maynard Pratt, the founder of the Goodell-Pratt Company, served on the Board of Directors of the Millers Falls Company from 1931 to 1946. A third generation tool man, he built his business on the basis of his financial acumen rather than an intimate understanding of tool production and design.
Josiah Pratt, the first of three generations of Pratts involved in tool manufacture, was born in Mansfield, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1802. His father, a carpenter and farmer, moved the family to Buckland Center where Josiah became involved in the manufacture of axes. In 1832, Josiah was issued a patent for an axe-making machine and relocated to Charlemont where he established an axe and scythe manufactory. He remained there eleven years, then moved the operation to a better site on Deerfield Street in Shelburne Falls. Josiah Pratt retired from the tool business 1865. He and his wife, the former Catherine Hall, were the parents of eight children. Two of their sons became involved in tool manufacture: Frank J. Pratt associated with his father in the ax business; Francis R. Pratt worked as superintendent and manager of the H. H. Mayhew Company in Shelburne Falls. Josiah Pratt died in 1887.
Francis R. Pratt, the second son of Josiah and Catherine Pratt, was born in Charlemont, Massachusetts, in 1835. When the family moved to Shelburne Falls in 1843, he was enrolled in the Shelburne Falls Academy. On completing his education, he went to work in his father's axe-making business. He left the family business at age 27 for a position with the W. H. Maynard & Company, a Shelburne Falls tool manufacturer. In 1867, the year his son William was born, Francis Pratt moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, to accept a position in the office of W.H. Maynard's wholesale grain dealership. Shortly after he left Shelburne Falls, Maynard's tool manufacturing operation became H.S. Shepardson & Company, a producer of such hardware items as braces, bits, awls, chisels and farm tools.
F.R. Pratt returned to Shelburne Falls in 1872 to take up a position as superintendent of H.S. Shepardson & Company. When Shepardson died in 1876 and the firm was sold to H.H. Mayhew, Francis Pratt remained with the operation, adding the title of manger to that of superintendent. He became the firm's assistant treasurer in 1886, and on Mayhew's death in 1894, became company treasurer. The H.H. Mayhew Company was a small operation, employing a workforce of just thrity-five men.
When his son William M. Pratt purchased a controlling interest in the Goodell Tool company in 1907, Francis Pratt became its vice-president. The elder Pratt served as vice-president of Goodell Tool Company when it was incorporated in 1907 and in 1913 funded the construction of the Pratt Memorial Library in Shelburne Falls.
Francis R. Pratt was married to Lydia Taft. The couple had one son, William M., the founder of the Goodell-Pratt Company.
Born in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1867, William H. Pratt graduated at age sixteen from the Arms Academy, the local secondary school. In 1884 he moved to Pukwana, a small town in central South Dakota, where he worked as editor and publisher of the Pukwana Press and as cashier for the Bank of Pukwana. Life on the prairie must not have been to his liking for he returned to Shelburne Falls in 1890 to become secretary of the H.H. Mayhew Company, a hardware manufacturer where his father served as manager and plant superintendent. William Pratt moved to Greenfield in 1892 to become a sales representative for Wells Bros. Company, a tool producer that would become Greenfield Tap & Die.
In 1895, Pratt purchased a fifty percent stake in Goodell Bros., a Greenfield manufacturer of braces, drills, screwdrivers and small hardware items run by Dexter W. and Henry E. Goodell. With the purchase, he became treasurer and manager of the operation, and in 1898, he purchased the remainder of the business and shortly thereafter renamed it the Goodell-Pratt Company. Pratt began an aggressive program of expansion--buying or acquiring controlling interest in smaller companies and purchasing product lines from others. The Goodell-Pratt Company would eventually boast that it manufactured and distributed a line of "1500 good tools." The onset of the Great Depression, however, doomed the operation. It was merged with the Millers Falls Company in 1931. William Pratt became a member of the Millers Falls board of directors and served for a number of years as an international sales representative.
William Pratt married Emma C. Richardson, and the couple had two children, Ethel A. and Francis W. An avid outdoorsman, Pratt pursued his interest in hunting and fishing with a passion, providing an interesting contrast to another of his hobbies--stamp collecting. For a time he served as president of the First National Bank of Greenfield. William Maynard Pratt died in Greenfield, September 26, 1946.
Source: Biographical Review: Sketches of the Leading Citizens of Franklin County, Massachusetts. Boston: Biographical Review Publishing Company, 1895. p. 61-62.
Cope, Ken. "Sorting out the Goodell companies." Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, v. 45 no. 4., p. 115.
Dictionary of American Toolmakers. [S.l.] : Early American Industries Association, 1999. p. 321, 624, 713.
National Cyclopedia of American Biography: Being the History of the United states as Illustrated in the Lives ... v. 41. Reprint ed. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1967. p. 265-266.
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