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Up for sale "American Industrialist" Alfred Atmore Pope Cut Signature.
ES-148A
Alfred Atmore Pope (July 4, 1842, North Vassalboro, Maine – August 5, 1913, Farmington, Connecticut)
was an American industrialist and art collector. He was the
father of Theodate Pope Riddle, a noted American
architect. Alfred Pope's ancestors came to the New World from Yorkshire, England
in 1834 and settled in Massachusetts. Pope's father Alton was a successful
businessman during The Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in 1851. In 1861 he moved
his family to Ohio, in an old Quaker town in the Connecticut Western Reserve. Later in Cleveland,
Alton set up a wool business again with his sons as partners. In 1862, Alfred
Pope joined the production company of Alton Pope and Sons and in 1866 married
Ada Lunette Brooks of Salem, whose family, like his, had roots in the wool
industry. The couple's only child, Theodate, was born one year later. In 1869
Alfred Pope left the family business and, with loans from his brother-in-law
Joshua Brooks and others, bought into the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company, a
concern which had been formed a year earlier by five Cleveland men. Pope
entered the firm as secretary and treasurer and within ten years rose to the
rank of president, an office he held until his death in 1913. With the rapid
industrialization and urbanization of the country, malleable
iron – a form of metal exceptionally stronger than forged
iron – became an important commodity in the construction industry. Under Pope's
leadership the Cleveland Company eventually expanded to include a group of six
malleable iron and steel castings plants in the mid-west, known as the National
Malleable Castings Company. He was also involved with several other manufacturing
enterprises and financial institutions. As his company and personal wealth
grew, Pope moved his family up the ladder of Cleveland society and eventually
built a Richardsonian Romanesque townhouse on Euclid Avenue in one of
the city's most fashionable districts. John D. Rockefeller was among his neighbors.