F.J. Kaldenberg Company

F.J. Kaldenberg Company is the corporate name the Kaldenberg business, maker of meerschaum pipes and amber goods in 19th-century New York, took on in 1887. The family workshop had been operating since the 1850s; incorporation was the step that turned it from a craft workshop into an industrial concern bound to notes and credit.

The firm's production and exhibition history is gathered in a separate entry: The Kaldenberg Company. What is described here is the corporate life that began in 1887 and ended in 1900.

Incorporation and Partners

According to the newspapers of the day, Frederick Julius Kaldenberg incorporated a company in May 1887 under New York state law with capital of five hundred thousand dollars and took the presidency himself; the bulk of the shares remained in his own hands. The names brought onto the board show the business reaching beyond a craftsman's reputation: G. M. Hard, head of Chatham Bank; Eberhard Faber, known for his pencils; and Henry C. Euler. Faber also served for a time as treasurer before leaving the board — a departure that would be revisited years later in a courtroom.

Production was housed in a broad, seven-story building on Manhattan's East Side. The building belonged not to the company but personally to F. J. Kaldenberg; the company thus paid rent to its own president. The scope of the business was not limited to meerschaum pipes. Amber and mother-of-pearl goods, mouthpieces, ivory work, and even items with no connection to pipes at all, such as carriage springs, were made under the same roof. Branch stores had opened in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis.