Charlotte Morgan did things her way. As one biographical note put it “To act subordinate to others was not in accordance with her ambitions and her progressive tendencies.” She was born in Ellsworth, Maine around 1823. After she finished her schooling, she launched her first enterprise, a hat-making business. By the time she was forty, she had sold that business and moved to Melrose, investing her capital in a new venture, a factory in Boston making bonnets for carriages. She moved her whole family down from Maine; in a reversal of the usual roles, her brother went to work for her.
When she was in her fifties, she liquidated the bonnet-making business, and combined that capital with the money she had made from a small real estate empire she had founded to buy the Boston Hydraulic Motor Company. Taking an interest in research and development, she purchased a number of patents from engineers working in Cambridge to corner the market on the latest in church organ design.
The fruits of her labor can be seen in her large house on Franklin Street, and in her family’s ornate stone in Wyoming Cemetery. She never married, and kept up with her businesses into her eighties.
There is a reason that this is probably the first time you have heard of her. In the 1880 US census, her occupation was listed as “keeping house”; in a description of Boston Hydraulic, which you can see here, she is listed simply as “C. Morgan,” her gender deliberately concealed. As her biographical entry put it, she had “a competence and reputation deservedly ranking with that of the majority of her contemporaries of the opposite sex.” Such a display of “competence and reputation” had consequences, and one of them was that men would minimize the memory of her accomplishments after her death. By telling Charlotte Morgan’s story here, we hope to have initiated a reversal of that suppression.
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