Yellow Fever on Galveston Island by Jan Johnson

Author:Jan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439675427
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Younger Sealy brother George rose to shareholder in elder brother John’s company within two years. Courtesy of the Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas.

By age eighteen, George had risen to station manager for the Lackawanna Railroad. By the time his sixty-one-year-old father died in November 1853, the younger son was earning $150 a month and had saved $1,100. Giving his widowed mother, Mary McCarty Sealy, $1,000, he left Pennsylvania to join his older brother in Galveston at age twenty-two.

When George Sealy arrived on the Texas island in 1858, he had just twenty-five dollars in savings in his pocket. However, he already had a job at Ball, Hutchings and Company, having previously agreed to work for brother John for one year at any salary the company could offer. He started as a shipping clerk, opening the office daily—even sweeping the floors at night if need be. Eagerly, he volunteered to do anything necessary, such as filling in for those who had quit, were on sick leave or vacation to keep the company going. Within two years, he had learned every position, becoming so valuable an employee that he could name his own salary—and was even awarded a share in the company profits.

One year later, the Ball, Hutchings and Sealy Company established the Galveston Wharf Company, with elder brother John serving as president, in 1859. During this year, John’s daughter Etta Jane married R. Waverly Smith.

Even though he was against secession, George Sealy joined the Confederate States of America as a private. It seems as though the true intent behind his move was primarily to represent Ball, Hutchings and Company at Matamoros, Mexico. Until the Civil War ended, his chief responsibilities included shipping cotton to Liverpool and receiving the CSA’s orders from Europe, while simultaneously serving as paymaster. It was George Sealy’s signature that dismissed the last patrol of Confederate troops at the surrender in Brownsville, Texas, in 1865.

In the meantime, the older Sealy brother had closed his dry goods store so that the partners could concentrate solely on their banking interests. As a result, John Sealy accumulated a total of $250,000 in both personal and real property wealth within five years.

When George returned to Galveston, he went to work again for his older brother, who named him head cashier at the bank and gave him the responsibility of handling all the banking firm’s services. As such, the younger Sealy brother ensured that business would continue as usual, which secured the city’s financial stability during Reconstruction.

Based on the gold standard, Ball, Hutchings and Company named George Sealy a full partner on April 14, 1870. The partnership would again change its name when George Ball died on March 13, 1884. With personal contributions from all the remaining partners, Hutchings, Sealy and Company continued to grow and prosper into one of the most influential and powerful business houses in the state.

At that time, the city of Galveston boasted a population of over seven thousand. Still the largest city in the state, it had no railroad line to tie it to the mainland.

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