William Robinson Brown (January 17, 1875 – August 4, 1955), known professionally as W.R. Brown, was an American corporate officer of the Brown Company of Berlin, New Hampshire. An authority on Arabian horses, he was also an influential Arabian horse breeder, and also the founder and owner of the Maynesboro Stud.
After graduating from Williams College, Brown joined the family business, then known as the Berlin Mills Company, and became manager of the Woods Products Division, overseeing the company's woodlands and logging operations. He became an early advocate for sustainable forest management practices, was a member of the New Hampshire Forestry Commission from 1909 until 1952, and served on the boards of several forestry organizations. As chair of the Forestry Commission, Brown helped send sawmills to Europe during World War I to assist the war effort. He was influenced by the Progressive movement, instituting employee benefits such as company-sponsored care for injured workers that predated modern workers' compensation laws. A Republican, he served as a presidential elector for New Hampshire in 1924.
Brown founded the Maynesboro Stud in 1912 with foundation bloodstock from some of the most notable American breeders of Arabian horses. He looked abroad for additional horses, particularly from the Crabbet Arabian Stud, and imported Arabian horses from England, France and Egypt. At its peak, Maynesboro was the largest Arabian horse breeding operation in the United States. In 1929, he wrote The Horse of the Desert, still considered an authoritative work on the Arabian breed. He served as President of the Arabian Horse Club of America from 1918 until 1939. Brown was a remount agent and had a special interest in promoting the use of Arabian horses by the U.S. Army Remount Service. To prove the abilities of Arabians, he organized and participated in a number of endurance races of up to , which his horses won three times, retiring the U.S. Mounted Service Cup. This accomplishment occurred even though The Jockey Club donated $50,000 to the U.S. Army to buy Thoroughbreds that tried but failed to beat the Arabians. Brown's legacy as a horse breeder was significant. Today, the term "CMK", meaning "Crabbet/Maynesboro/Kellogg" is a label for specific lines of "Domestic" or "American-bred" Arabian horses, many of which descend from Brown's breeding program. In 2012, the Berlin and Coös County Historical Society held a 100th anniversary celebration of the stud's founding.
Although Brown family members sold personal assets to keep the Brown Company afloat during the Great Depression, including Brown's dispersal of his herd of Arabian horses in 1933, the business went into receivership in 1934. Brown remained in charge of the Woods Division through the company's second bankruptcy filing in 1941. He retired from the company in 1943 and died of cancer in 1955. His final book, Our Forest Heritage, was published posthumously, and his innovations in forest management became industry standards.
Personal life
W. R. Brown was born in Portland, Maine, in 1875 to Emily Jenkins Brown and William Wentworth "W. W." Brown. He was the youngest of the couple's three sons, all of whom were avid horsemen. He also had two younger half-brothers. He attended Phillips Andover Academy and Williams College, graduating from the latter in 1897. He was a member of Kappa Alpha Society fraternity who also managed the football and baseball teams at Williams. In 1915, he married Hildreth Burton Smith, the granddaughter of former governor of Georgia, U.S. Senator and Confederate general John B. Gordon. The couple had five children: Fielding, Newell, Brenton, Nancy, and Frances. Brown lived in New Hampshire for the remainder of his life, in Berlin until 1946 and then Dublin. After a long illness, he died of cancer on August 4, 1955, and was buried at the Dublin cemetery. He was survived by his wife, his five grown children, and 15 grandchildren.
Brown's family was strongly affiliated with Williams College; W. R. and his two older brothers Herbert ("H. J.") and Orton ("O. B.") all attended Williams, as did sons Fielding and Brenton. Fielding also earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University and returned to Williams as the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Physics before retiring to become an artist and sculptor. Daughter Frances married Nobel Prize–winning physicist Charles H. Townes and wrote a book, Misadventures of a Scientist's Wife, about her life. Newell attended Princeton and served as the Federal Wages and Hours Administrator for the United States Department of Labor during the Eisenhower administration. Politically aligned with the Republican party, W. R. Brown was a presidential elector for New Hampshire in the 1924 election, voting for Calvin Coolidge.
Brown Company career
H. Winslow & Company, later called the Berlin Mills Company, was founded about 1853, and W. W. Brown purchased an interest in 1868. In 1881, the company expanded from lumber into pulp and paper manufacturing. W. W. Brown obtained a controlling interest in the company by 1888, becoming, along with his older two sons, the sole owners by 1907. The corporation's name was changed to the Brown Company in 1917, removing the word "Berlin" because of the conflict with Germany in World War I.
W. R. Brown went to work for the company in 1897 after finishing college. His father, declaring he "wanted no kittens that couldn't catch mice," made W. R. find a job without family help. As a result, Brown started out selling the company's lumber in Portland, Maine, earning nine dollars a week. He was promoted, returned to Berlin, and after a second promotion became the sawmill's night superintendent. In that position, he developed a method of using exhaust steam to heat a pond that thawed and cleaned logs, speeding up mill production during the winter. Promoted to day superintendent, he organized a successful event on September 8, 1900, to break the world's record for lumber cut by the crew of a "one head rig" in an 11-hour shift, producing 221,319 board feet, a record that still stood 85 years later. After this event, he declared that he "qualified with Father as one of the 'kittens'." His father, who had been out of town on the day of the record attempt, reviewed the results, inquired as to the amount of cut lumber that was actually shipped to customers, and then commented, "Hum, that was good." His father promoted Brown to full general manager of the Woods Division in 1902. He was an officer of the corporation, and managed the company's timberlands as director of woods operations until 1943. When Brown began his career, the company owned of land. At its peak, the company owned, and Brown supervised, , as many as 40 logging camps, plus an inland fleet of more than 30 boats. The loggers used at least 2500 horses to haul logs, and the company-owned railroad had more than 800 freight cars.
The Brown family was later described as "progressive and... ahead of their times", and had innovative ideas about wood products manufacturing and scientific forest management. During Brown's tenure, the company was one of the first to initiate modern forest management practices and to attempt to conserve the forest for future industry use. He was particularly critical of the damage done by portable sawmills. Brown understood that the pulp mills of his time were dependent on locally accessible timber, and concluded that sustainable practices were important to the industry. He built upon the sustainable forestry practices advocated by company forester Austin Cary, who had been recruited from the U.S. Forest Service. In 1919, Brown set up a tree nursery on the north shore of Cupsuptic Lake that researched sustained yield practices and at its peak was the largest tree nursery in the United States. His innovations in forest management became industry standards; researchers at Plymouth State College concluded that he "led the Brown company to international prominence as a source for scientific research and development."
Brown was influenced by the Progressive movement as applied to business. He paid his workers above the prevailing wage, instituted safety programs, hired a doctor to care for loggers in the camps, and, prior to modern workers' compensation laws, had the company pay for hospitalization of injured workers. He also attempted to improve camp conditions for the workers by banning card games and requiring the loggers to take showers, but those particular reform efforts "were not well received." The Brown family took considerable interest in the city of Berlin. Various family members started a public kindergarten, built a community club with a gym, swimming pool, and bowling alley, provided soup to the sick, and gave Christmas presents to local children. Brown himself helped found a number of civic and business self-help organizations including the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, established in 1901; the New Hampshire Timberlands Owners Association, a fire-protection group established in 1910; and similar fire-protection groups in Maine and Vermont. He set up a series of effective forest-fire lookout towers, possibly the first in the nation, and by 1917 had helped establish a forest-fire insurance company. In 1909, after helping draft the legislation creating New Hampshire's State Forestry Department, he became a member of the New Hampshire Forestry Commission; and its chair from 1910 until 1952, playing a significant role in shaping the forestry practices and laws of the state. Brown also served on the boards of several industry groups, including the American Forestry Association, Society of American Foresters, Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, and the Forest Research Council. He represented the U.S. at the first World Forestry Congress held in Rome in 1926.
During World War I, in his capacity as chair of the New England Forestry Commission, Brown worked with the War Industries Board to send 10 sawmills abroad. The equipment went to Scotland to meet Britain's need for lumber. When the war effort in France subsequently required more than 73 million board feet of lumber per month, Brown was commissioned as a major to oversee sawmill operations there, but ultimately was not allowed to serve in France because of his poor vision, as he was partially blind in one eye.