I See Dead Entrepreneurs: Dr. Augustin Thompson and Moxie

WHEN I was about four years old and visiting my grandparents, I spotted a slotted wooden carton in their back hall. It was filled with brown and orange bottles.  “What’s that?” I asked. 

“Moxie,” replied my grandfather. “It’s my favorite drink. Want to try some?” He put an ice cube in a little plastic cup and poured the fizzy brown soda over it.

I took a sip.  For a fraction of a second, the taste was sweet, like the root beer I was expecting.  And then an ungodly medicinal bitterness exploded in my mouth.  I spit everything back in the cup.  My grandfather laughed.

“It’s an acquired taste,” he said.

More than half a century later, I know he was wrong.  Coffee is an acquired taste.  Scotch is an acquired taste.  Steamed clams and raw oysters are “acquired tastes.” Not Moxie. 

Moxie is the durian of carbonated drinks.  It’s an acquired taste like sweetbreads and blood pudding, tripe and haggis.

One day at a restaurant in Iceland, the waiter politely informed our table that the specialty of the house was sour ram’s testicles.  I almost asked, “Is that served with Moxie?”

Nei takk to the house specialty, and no thanks to Moxie. 

More Dead Entrepreneurs: Grove Street Cemetery at Yale

If you're serious about collecting luxury watches, eventually you'll need to add a Patek Philippe.  If you're a baseball card aficionado, you must, one day, buy a Honus Wagner.

But if, like me, you're trying to collect dead American entrepreneurs, you'll eventually need to bag the Big Kahuna.  The original Steve Jobs.  The Henry Ford-before-there-was-a-Henry Ford.

So, that's what I did.  On my way home from a visit to Gettysburg I stopped at the Grove Street Cemetery, in the shadow of Yale's impressive Sterling Law Building.  That's where I found Eli Whitney. (My first post on this early entrepreneur and his incredible, final invention is here.)

Whitney is the Father of Interchangeable Parts--maybe.  He's the patron saint of the American System of Manufactures--perhaps.  He's the inventor of the cotton gin--quite probably.  And in the 20th century, Whitney became a major bone of contention among technology historians--for sure.  At his death, however, there was no confusion.  The prestigious Niles Register termed his loss in 1825 a "public calamity."

So, on a snowy March morning in 2016, we finally met.

Mount Auburn Cemetery Redux: More Dead Entrepreneurs

I returned to the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown/Cambridge last weekend, my second visit this year.  (See here for the June 2014 post, I See Dead Entrepreneurs.)  I don't generally spend this much time hanging around cemeteries, but Mount Auburn is a very special place, and one full of folks worth meeting--nearly 100,000 at last count.  The leaves also happened to be turning and--while I sound like a old, doty leaf-peeper writing that--Mount Auburn is a world class arboretum.  And sometimes it is fun to indulge my inner National Geographic photographer.

In my last visit I was collecting entrepreneurs, and I was interested this time in adding to that list.  But it's worth saying that Mount Auburn itself is also one of the most interesting social innovations of the 19th century: go visit King's Chapel graveyard in Boston and then head out to Mount Auburn.  It's hard to be more innovative than changing the way people think about death and remember their loved ones.

Below is King's Chapel on a summer day in 2009.

I See Dead Entrepreneurs: A Visit to the Mount Auburn Cemetery

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I had the opportunity this past weekend to visit the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge/ Watertown, about a mile and a half outside Harvard Square.  Authorized on this day in 1831 by the Massachusetts legislature, Mount Auburn was America's first landscaped cemetery and the first large-scale green space open to the public in North America.  For nearly two centuries, visitors from all over the world have come to experience one of the finest examples of what is known today as America's rural cemetery movement.

Other famous rural cemeteries include Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor (Maine), Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands (New York), Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit and Holly-Wood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

Mount Auburn Cemetery covers 175 acres, 98,000 burials, 60,000 monuments, and 9,400 trees and shrubs representing over 1,250 taxa--part living memorial (with 600 burials a year), part history and part renowned arboretum and botanical garden.  "Rather than depicting the horror of death," Mount Auburn's literature says, the cemetery's "picturesque landscape. . .was designed to provide solace and comfort to the bereaved and public alike."

The horror of death (and source of an unhealthy local water supply) could be found aplenty in the typical 17th/18th-century urban churchyard cemetery, full of carved skulls and graves dug nearly on top of one another.  Here are a few pictures I took in 2009 on a pass-through the King's Chapel Burying Ground on Tremont Street in Boston--precisely the ghoulish congestion Mount Auburn hoped to improve upon.

By comparison, this is what Mount Auburn looked like in its opening decades.