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HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ILLINOIS.
Central Railroad. The Pullman Palace Car Company began the erection of buildings here in 1880, and, on the 1st of January, 1881, the first family settled in the future manufacturing city. Within the next few years, it became the center of the largest manufacturing establishments in the country, including the Pullman Car Works, the Allen Paper Car Wheel Works and extensive steel forging works, employing thousands of mechanics. Large numbers of sleeping and dining cars, besides ordinary passenger coaches and freight cars, were manufactured here every year, not only for use on the railroads of the United States, but for foreign countries as well. The town was named for the late George M. Pullman, the founder of the car-works, and was regarded as a model city, made up of comfortable homes erected by the Palace Car Company for the use of its employees. It was well supplied with school-houses, and churches, and a public library was established there and opened to the public in 1883. The town was annexed to the city of Chicago in 1890.
PULLMAN, George Mortimer, founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company, was born at Brocton, N. Y., March 3, 1831, enjoyed ordinary educational advantages in his boyhood and, at fourteen years of age, obtained employment as a clerk, but a year later joined his brother in the cabinet-making business at Albion. His father, who was a house-builder and house-mover, having died in 1853, young Pullman assumed the responsibility of caring for the family and, having secured a contract for raising a number of buildings along the Erie Canal, made necessary by the enlargement of that thoroughfare, in this way acquired some capital and experience which was most valuable to him in after years. Coming to Chicago in 1859, when the work of raising the grade of the streets in the business portion of the city had been in progress for a year or two, he found a new field for the exercise of his inventive skill, achieving some marvelous transformations in a number of the principal business blocks in that part of the city. As early as 1858, Mr. Pullman had had his attention turned to devising some means for increasing the comforts of night-travel upon railways, and, in 1859, he remodeled two old day-coaches into a species of sleeping-cars, which were used upon the Alton Road. From 1860 to 1863 he spent in Colorado devoting his engineering skill to mining; but re
