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New York Produce Exchange records

Call Number

MS 449

Date

1860-1955, inclusive

Creator

New York Produce Exchange

Extent

62 Linear feet
in 330 volumes and 1 box

Language of Materials

The documents in the collection are in English.

Abstract

The collection includes the records of the New York Produce Exchange and the related New York Commercial Association, spanning the years 1860-1955. Holding 330 volumes and some unbound papers, there are records of meeting minutes of the Board of Managers, members, and committees; arbitration proceedings and resolutions; membership; data on daily trades, calls, and quotations for a wide range of commodities including cotton seed oil, wheat and other grains, and many more; accounting ledgers and journals; and some employee payroll records. Buildings Committee records relate to the George Post-designed building that opened in 1884 on Broadway at Bowling Green.

Biographical / Historical

The New York Produce Exchange, which dissolved in 1973, traced its origin to the 1840s-1850s and the informal association of merchants that engaged in the trade or exchange of various commodities in New York City. In the late 1850s, in response to the merchants' desire to acquire a building for a suitable place to conduct trade, subscriptions were raised and a building constructed and opened for business in 1861. That same year a company—the New York Produce Exchange Company—was incorporated, apparently with responsibility for the physical plant and overall administration of Exchange operations, but not for regulation of the commodities markets and the tenants, who were the merchants themselves. The merchants retained that self-regulatory responsibility and, on April 19, 1862, they incorporated as the New-York Commercial Association. The two organizations continued to operate in parallel until perhaps 1872. In 1868 the Association had its charter amended and changed its name to New York Produce Exchange and in 1872 the corporation took ownership of the building, completing the unification of the business and building forms of the Exchange. (It is not clear whether the two corporations actually merged at some point or whether the original Company of 1861 eventually dissolved after the sale of the building.)

Through the 1870s, space for the growing activities of the Exchange was a pressing problem; this was resolved with the construction of a large building, designed by George Post, at Bowling Green in 1884. The Exchange remained there until 1957 when it moved to new quarters and the 1884 building was demolished.

Over the course of a century, the specific commodities that the Produce Exchange engaged in varied. Grains (e.g. wheat) and cotton seed oil (commonly abbreviated in the records as "CSO") were major products for much or all of its history, but other commodities were also traded, including tallow, pork, petroleum, lard, and others. Initially a cash or spot market only (i.e., for immediate delivery of goods), the Exchange also participated in the futures market (i.e., contracts for future delivery of commodities on agreed terms).

Well beyond simply providing a setting for the trading of goods, the Produce Exchange, as with exchanges generally, was a fundamental element of free market capitalism and the effort to keep economic power, by shaping the market, within the hands of the merchants. Accordingly, the Produce Exchange maintained various committees for admitting members, arbitrating disputes, inspecting the quality of goods, setting rules for deliveries of commodities, and other self-regulating and self-disciplining devices that would serve the interests of the merchants as a class, while also serving as justifications for minimal or no interventions by the legislature or courts, and for the homogenization of products by farmers and other producers.

(Sources include: E.R. Carhart, "The New York Produce Exchange" in "The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science" of September 1911, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1011641.pdf; and various New York Times articles.)

Arrangement

The collection is comprised almost entirely of 330 volumes, which are presented first in the finding aid container list. These are followed by the content of one box of unbound documents.

The volumes are presented in the finding aid in the order of their "sequence number" (SN). The sequence numbers simply represent the order that the volumes were stored on the shelves at N-YHS. The numbers were assigned to the volumes in early 2020 in preparation for offsite storage. Generally, volumes of related content were together on the shelves, but there are inconsistencies. There are also inconsistencies in the sequence in terms of chronological order of the volumes.

Scope and Contents

The collection includes the records of the New York Produce Exchange and the related New York Commercial Association, spanning the years 1860-1955, which includes all but the last couple of decades of the organization's history. The collection consists almost entirely of 330 volumes of records: minutes of meetings of the Board of Managers, members, and committees; records of complaints, arbitration proceedings, and dispute resolution agreements; membership registers and dues payment records; data on daily trades, calls, and quotations for a wide range of commodities including cotton seed oil (CSO), wheat and other grains, black pepper, and many more; accounting ledgers and journals for the Exchange's General Fund and special funds, such as the Chemists Fund; and some employee payroll records. Committee records include those of the Buildings Committee responsible for oversight of construction of the building that opened in 1884 on Broadway at Bowling Green. A set of boxed unbound papers document the Exchange's negotiations with the federal government's Arbitration Committee in 1928-1929 concerning delivery contracts for cotton seed oil.

Access Restrictions

Open to qualified researchers.

Use Restrictions

Photocopying undertaken by staff only. Limited to 20 exposures of stable, unbound material per day. Application to use images from this collection for publication should be made in writing to: Department of Rights and Reproductions, The New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024-5194, rightsandrepro@nyhistory.org. Phone: (212) 873-3400 ext. 282.

Copyrights and other proprietary rights may subsist in individuals and entities other than the New-York Historical Society, in which case the patron is responsible for securing permission from those parties. For fuller information about rights and reproductions from N-YHS visit: https://www.nyhistory.org/about/rights-reproductions

Preferred Citation

The collection should be cited as: New York Produce Exchange records, MS 449, New-York Historical Society

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift of the New York Produce Exchange, 1974.

Collection processed by

Elise Winks and Larry Weimer

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-03-25 13:20:58 -0400.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Finding aid written in English

Processing Information

The collection was processed in 2020 to prepare it for off-site storage. Archivist Elise Winks flagged the bound volumes with sequence/control numbers and prepared a preliminary inventory. Archivist Larry Weimer expanded on Winks's inventory to list the volumes individually in the finding aid, processed the few loose documents, and added further notes to complete the finding aid.

Repository

New-York Historical Society
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024