THE GILLIES STORY

Gillies has been championing specialty coffee ideals since clipper ship days.

Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren, known as “the Little Magician” for his diminutive stature and astute political ability was the eighth president of the United States when the panic of 1837 punctured the prosperity of the young American republic. Hundreds of banks and businesses failed. Thousands lost their lands. For about five years the United States was wracked by economic depression.

The Gillies family were colonial Scottish immigrants to America, who embraced the Continental ideal and whose family members fought with General Washington. They settled as farmers at Newburgh New York, not far from President Van Buren’s own Dutch homestead in Kinderhook, on the other side of the majestic Hudson River. As the financial dislocation settled in as an economic misery on the land the economically stressed Gillies’ turned to their son Wright, to travel down river, in the parlance of that day, “to seek his fortune in the city.” The event is recorded in All About Coffee (Tea & Coffee Trade Journal Company,1922) Wm. H. Ukers’ great coffee reference work, known now as then as “The Coffeeman’s Bible.”

“While still a lad of nineteen, Wright Gillies came from a Newburgh farm in 1838, and obtained a clerkship in a tea store in Chatham Street, now Chambers and Duane Street. He branched out for himself in the tea and coffee business at 232 Washington Street in 1840, removing in 1843 to 236, which had a courtyard where he installed a horse-power coffee roaster…..”

Young Mr. Gillies and his little business prospered. During the remaining years of the Nineteenth Century the Gillies family continued to set the gold standard in American coffee roasting, innovating roasting with natural gas, and shipping their goods to fine retailers throughout the Northeast. In the early years of the century just ended, the little house from Washington Street fell on hard times, in part because there were no son’s to carry on the business, and in that age young women were forbidden from, “going into trade.”

The Schoenholt family was active in the New York coffee trade. The Gillies business presented a unique opportunity for the Schoenholt family. The Schoenholt family, and their coffee expertise, and interest in continuing the Gillies business presented an opportunity for the Gillies family and their hopes for continuing their coffee heritage into the future. It proved a match well made.

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