1800-1820s
Henry Shaw grows up in England and comes to St. Louis to start a hardware business.

Slide of photograph of Mill Hill School ca. 1890-1907

Articles sold by Shaw in hardware store, 1819-1839

Henry Shaw, a successful St. Louis businessman, founded the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859. Shaw was born on July 24, 1800 in Sheffield, England, which had been a center of iron and steel manufacturing for centuries. Henry’s father, Joseph Shaw, had moved to Sheffield as a young man to open his own iron factory, along with a partner. The firm manufactured grates, fire irons and so forth. Henry was the oldest of four children in the family. He had two sisters, Sarah and Caroline, and a brother who died in infancy. Shaw received his primary school education in the village of Thone near his home in Sheffield. When he about ten or eleven, however, he was transferred to the Mill Hill School near London. He remained at this boarding school for about six years, before returning home to Sheffield in 1816.

Shaw was forced to return to Sheffield, it seems, because of his father’s financial difficulties. While he had been away at school, his father’s business had come upon hard times. The family could no longer afford the luxury of sending young Henry to the expensive school with other children of the upper classes. Nevertheless, Shaw had gained in his time at Mill Hill School the basic education of an English gentleman. He had studied the classics, learned some Latin and Greek, and studied French. He also studied mathematics and was introduced to the sciences. More importantly, however, he acquired the attitudes and outlook of an English gentleman, traits that he would continue to have even after decades of life in the United States.

On his return to Sheffield, Henry began to assist his father with the business. Searching for new markets, the elder Shaw turned his sights on the vast markets of the Americas. Iron and steel manufacturing in the former colonies was not as advanced as in England, and indeed, Sheffield steel products were some of the finest in the world. In 1818, Henry accompanied his father on his first trip across the Atlantic Ocean where the pair did business in Quebec, Canada. Young Henry must have impressed his father with his business acumen, because the next year he was sent to New Orleans alone on business, even though he was still a teenager.

A shipment of goods to New Orleans had been lost or misplaced and Henry was sent to find the shipment. Although he recovered the goods, he could not find a buyer in New Orleans. With the business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit that was to mark his adult life, Shaw was determined to find a market for the goods in the interior of the country. Vast territories of the American Middle West had been opened up in the previous decade by the Louisiana Purchase, which nearly double the size of the United States. In about 1817, New Orleans had become the gateway to this vast interior markets when the first steam powered paddlewheel boat made its way up the Mississippi River from the port of New Orleans.

In the Spring of 1819, Henry Shaw purchased passage for himself and his goods on a steamship called the Maid of Orleans. The trip, which took 40 days, cost Shaw $120. On May 4, 1819, Shaw landed in a small French village on the Mississippi called St. Louis. At the time, the village was about fifty years old. It ran about three blocks deep for about a mile along the bank of the river. Shaw set up a hardware store in St. Louis, selling high quality cutlery and other metal products. His first storefront was at Four North Main, on the west side of the street between Market and Chestnut. The goods were purchased by Shaw’s uncle, James Hoole, back home in Sheffield and shipped to St. Louis to be sold at a tidy profit. Hoole also provided the initial capital for the business. It turned out to be a good investment. It was a good time to be in the hardware business in St. Louis.

During the two decades he stayed in this business, roughly 1819 to 1839, St. Louis grew quite rapidly. Shaw sold his goods to the people of St. Louis, to soldiers and farmers, and to the other new immigrants to the area. He also found a ready market in the pioneers making their way to the lands of the West. Many of the pioneers moving westward were outfitted in St. Louis before moving West, and Shaw had the kind of hardware, tools and cutlery they would need to make the long trip and set up a new homestead.