The Whitehouse Factory and Saga
by Shannon Butler Historians have a habit of randomly researching something that sparks our interest. You discover something you didn’t know and soon find yourself going down a rabbit hole, searching for clues that give us answers which only lead to more questions, and finding lots of dead-ends. This leads us to this week’s Local History Blog post and a maddening series of discoveries and mysteries (ah! the joys of being a historian). Walking down Main Street in Poughkeepsie today, one would never know that a massive factory once stood on the northeast corner of Main and Cherry Street. Well over a century ago, the building you see on the right (image from the collection of the Library of Congress) was the workplace of over 400 men, and almost everyone in the city would own a pair of shoes or boots made by J.O. Whitehouse and Company. John Osborne Whitehouse was born in Rochester New Hampshire in 1817 and worked on a modest farm until he was 18 years old. He then made his way into Brooklyn to begin his business career and he appears to have succeeded rather quickly. By the early 1860s he began the firm of J.O. Whitehouse [...]