Henry B. Endicott

Henry Bradford Endicott (September 11, 1853 – February 12, 1920) was the founder of the Endicott Johnson Corporation as well as the builder of the Endicott Estate, in Dedham, Massachusetts. During World War I he served in numerous public capacities, including as a labor strike negotiator and as director of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety.

He was born in Dedham, and died of spinal meningitis at the Brooks Hospital in Brookline. He was born poor but died a multimillionaire, and was called "a typical Horatio Alger type." The village of Endicott, New York was named for him.

Henry Bradford Endicott was born in the family homestead in Dedham, the son of Augustus Bradford Endicott, a businessman and state and local official, and Sarah Fairbanks. He was a descendant of John Endecott, the first governor of Massachusetts, on his father's side and direct descendant of Jonathan Fairbanks on his mother's. He was graduated from Dedham High School after three years.

He had two children, Henry Wendell and a daughter named Gertrude Adele, with his first wife, Caroline Williams Russell, whom he married on May 23, 1876. They divorced in 1904. He remarried in Rye Beach, New Hampshire to fellow Dedhamite Louise Clapp Colburn, a divorcee with two children from her first marriage, Sam and Katherine. He adopted the Colburn children in 1916.

Endicott liked to hunt and he enjoyed cigars. When about to smoke in the company of a close friend, it was characteristic of him that he would pull a cigar from his vest pocket, clinch it with his teeth and, taking another perfecto from his vest, he would vigorously thrust it into the mouth of his companion.

Endicott spent his boyhood on the farm of his father where his first venture into business was to sell the milk of the farm, the profits of which be divided with his mother. He then went to work for a short time in a plumber's shop, but lost his job because he went to the Massachusetts State Fair in Reading after his boss told him he would be fired if he did so.

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