ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the growth and development of the business started by John Shaw as a young man at some point in the first decade of the nineteenth-century. John, Elizabeth and Henry, as partners, and friends, might be said to have engaged in business and entrepreneurship as a sort of practical coping. Shouldering risk and responsibility from a young age John worked long and hard to establish his business on the firmest possible foundations; rooted in self-discipline, esteem and independence. Along the way, John acquired first a wife and then a family and a partner. John's duties expanded as he and the firm aged, but so did the support, emotional as well as physical, that he was able to draw from the world as he constructed it. Nonetheless, the firm itself and the activities if performed remained, relatively unchanged; employees came and went, routes extended and new markets tapped.
