ABSTRACT
Prior to the 1870s, most of the gas companies of Massachusetts were either unincorporated joint-stock associations or corporations created by individual acts of the legislature, which was the normal vehicle for establishing a corporation during the nineteenth century. The Acts of 1855 provided for the formation of corporations for the sale of gas, subject to certain requirements and oversight by the BG&ELC, for example, annual reporting of the corporation's finances, statutory requirements that stock must be sold by public auction, and that stock had to be redeemable in cash. Later legislation, in 1913, gave the Board additional authority over corporations’ finances, including increasingly stringent requirements to disclose definitive financial information. Ownership and purpose of business here play their roles in how each of the gasworks conducted its business, and with the arrival of the general American business phenomenon of consolidation (about the time of the Centennial year of 1876), the manufacture of gas took on the new and unprecedented nature of large businesses in urbanized Massachusetts, with long-term effects for the scale of the hazardous environmental legacy found in the subsurface of derelict gasworks, which can be owed to the size and character of the gas company.
