Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,974
By This is the grave of Charles Dow.
Born in 1851 in Sterling, Connecticut, Dow would move to New York and get involved in the financial exchanges growing in that city. In fact, there’s no good reason to beat around the bush on this grave post, because this guy is important but not really that exciting. He became a leading broker by the early 1880s and found his own firm with some partners, Goodbody, Glynn, and Dow. Dow wanted to rationalize the rapidly growing system of industrial capitalism and create trading standards. He also was spending a lot of time writing about the markets and was an early financial journalist, basically. So in 1882, Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser founded Dow Jones & Company. Sorry Chuck, your kraut name means you don’t get it on the company letterhead. This company focused on taking financial information and breaking it down for investors. It produced the broadsheet that would become the direct ancestor of the Wall Street Journal.
Dow then used his new company to create the Dow Jones Index, i.e., the stock market numbers we use today. This started by averaging the price of 11 leading companies, mostly railroads, and continued to grow, again based around railroads in these early years. Later, Dow sought to expand his financial education to more general readers and began a column in his paper to do that in 1899. His basic theories of financial expansion became important to the broader growth of American capitalism beyond the robber baron elite and into a larger swath of the American public.
Dow died in 1902, at the age of 51. Not sure why.
Charles Dow is buried in North Burial Ground, Providence, Rhode Island. I think this had to do with his wife’s family, as I’m not sure that he had any broader connection to Rhode Island.
If you would like this series to visit other people involved in the creation of the modern stock market, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward Jones is in Worcester, Massachusetts and Charles Bergstresser is in North Branford, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.