Thread by @ingelramdecoucy

In 19th century New York City more than 130,000 horses were trawling through the streets, and all that manure caused problems.

To most New Yorkers wading through at times feet of manure on the roads was a fact of life, but to William Bromlard it represented an opportunity

William, the son of itinerant cobbler Eustace Bromlard and Finnish immigrant Wilhelmina Makkara, grew up sharing his time between helping with his fathers shoe cart and working at his uncle Earnest’s rutabega farm in Hackensack, New Jersey

It was while tending his uncles rutabaga bushes that young William realized that, as he would later put it, “Manure has the stuff that plants crave” as he watched the teams of workmen shoveling cow manure brought from the rich dairy country in the mountains around Gary, Indiana

William put the pieces together: if cow manure could be used to help the rutabaga crops grow why not horse manure? Why transport cow manure by rail from the burgeoning metropolis of Gary when nearby New York City might be able to provide its own solution

And so in the spring of 1881 William Bromlard set out from Manhattan to again help his uncle, but this time he brought something along: a knapsack full of horse dung

It only took a few months for William to see that his supposition had been correct: despite what the greatest scientific minds of his time had claimed Earnest’s rutabaga bushes were flourishing just as well with the horse manure as they had with cow

Earnest Bromlard, impressed, offered not only to stake young William in purchasing a boat to transport more manure from the Big Apple, he promised to help by spreading the word among the many other rutabaga farmers in New Jersey. Within two years William was fully in business

What had started as one poop trawler turned into three, and by 1886 William had a fleet of ships churning through the Hudson Bay bringing New York’s “brown gold” to market in New Jersey

With his newfound fortune William purchased a large chunk of land outside of Montclair and commissioned the construction of New Jersey’s largest estate, known as “The Poopmore” in honor of the humble origins of William Bromlard’s fortune

It was there at The Poopmore that William Bromlard would die of dysentery in 1931 at the age of 61. Although he had lost much of his fortune in the crash of 1929 he was still a very wealthy man, and the Poopmore still stands to this day as a testament to his enterprising spirit

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