William M. Pratt, the founder of the Goodell-Pratt Company, served on the Board of Directors of the Millers Falls Company from 1931 to 1946. A third generation tool man, he built his business on the basis of his financial acumen rather than an intimate understanding of tool production and design.(1)
Josiah Pratt, the first of three generations of Pratts involved in tool manufacture, was born in Mansfield, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1802. His father, a carpenter and farmer, moved the family to Buckland Center where Josiah became involved in the axe business. In 1832, Josiah was issued a patent for an axe-making machine and relocated to Charlemont where he set up a business to manufacture axes and scythe snaths. He remained at Charlemont for eleven years and then moved the operation to a better site on Deerfield Street in Shelburne Falls. Josiah Pratt retired from the tool business 1865. He and his wife, the former Catherine Hall, were the parents of eight children. Two of their sons became involved in tool manufacture: Franklin J. Pratt associated with his father in the ax business; Francis R. Pratt worked as superintendent and manager of the H. H. Mayhew Company in Shelburne Falls. Josiah Pratt died in 1887.
Francis R. Pratt, the second son of Josiah and Catherine Pratt, was born in Charlemont, Massachusetts, in 1835. When the family moved to Shelburne Falls in 1843, he was enrolled in the Shelburne Falls Academy. On completing his education, he went to work in his father’s axe-making enterprise. He left the family business at age 27 for a position with the W. H. Maynard & Company, a Shelburne Falls tool manufacturer. In 1867, the year his son William was born, Francis Pratt moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, to accept a position in the office of W.H. Maynard’s wholesale grain dealership. Shortly after Francis Pratt left Shelburne Falls, Maynard’s tool manufacturing operation became H.S. Shepardson & Company, a producer of such hardware items as braces, bits, awls, chisels and farm tools that employed some thirty-seven men.
F.R. Pratt returned to Shelburne Falls in 1872 to take up a position as superintendent of H.S. Shepardson & Company. When Shepardson died in 1876 and the firm was sold to H.H. Mayhew, Francis Pratt remained with the operation, adding the title of manager to that of superintendent. He became the firm’s assistant treasurer in 1886, and on Mayhew’s death in 1894, became company treasurer. When his son William M. Pratt purchased a controlling interest in Albert Goodell’s Goodell Tool company in 1907, Francis Pratt became its vice-president. The elder Pratt also served as a director of the Pratt Drop-Forge and Tool Company, an entity created by his son when he son assumed control of Ducharmes & Company in Shelburne falls. In 1913, Francis R. Pratt funded the construction of the Pratt Memorial Library building in Shelburne Falls. The structure was dedicated to memory of his parents, Josiah and Catherine Pratt.
Francis Roscoe Pratt was married to Lydia Taft. The couple had one son, William M., the founder of the Goodell-Pratt Company.
Born in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1867, William H. Pratt graduated at age sixteen from the Arms Academy, the local secondary
school. He moved to Pukwana, a small town in central South Dakota in 1884 and worked there as editor and publisher of the Pukwana Press and as cashier for the Bank of Pukwana. The following year he accepted a cashier position at the Case & Whitbeck Bank in the nearby town of Kimball. Life on the prairie must not have been to the young man’s liking for he returned to Shelburne Falls in 1890 to become secretary of the H.H. Mayhew Company, a hardware manufacturer where his father served as manager and plant superintendent. In 1892, William Pratt moved to Greenfield to become a sales representative for Wells Bros. Company, the tool producer that would eventually become Greenfield Tap & Die.
In 1895, William Pratt purchased a fifty percent stake in Goodell Bros., a Greenfield manufacturer of braces, drills, screwdrivers and small hardware items that was run by Dexter W. and Henry E. Goodell. With the purchase, he became treasurer and manager of the operation, and in 1898, he purchased the remainder of the business and renamed it the Goodell-Pratt Company. Pratt began an aggressive program of expansion—buying or acquiring controlling interest in smaller companies and purchasing product lines from others. The Goodell-Pratt Company grew to the point that it would boast that it manufactured and distributed a line of “1500 good tools.” The onset of the Great Depression, however, doomed the operation. It was merged with the Millers Falls Company in 1931, and William Pratt became a member of the Millers Falls board of directors serving for a number of years as an international sales representative.
William Pratt married Emma C. Richardson, and the couple had two children, Ethel A. and Francis W. An avid outdoorsman, Pratt pursued his interest in hunting and fishing with a passion, providing an interesting contrast to another of his hobbies—stamp collecting. For a time he served as president of the First National Bank of Greenfield. He died in Greenfield, September 26, 1946.