Series IV. Business Transaction Records (1910-1968)

While Series II. Annual Reports and Statements of Condition and Series III. Financial and Business Records document primarily the internal accounting transactions and financial condition of Brown Brothers Harriman's precursor companies, this series documents a few of the firms' external financial activities and interests. It includes records of stocks sold in the Wall & Hanover Street Realty Company; correspondence with individuals and organizations who purchased Russian ruble war loans in 1916, and with the International Bank of Commerce of Petrograd (some of which is in French), which held the bonds; bonds issued for foreign corporations and governments in the period 1925-1930; records of underwriting syndicates for the purchase of stocks and bonds in which Harriman Ripley & Co., Inc., did and did not participate (including some of the bond issues documented in Volumes 22-34) from the late 1920s through the 1940s; minutes of the Finance Committee of Caledonian Insurance Company; and correspondence related to Frederick Dumaine's challenge to the purchase of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad in 1968.

Volumes 23-34 were bound by the firm and include carbon copies of letters and telegrams, photostats of bond documents, and original printed offerings. Volumes 32 and 33 are identical duplicates.

The syndicate records consist predominantly of filled out (typed or handwritten) preprinted file cards arranged in tabbed alphabetical order by the name of the company or municipality offering being underwritten. They include details of prices paid, dates of offering and expiration, and selling commissions received.

The Delaware & Hudson-related correspondence appears to have come from the files of John B. Madden, a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who had served since 1964 as a manager of the Delaware & Hudson Company (a holding entity) and a director of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad Corporation.

The Wall and Hanover Street Realty Company was constituted after the death of James Brown to capitalize the property on which Brown Brothers & Co.'s headquarters stood, at 59 Wall Street, in order to distribute shares to his many heirs and other parties.

To finance the enormous debt it had incurred during World War I, the Russian imperial government issued bonds in 1916, some of which which were handled by Brown Brothers on behalf of individual and institutional customers.

The investment banking firm Harriman Ripley & Co., Inc. (originally called Brown Harriman and Co. but renamed in 1938 to avoid confusion) was formed in 1934 after the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 mandated the separation of investment and commercial banking activities of individual firms. Its initial officers were four Brown Brothers Harriman partners and associates from National City Bank's securities affiliate.

Brown Brothers Harriman partner Knight Woolley was a director of Caledonian Insurance Company beginning in the 1930s. He served later as chair of its Finance Committee, to which the bank acted as investment advisor.

In 1968, Delaware & Hudson Railroad's president and largest individual stockholder, Frederick Dumaine, Jr., unsuccessfully opposed a plan to sell the railroad to the Norfolk & Western Railroad, which move was supported by Delware & Hudson directors including Brown Brothers Harriman partners John B. Madden and E. Roland Harriman. The plan was intitially suggested by the Interstate Commerce Commission in an effort to balance the East Coast rail monopoly occasioned by the previous merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads.

The volumes are arranged chronologically, as are the foldered materials except as noted otherwise here.

The Russian ruble bond materials are often organized alphabetically within folders by name of correspondent, as noted on the folder labels.

The syndicate records consist predominantly of alphabetized runs of cards, which are arranged chronologically in different sized boxes from other materials in the series.

Some of the Delaware & Hudson materials were originally foldered chronologically and those designations have been retained. More than half of the material was not originally organized and has been arranged by subject and then chronologically.