John Brisben Walker (September 10, 1847 – July 7, 1931) was a magazine publisher, agricultural innovator, land developer, and automobile entrepreneur in the United States. He led an extraordinary life as a "Renaissance man" whose careers spanned the military, high-stakes journalism, pioneering transportation, and massive real estate development.
Early years Walker was born on September 10, 1847, at his parents' country house on the Monongahela River, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On that river his grandfather owned a shipyard reputed to be where the keelboat used by the Lewis and Clark expedition was built, although this is disputed.
After a brief stint as a Georgetown College student, Walker transferred to West Point in 1865. In 1866 he was court-martialed for deserting his post as a sentinel in cadet barracks before being relieved, suspended for ten weeks, and set back a semester. In 1868 he was again court-martialed, this time for stretching a seven-day New Year's leave to seventeen days.. After being convicted, he resigned from the Military Academy without graduating.
China Shortly thereafter, a family connection helped him find a place accompanying J. Ross Browne, the newly named Envoy of the United States, to China, which was then recovering from a devastating civil war, the Taiping Rebellion.
In China, Walker found a use for his military training. Through the influence of Anson Burlingame, a recently retired former U.S. minister to the Qing Empire, Walker entered the Chinese Army, where he served for two years advising local commanders on the reorganization of infantry units. The experience left a strong impression on Walker, prompting him to say years later that if China ever modernized its military system, "it will not be long before the Yellow Dragon will be the most formidable battle ensign on earth."
West Virginia In 1870, Walker arrived in Charleston, West Virginia, founded a weekly newspaper called the Charleston Herald, and hired David Hunter Strother to be its editor. Strother had experience as a writer and illustrator for Harper's Monthly under the name Porter Crayon. In 1871, Walker married Strother's daughter, Emily, "the prettiest girl in the valley of the Virginia," (with whom he would have eight children before their divorce 33 years later).
When the West Virginia capital was first moved from Wheeling to Charleston, Walker seized on the opportunity. With local financial backing, he purchased land extending from the Elk River west to a line that ran from the Kanawha River near the end of the present Delaware Avenue to about the end of Fayette Street at West Washington Street, and extending from the Kanawha River to the present West Washington Street. This he designated as the "J.B. Walker addition to the City of Charleston" (it is now the core of the city's West Side neighborhood). Walker laid out this section into a town site, with streets running in one direction and avenues in another. He named the streets for West Virginia counties, and the avenues for other states.
Walker's original plans, with a few changes in names, but little other variation, are still the plans of that part of the city. He made his first fortune developing the property as a residential and industrial community, only to lose everything in the Panic of 1873 when various railroads went bankrupt, causing the failure of the banks that had financed them.
Washington, D.C. After his real estate venture collapsed, Walker was asked by the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette to do a series of articles on the mineral and manufacturing industries of the West and their future prospects. Walker travelled throughout the West to do the necessary research and the articles were well received by the reading public. Walker was then offered and accepted the job of managing editor of the Pittsburgh Telegraph, which led to him being hired in 1876 as managing editor of the Washington Chronicle. He moved his growing family to Washington, D.C. and remained there until 1879, when he was appointed by the United States Department of Agriculture as a Commissioner tasked with determining agriculture possibilities in arid regions of the West.
Colorado Walker moved his family to Colorado and, based on what he had learned as Commissioner, decided to try his hand at farming. He purchased 1,600 acres in north Denver and used what he knew about irrigation to grow alfalfa as a cash crop. This turned out to be a lucrative business, and within ten years, his Berkeley Farm was the largest alfalfa grower in Colorado, harvesting nearly 3,000 tons annually and containing nearly 200 miles of main and lateral irrigation ditches. With his farming profits, he turned to real estate development.
In 1880, Walker bought 550 lots in Denver near the Platte River and over the ensuing years developed an amusement park on this property. In 1887 more than 20,000 people came to the opening of River Front Park. It featured a racetrack, medieval castle, baseball park, toboggan slide, an exhibition hall, and a grandstand with a capacity of 5,000 people in which Walker staged Denver's first rodeo. A showboat on the river put on performances every evening during the summer, but the Sunday shows were cancelled after the manager and company were arrested and fined for violating Sunday blue laws. Walker also bought waterlogged tracts in the Platte River valley that he devised a means of reclaiming. His investment is these tracts was said to be $100,000 and they were bought by railroads for a price reputed to be $1,000,000.
Acquisition of The Cosmopolitan and move to New Jersey
In 1888, Walker returned to his journalistic pursuits. He sold his Berkeley Farm to a group of investors, and in 1889 used part of the proceeds to buy for $360,000 The Cosmopolitan, an insolvent monthly magazine with a circulation of 16,000. He would transform it from a nondescript literary magazine into America's leading general-interest magazine, using it to promote a progressive, reform-minded agenda to an educated, middle-class audience.
To undertake direct management of the magazine he moved himself and his family back East, to Orange, New Jersey.
Shortly after buying the magazine, Walker, on a ferry on his way to his office, read in the New York World that its star reporter Nellie Bly was about to embark on a round-the-world trip in an attempt to complete it in less time that the 80 days in had taken the hero of Jules Verne's popular novel published 16 years earlier. Six hours after Walker arrived at his office, his 28-year-old literary editor, Elizabeth Bisland, was on a train to San Francisco to begin a race around the world in the opposite direction of Bly. The race between Bisland and Bly was covered by newspapers across the United States and was a boon to the country's gambling houses. Both completed their journey in under 80 days. Bly won by four days, finishing in 72,Ruddick, Nicholas. "Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and the World on the Threshold of the American Age." Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 29, Number 1, 1999, p. 4 but the race achieved the object of giving a boost to circulation of The Cosmopolitan. It climbed to 100,000 by 1892 (and would reach 300,000 by 1897).
In 1893 Walker increased his wealth by selling River Front Park to the city of Denver, shortly before the Panic of 1893 that might have lost him his fortune for a second time.
Move to New York state and the Mobile Company of America In 1894, Walker and his family moved to Irvington, New York, a village on the shores of the Hudson River about 20 miles north of Manhattan that then had many of the wealthiest people in the country as residents. He promptly commissioned the construction of a new headquarters for his now thriving magazine, the Cosmopolitan Building. To this day, the three-story stone Neo-Classical revival building remains the largest building in Irvington.
In 1895, he had The Cosmopolitan sponsor the second automobile race ever held in the United States. The magazine offered an aggregate of $3,000 in prizes to whoever first completed the 52-mile round trip from New York City Hall in Manhattan to the new Ardsley Country Club in Irvington, and back. On May 30, 1895, then called Decoration Day, six cars started up Broadway behind riders on horseback who cleared the road of pedestrians and onlookers for them. One rider was arrested mid-race for knocking a bicyclist off his bike. Only three cars made it out of Manhattan, and only two of them could make it up the hill by the Country Club under their own power; all had to be pushed by spectators. The two did manage to finish the race back at New York City Hall.
In 1897, Walker devised a plan for a free distance-education college called Cosmopolitan University, modeled after Chautauqua schools. The Cosmopolitan would cover all expenses, requiring only a commitment to a set number of study hours. When 20,000 students immediately signed up, Walker could not fund the school, so students were then asked to contribute $ 20 a year; however, the project still failed to survive in the long term.
Ever "an avid geek and prophetic thinker," Walker had long been enamored with transportation innovations, reportedly offering his acquaintances, the Wright brothers, room on his estate for their work. After one of the steam-powered cars made by the Stanley Brothers had set a new speed record of 27.4 miles per hour in November 1898, he bought the Stanley Brothers company and patents for $250,000 in early summer 1899. In this, he partnered with Amzi L. Barber, a fellow Irvington resident who made his fortune producing and selling asphalt used to pave roads around the country, including Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The partnership was very short-lived, dissolving on July 18, 1899.
In the split-up, Barber got the factory in Watertown, Massachusetts, that the Stanley Brothers company had built, together with most of the steamers under production. He sold the cars as "Locomobiles." Walker wound up with the rights to produce steamers and pieces of undeveloped land (parts of the former Ambrose Kingsland estate) in North Tarrytown, New York. He founded the Mobile Company of America and hired McKim, Mead & White (who had designed his Cosmopolitan Building) to design a purpose-built automobile factory on the southern plot, at the foot of the village's Beekman Avenue. Walker's steamers were to be sold as "Mobiles." In March 1900, the first Mobile was ready for sale.
Walker, accompanied by his 8-year-old son Justin, displayed the hill-climbing prowess of the Mobile (reportedly a two-seat, 2-cylinder Model 4 runabout)[ on September 8, 1900, by driving one up Pikes Peak to a height of 11,000 feet (but not to the top of the 14,115-foot-high peak), presumably the highest altitude ever reached by an automobile until then. In August the following year, one of his cars, driven by others, did reach the top. These stunts, however, were ridiculed by the Colorado newspapers in articles claiming that "the west is not yet prepared for the flood of automobile travel that Mr. Walker promises to let loose in the mountains."