_The Story of John Arbuckle_

John Arbuckle, for nearly fifty years the honored dean of the American
coffee trade, pioneer package-coffee man, some time coffee king, sugar
merchant, philanthropist, and typical American, came from fine, rugged
Scotch stock. He was the son of a well-to-do Scottish woolen-mill owner
in Allegheny, Pa., where he was born, July 11, 1839. He often said he
was raised on skim milk. He received a common school education in
Pittsburgh and Allegheny. He and Henry Phipps, the coke and steel head,
are said to have occupied adjoining desks in one of the public schools,
Andrew Carnegie being at that time in another grade of the same school.
He had a strong bent for science and machinery; and, although he chose
the coffee instead of the steel business for his career, the basis of
his success was invention. He also attended Washington and Jefferson
College at Washington, Pennsylvania.[348]

The Arbuckle business was founded at Pittsburg, in 1859, when Charles
Arbuckle, his uncle Duncan McDonald, and their friend William Roseburg,
organized the wholesale grocery firm of McDonald & Arbuckle. One year
later John Arbuckle, the younger brother of Charles Arbuckle, was
admitted to the firm, and the firm name was changed to McDonald &
Arbuckles. McDonald and Roseburg retired from the firm a few years
later, leaving the business in the hands of the two youthful, hopeful,
and energetic brothers, who under the firm name of Arbuckles & Co., soon
made their firm one of the important wholesale grocery houses in
Pennsylvania. Although little thinking at the time that their greatest
success was to be achieved in coffee, and that a new idea of one of the
partners--that of marketing roasted coffee in original packages--would
make their name familiar in every hamlet in the country, yet the first
two entries in the original day-book of McDonald & Arbuckles record
purchases of coffee.

Prior to the sixties, coffee was not generally sold roasted or ground,
ready for the coffee pot. Except in the big cities, most housewives
bought their coffee green, and roasted it in their kitchen stoves as
needed. John Arbuckle, having become impressed with the wasteful methods
and unsatisfactory results of this kitchen roasting, had already begun
his studies of roasting and packaging problems, studies that he never
gave up. How, first to roast coffee scientifically, and then to preserve
its freshness in the interval between the roas