usiness opportunities of New York
City had attracted the two brothers, and a branch was established in New
York in charge of John Arbuckle, the main business in Pittsburg being
left in the care of his brother Charles. The growth of the New York
branch soon made it necessary for Charles Arbuckle to leave the
Pittsburg business in charge of trusted employees, and to come to New
York. In time, the coffee business of the New York house overshadowed
the grocery lines; and the latter were abandoned there, so that the
entire energy of the firm in New York might be devoted to the coffee
business, which thenceforth was operated under the firm name of Arbuckle
Bros. The Arbuckle coffee business, which began with a single roaster in
1865, had eighty-five machines running in Pittsburg and New York in
1881.

Charles Arbuckle died in 1891, and John Arbuckle admitted as partners
his nephew, William Arbuckle Jamison, and two employees, William V.R.
Smith and James N. Jarvie, the business continuing under the former name
of Arbuckle Bros. The most important step taken by the firm while thus
constituted was its entrance into the sugar refining business in 1896.
That entrance had to be forced against the bitterest opposition of a
so-called sugar trust, and brought on a "war" signalized by the most
ruthless cutting of prices of both coffee and sugar. This war was costly
to both sides; but when it had ended, Arbuckle Bros. remained unshaken
in the preeminence of their package-coffee business and had acquired
also great publicity and a fine trade in refined sugar.

[Illustration: JOHN ARBUCKLE]

Arbuckles were always large consumers of sugar in connection with their
coffee glaze, and having introduced the package sugar idea with their
customers some years before, they at last made up their minds to refine
for their own needs and thus to save the profits paid to "the
Havemeyers". It is generally conceded that John Arbuckle's shrewdness
and business sagacity in having previously acquired the Smyser patents
on a weighing and packing machine, and his control of it, really led to
the coffee-sugar war. "This packing machine", said the _Spice Mill_,
when Henry E. Smyser died in 1899, "puts him [Smyser] with the greatest
inventors of our day."

The sugar trust met the Arbuckle challenge by invading the
coffee-roasting field. This they accomplished by securing a controlling
interest for $2,000,000 in one of the largest competing roasting plants