Died: July 21, 1887 (age 73)
Richfield Springs, New York
Bellefontaine Cemetery Saint Louis, Missouri
President, Fulton Iron Works
President, St. Louis Bridge Company
Few industrial figures in nineteenth-century St. Louis embodied the city’s explosive rise more completely than Gerald B. Allen. Builder, manufacturer, financier, railroad promoter, insurance executive, newspaper investor, and steamboat capitalist, Allen’s career touched nearly every major engine of St. Louis growth during the decades surrounding 1875. His life reflects the remarkable opportunities available in a rapidly expanding western metropolis and the immense fortunes that could be created through energy, timing, and industrial vision.
Born in Cork, Ireland, on November 6, 1813, Allen was the son of Thomas Allen, a silk weaver. He learned the carpenter and turner trades before deciding that his future lay elsewhere. At twenty-three years of age he emigrated to the United States, arriving first in New York before ultimately making his way westward to St. Louis around 1837, when the city was still little more than a vigorous frontier river town. A contemporary obituary later observed that he arrived when St. Louis was “only a small town,” yet within a few decades he would become one of the men most responsible for transforming it into an industrial giant.
Allen initially worked as a contractor and builder, applying the practical trade skills he had learned in Ireland. His energy and business instincts quickly allowed him to move beyond wage labor into ownership. He acquired two sawmills, one in St. Louis and another on the Gasconade River, entering the lucrative lumber trade during an era when western cities consumed vast quantities of timber for homes, warehouses, riverfront structures, and railroad expansion.
Yet Allen soon recognized that the true industrial future of St. Louis rested not in lumber, but in iron.
After selling his sawmills, he invested heavily in the iron business and became associated with the prosperous firm of Gaty, McCune and Company. In 1855, withdrawing from that partnership, he established the Fulton Iron Works, the enterprise most permanently associated with his name. Under Allen’s leadership, Fulton Iron Works grew into one of the largest iron manufacturing concerns in the American West.
The timing could not have been more significant. St. Louis in the mid-nineteenth century was rapidly becoming a city of railroads, bridges, foundries, mills, steam engines, and river commerce. Iron was the structural backbone of this transformation. The Fulton Iron Works supplied machinery, structural components, boilers, castings, and heavy industrial equipment that supported the city’s expanding infrastructure and manufacturing economy.
During the Civil War years, Allen’s industrial influence expanded even further. He reportedly built ironclad vessels for the Federal government and became heavily involved in river transportation through the Anchor Line system of steamboats operating on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. His interests connected manufacturing directly to transportation, illustrating how interconnected the city’s industrial elite had become.
Allen’s influence extended well beyond manufacturing alone. He helped organize or direct numerous corporations and civic institutions during the decades when St. Louis sought to establish itself as the dominant commercial center of the Mississippi Valley. He served as president of the Covenant Mutual Life Insurance Company of St. Louis, director of the Hope Mutual Fire Insurance Company, director of the Bank of the State of Missouri, vice-president of the O’Fallon Polytechnic Institute, and vice-president of the North Missouri Railroad.
His business interests also extended into journalism and public influence. Allen became deeply connected with the Missouri Republican newspaper, later known as the St. Louis Republic. Contemporary accounts described him as one of the influential figures helping direct the paper’s policies and shaping public sentiment in the city. In nineteenth-century St. Louis, newspapers were not merely sources of information; they were powerful political and economic instruments tied closely to business and civic leadership.
By the 1880s Allen was regarded as one of the wealthiest men in St. Louis. A New York Times obituary published at the time of his death stated that his estate was estimated at approximately four million dollars — an enormous fortune for the period. The same article described him as “prominently connected with every public enterprise for years past,” a fitting summary for a man whose activities touched nearly every dimension of the city’s growth.
Allen was married twice. He first married Frances W. Adams on December 10, 1846, in St. Louis. After her death, he married Eugenia L. Paschall Carr on July 13, 1871. He was survived by four children.
Gerald B. Allen died on July 21, 1887, at Richfield Springs, New York, where he had traveled for the summer season. His passing marked the end of one of the great entrepreneurial careers of nineteenth-century St. Louis. From immigrant carpenter to industrial magnate, Allen’s life paralleled the rise of St. Louis itself — a city transformed through iron, railroads, river commerce, finance, and relentless ambition.
LucGar Reflective Addendum
Gerald B. Allen represents the powerful industrial class that reshaped St. Louis after the Civil War. Men like Allen did not merely participate in the city’s growth; they actively engineered it. Iron works, railroads, steamboats, banks, insurance companies, newspapers, and civic institutions were increasingly interconnected through a relatively small network of ambitious businessmen whose influence extended into nearly every aspect of urban life.
Yet Allen’s story also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of nineteenth-century America. An Irish immigrant trained as a carpenter could arrive in a frontier river city and, through skill, risk, and relentless work, help construct one of the industrial capitals of the nation. His career illustrates both the possibilities and the immense concentration of power that emerged during America’s Gilded Age.
By 1875, residents walking along Chestnut Avenue may not have fully grasped that one of the men living among them had become tied to nearly every major mechanism driving St. Louis forward. Iron, steam, finance, transportation, and public opinion all intersected in the career of Gerald B. Allen — making him one of the defining industrial figures of the Lucas and Garrison era.
Gerald B. Allen