INDUSTRIAL COMBINATIONS 
AND TRUSTS 
CHAPTER I 
SPECIMENS OF EARLY POOLING 
NOTE 
The industrial combination and trust movement as a feature of 
our national life may be said to date from the pools in the cordage 
industry about i860. These combinations were shortly succeeded 
in the middle of the sixties by the organization of the Michigan 
Salt Association, and the first anthracite coal combination appears 
to have been formed in 1871. The pools of the anthracite coal roads 
continued a more or less intermittent and spasmodic existence down 
to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Both the 
seventies and eighties were characterized by numerous combina 
tions of the same type. Among these may be mentioned the West 
ern Export Association, the United Refining Company, Gunpowder 
Manufacturers’ Association, Kentucky Distilleries’ Association, 
Wall Paper Association, Sand Paper Association, Upholsterers 
Felt Association, Standard Envelope Company and others. 
Space permits the reproduction of only three documents showing 
the form of organization and methods of these early combinations. 
So brief an examination may be justified first, by the fact that these 
pools are now chiefly of historic interest, and second that their or 
ganization and methods of operation have in nearly every case 
been substantially reproduced in more recent combinations whose 
agreements will be shown in other chapters. 
The first exhibit in the following pages is the pooling agreement 
of the Gunpowder Manufacturers, which was adopted April 23, 
1872. In essence it is a simple agreement for the maintenance of 
prices. In the second agreement, that of the Kentucky Distillers, 
we have an example of a pool formed primarily to divide output