Business, Philanthropy, and the Importance of Local History: An Interview with Kimberly Hess on Sarah B. Cochran
Although she has been described as a “trailblazer” for women in business in America and used her wealth to benefit the local community in Pennsylvania by supporting education for men and women and women’s suffrage, relatively little is known about the businesswoman and philanthropist Sarah B. Cochran. During her lifetime, from 1857-1936, Sarah went from humble beginnings in rural Pennsylvania, to competing in the coal and coke business with Henry Clay Frick and contributing towards philanthropic endeavours.
Despite Sarah’s contributions being difficult to identify in the present day, Kimberly Hess is very familiar with Sarah’s story. Having written a biography on Sarah titled A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran, Kimberly discusses how Sarah took over the family business after the deaths of her father-in-law, husband, and then her son, during a time when women working in or around coal mines in Pennsylvania was against the law.
I was able to interview Kimberly to find out more about Sarah’s story, and found out about the challenges Sarah faced, how she overcame them, and how her legacy can still be seen today when you know where to look.
A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected life of Sarah B. Cochran by Kimberly Hess can be purchased through this link.
How many people in America are aware about Sarah B. Cochran?
They are aware of her business competitor Henry Clay Frick because his business became the largest in Southwestern Pennsylvania and his name became associated with coal and coke in that part of the country. Because he moved to New York City and had a mansion there that people have been able to visit for years, it has kept the name in people’s minds. He’s also made it into history textbooks because of his handling of Homestead with Carnegie and his business alignment with him. Whereas Sarah didn’t move away, she stayed in this very small area and people weren’t really expecting a woman to be in the business she was in and often still associated it with her husband even after he had died.
Sarah B. Cochran spent her early years with her family, and you have mentioned in other work that she had humble beginnings in Fayette, Pennsylvania. Can you first paint a picture of what life would have looked like for Sarah and her family, and other people of her socio-economic status in general during this part of America in the mid-nineteenth century? With American history you really have to understand its geography.
So, she was born in 1857 in Fayette County which is near West Virginia in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. At that point, it’s following the frontier era after the revolution and it’s right before the civil war. What has always struck me about that area at that time is just how remote it might have seemed and how people would have had these very large families, and they would have been working on their own farms and clearing the land.
There wouldn’t have been a lot of opportunities, especially for a young woman. Sarah went to school, but she had to share a dress with her sister, so on alternating days each one would get to wear the dress and go to school because they were so poor they couldn’t afford enough clothing. But they were trying to get their daughters educated even though it wasn’t at high levels of education. They were trying to get as basic an education as they could. Sarah was from a family of 8 or 9 children and her parents were farmers. It’s not clear to me if they owned the land that they were working or not. They would have been in a situation where they would have been working to make ends meet and they probably weren’t looking at “getting ahead” in their profession the way some people think of careers today. Sarah wouldn’t have had career prosects or educational prospects the way we have them today.
There would have been a number of limits like her gender and her family’s financial background. But at that point, American women in certain places couldn’t vote, so in Pennsylvania women weren’t voting which also meant they weren’t serving on juries either. That would have been one piece to consider for women in that era. This is also the time after the women’s movement is starting to take shape as an organised movement in the US and certain states were starting to pass legislation to protect married women’s rights. For someone born in 1857 in Pennsylvania, it’s not clear how many rights of her own she would be able to maintain once she got married. She would have to get married for economic reasons, but she would have to be careful in her choice of a spouse because he might be able to do a number of things and she would have no recourse.
“There wouldn’t have been a lot of opportunities, especially for a young woman. There would have been a number of limits like her gender and her family’s financial background.”
Eventually, Sarah became a maid to James Cochran who made his fortune in the coal and coke production, and eventually married his oldest son, Phillip. Linking into what you mentioned about marriage prospects for women at that time, was this a love-match or was this relationship pursued by Sarah by ambition for financial stability which she lacked herself? Given that James Cochran was a man of great wealth by this point, what was his reaction to his oldest son marrying one of the maids?
Her marriage to Phillip has always been portrayed as a love match, they seemed to be in love with each other and respected each other which seems to be one of the reasons why Phillip was interested in teaching her the business and mining industry. I think it’s telling that after Phillip died, Sarah never remarried, and she was alive for 37 years afterwards. No one knows exactly why she didn’t remarry; it could have been that Phillip was the love of her life, it could have been that she would have ceded some power if she had gotten married again, it could also have been that for someone from her background it would have been difficult to find someone she would have been comfortable with who would also be comfortable with the world she was moving in by the twentieth century. Generally, people see her marriage as a love match.
As far as Jim Cochran, I’ve never heard anything about any negative reaction from him or his family. It’s interesting because he was an entrepreneur and he made all his own money and pioneered the coal and Connellsville coke industry. His money wasn’t family money and in some ways, he wasn’t in a position to look down on someone who came from nothing because it wasn’t as if he came from old wealth himself. It may be that she had some kind of business acumen that he admired, we don’t really know. It’s also interesting that the marriage announcement for Phillip and Sarah is just a couple of sentences saying that they got married. When you think of wedding announcements from young coal barons in 1879, there could be a much larger description of that wedding and there isn’t, so that’s an interesting fact to consider too.
As you said, as James Cochran made his wealth himself and he wasn’t in a position to look down on a woman marrying a wealthy man. He would have been aware of women getting married to economically stable men.
Phillip would have had better marriage prospects if you think about it strictly from the financial and networking matches that were available because there would have been daughters from industrialists in the area at that time who would have certainly been groomed to marry an industrialist. It’s possible that he was looked down upon in other circles because he married the maid and he married someone who couldn’t contribute social status or a network.
I even heard someone say once that when they were married, they would both get invited to an event, or it was supposed to include both of them, but only his name would be on the invitation at a time when it should have also included her name. There was some snubbing associated with her background as coming from an impoverished family.
“For someone born in 1857 in Pennsylvania, it’s not clear how many rights of her own she would be able to maintain once she got married.”
You have written previously that Phillip admired Sarah’s intellect and taught her the business, which was considered a man’s world, but it proved to be extremely useful after his untimely death. Did Sarah face any push back from other men in the industry?
I grew up hearing in my family that Frick never saw the business as hers and that he always saw it as Phillip’s business even after his death. That was an interesting perspective, but as I was doing research, I found an obituary for Sarah that was about three sentences long in a Pittsburgh newspapers that said “her husband was the business man, she was the philanthropist and she died”. It was very much delineated along gender lines that you expect at that time so I think while we can’t always find specific examples, there are examples like that obituary. There’s also the fact that in the 1890s in Pennsylvania women weren’t allowed to work in or around any coal mines in the state, so when she inherited this business, she couldn’t have gone into any of the mines that she owned because it would have been illegal. There was not really push back but a dancing around social sensibilities and laws at the time that she would have had to deal with.
In one case, early in the twentieth century, she was in the local newspaper because she was the only woman at a smoker that one of the managers at one of her companies was giving. It specified that she was there to provide “pleasant conversation”, so it let people know that she wasn’t *that type of woman* hanging out at smokers! But between the lines you could read that she had to be there because she owned the company that this man worked for and all the railroad, banking, and mining guys from that area were included so there had to be a way for her to be involved. It’s interesting to see how she had to deal with some of these different ideas and laws at the time.
My research looks at this idea of women and philanthropic efforts, so that’s very much a gendered stereotype. It’s interesting that even after Phillip died when she was running the business, she was still seen as the “philanthropic wife” even though she was a businesswoman.
I think that was easier for people to understand in some ways. But locally, if you read the newspaper articles from the area she lived, everyone knew that she was involved with the business. I think it depends on how far away certain people’s viewpoints were. If you get to the US census from 1900, 1910, and 1920, after Phillip is dead, Sarah’s occupation is listed as a blank space, the word “none”, or as an “employer”, and that was never the case when Phillip and his father were running businesses; occupation data was very specific. Even Frick got the job title “capitalist” on one of the census records from that time. Even though it’s vague, it’s productive sounding. It’s interesting how she was perceived by people in different situations.
Unfortunately, Sarah went through a period of prolonged grief at the end of the nineteenth century as her father-in-law and leader of the business died in 1894, her husband died in 1899, and her son died in 1901. After this unfortunate period, Sarah spent time travelling abroad. Did her travels impact her perspective on life? Or prompt her to pursue the family business?
She was already involved in the business by the time she was travelling abroad a lot because her travels were mostly concentrated between 1901 and 1909. Whether or not she was giving greater thought to staying in the business or what her future in business might be, we don’t know. Certainly, travelling for a lot of people gives you time to clear your mind or see other perspectives, so she seems like someone who was perceptive and intelligent and certainly could have gotten a lot out of those travelling experiences. Without her own words it’s hard to say but it is certainly possible.
We know that when she was travelling, she got a lot of ideas for the mansion she built when she came back. It was a Tudor revival mansion and she named it Linden Hall at St. James’s Park which was a reference to her travels to London and to her son. The linden trees were a reference to Unter den Linden in Berlin, so she was definitely getting ideas when she was abroad. In a particular trip in 1905 she bought a full-size copy of Rapheal’s Sistine Madonna that was part of a commission that Jane Stanford began in the 1890s where the Kaiser had to select this particular artist in Dresden who was given authority to make copies of the painting. One went to Stanford University for its art museum. (Andrew) Carnegie apparently tried to buy the other copy but the artist didn’t sell it to him. By the time Sarah visited Dresden in 1905, the artist was dead and his estate was being settled so she was able to pick up this painting for just a couple of thousand dollars. The local newspaper reported that “Mrs Cochran succeeded where Carnegie failed”. She sent this painting back to Western Pennsylvania and hung it in the church she had built to memorialise her husband and son, and it’s still there.
For anyone who travels in south-western Pennsylvania, there’s this beautiful gothic-revival church that she built that has a Tiffany window in it from her, and this painting that you would never expect to see in this little railroad town on a river in this corner of Pennsylvania. She was definitely taking in information when she was traveling.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Acquires Monumental Tiffany Window Designed by Agnes Northrop, The MET (5th December 2023). “The three-part Garden Landscape window is one of the most important works created at the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany.”
So she was managing the business whilst being away travelling?
She had people in Pennsylvania who could take care of the business for her so that she could be away. She had a cousin of Phillip’s by the name of M.M. Cochran who was very involved who was an attorney and had been involved in dissolving and setting up the Cochran businesses over a period of many years. He was a trustee of a college and would have had networks and was a member of a the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh where Sarah couldn’t belong because of her sex. He was very involved and she also had a nephew by the name of Frank Tarr who was also involved. Those are the two names I’ve heard the most of so the business could still go on whilst she was travelling.
It's clever that she could utilise these male relatives to get into spaces where she couldn’t, like you said, because of her sex.
Yes, and I think it’s something we still end up doing today sometimes. I’ve noticed sometimes that you deal with a particular company or a particular person and realise “this person is only going to be comfortable talking to a male” so you end up transferring these discussions to your husband so he can deal with them and the outcome is different and their tone is noticeably different than when you’re dealing with them. But she had that, and in the grieving process she was advised to think about the schools and the churches she could aid, so becoming philanthropic resolved her of her grieving process. She continued on with philanthropy and became involved as a philanthropic activist for suffrage later too.
As you have mentioned, Sarah used her position as a wealthy woman to support women’s suffrage. The fight for women’s suffrage in America looked very different to the UK as each state granted suffrage independently of one another. What did this look like in Pennsylvania, and what role did Sarah play herself?
She was supposed to have been involved with the local suffrage organisation which seems to have been aligned with NAWSA, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, rather than Alice Paul’s group, it’s kind of before Alice Paul became popular. There’s a lot that we don’t know about her involvement in that but the way we can find out about how ardently she supported suffrage is because she opened her home for a suffrage rally in 1915. In 1915 Pennsylvania and a few other states were going to have referenda about women’s suffrage and there were all different rallies popping up across the state. It was so important that Anna Howard Shaw was going to a number of them and speaking for free, so she actually was the keynote speaker at the rally that Sarah hosted at Linden Hall in July 1915. There are newspaper accounts of this particular rally, and they talk about how opera singers were singing arias from Aida and Thaїs, and we know from other sources that Sarah loved music. I think she was even related to one or two of the singers and these were women who had been performing in Europe but because of World War One, they couldn’t continue. There was a band performing, people were getting bussed in on jitneys and they had around 500 or 600 attendees depending on which newspaper account you read.
It would have been so exciting for people whether they were interested in suffrage or not, they also would have got to visit Sarah’s home which was new and it was huge and would have had electricity and running water and this enormous Tiffany window, which is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But they would have also heard Anna Howard Shaw. The meeting was called to order with a potato masher as a gavel because they were trying to counter anti-suffragists arguments that if women got the right to vote they would stop being domestic and people wouldn’t be able to cook. That was a popular argument in western Pennsylvania at the time and suffrage organisations even created cookbooks as fundraisers. I don’t know if that was happening in the UK or not but that was an approach here.
There was definitely this idea in the UK that if women were enfranchised it would make them not want to get married and not want to have children, but I haven’t seen anything so far that would indicate that women would be unable to cook or clean. It’s really interesting that they countered that by using a potato masher as a gavel!
Yes! So that was her rally and that’s the most noticeable way that I’ve seen her involved which I think is really exciting to see because if she had ever tried to keep her gender hidden or less of a topic in her industry, this drew complete attention to it and it drew attention to the right that she didn’t have that all of her employees and competitors would have had. She really called that out. I think it’s a really interesting thing that she did.
Sarah also supported education for both men and women, and later went on to become Allegheny College’s first woman trustee, as well as a trustee for Beaver College and American University. How do you think we can see her legacy after her death and her contributions to furthering education? How did she pave the way for women in business in America?
I think in education the most powerful examples of her legacy that I’ve seen are that she created a space for women on the board at Allegheny College where they had never been before. And then being another woman on the board for Beaver College (now Arcadia University) and American University at that time would have been great and would have allowed doors to open to women through the current time. The fact that she built dormitories at Allegheny College and Otterbein University and she put local people through college, my great-grandmother was one of those people, she created this legacy where she changed the trajectory of people’s lives. But it also meant that now they might expect to educate their own children or grandchildren, and if you grow up in a family where you know your great-grandmother went to college and was on the college basketball team you take for granted that people do this and then you have different expectations. I think she created this legacy for people that may not be that obvious to see, but it’s definitely affected what people have done and expect for themselves and what they expect to contribute to their communities.
As far as women in business, she was a trailblazer in her history and I think that knowing about her today is so helpful. I grew up knowing about her so I felt like I had an example and a role model for being a woman in business. I had a business career but not everyone in business knows about Sarah Cochran or someone like her and they have their own different expectations for what you might or might not be able to do. I think that she created a place for women in certain industries, she became another example of women getting into various industries and doing well, and maybe having to navigate differently than men do, she was the first and only in some cases which I think is relevant to some people today. All of that is part of her legacy.
You mentioned at the start that not many Americans know about Sarah, but it seems like you have known about her for quite some time. How did you become familiar with her and her story?
I grew up knowing about her because she is my great-great-grandmother’s cousin. My dad grew up in the town where Sarah built her mansion and the church where I was baptized as a baby, my parents were married there, my grandparents were trustees, and my great-grandmother was married in the personage (and that was the same great-grandmother who was put through college by Sarah). It was just known and any time we would visit relatives in that area you could visit Linden Hall, her home, you could go to Christmas eve services at the Church. When you have those places to see as a person from history so accessible to you, suddenly they’re not far away and in the ether, they are right there in the pew that you’re sitting in or the stone floor. I grew up knowing about her, but I never expected to write about her because I had an entirely different career path, and then this opportunity came up to write a Wikipedia entry about her and do more research which led to writing her biography.
“There have to be other people who have been left out of a larger historical narrative who are well known in a particular community or family. I think there are opportunities for people to tell those stories and try to get them on other people’s radar.”
That’s amazing access to primary sources!
Yes! I can tell people that I saw her Tiffany window when it was in situ which kind of makes you feel old and archaic at the same time! It’s also just fun to know that you’ve seen it where it used to be. In talking about knowing about her all my life and growing up with her story, I think what I’ve come to learn from writing about her is that there have to be other people who have been left out of a larger historical narrative who are well known in a particular community or family. I think there are opportunities for people to tell those stories and try to get them on other people’s radar. In Sarah’s case, it would be great if PhD historians would include her in their research. But until the book was written, there really wasn’t a way to find out she was there unless you were familiar with the community where she was from or one of the colleges where she had something to do with. In some ways that even became harder. In one case, the dormitory that she donated at Otterbein was raised in the 1970s so people can walk across the Otterbein campus and not realise that she had anything to do with it.
It really highlights the importance of local histories and how micro histories relate to macros histories as well. For historians as well to include her in their analysis would be incredibly important.
She is an entirely different perspective on that era and on industrialism. I grew up with very fond ideas of capitalism because I saw someone who lifted up her community and created opportunities for other people because of the work that she did. Not everyone sees capitalism that way and honestly not every capitalist is like that either! Having those examples is very important for people trying to figure out how they want to have a role in business or philanthropy.
Thank you to Kimberly for an interesting conversation about the life of Sarah B. Cochran and the importance of not only women’s history, but also about the importance of discovering local histories.