After immigrating to Baltimore in 1800 and building a successful
linen trading business,
Alexander Brown and his four sons co-founded
Alex. Brown & Sons. In 1818, one son, John Alexander Brown, traveled to
Philadelphia to establish John A. Brown and Co. In 1825, another son, James Brown, established
Brown Bros. & Co. on Pine Street in Lower Manhattan and relocated to
Wall Street in 1833. started with railway money, and W. A. Harriman & Co. to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Founding partners included:
Time December 22, 1930, issue announced that the three-way merger featured 11
Yale graduates among 16 founding partners. Eight of the partners listed above, except for Moreau Delano and Thatcher Brown, were
Skull and Bones members. In the 1930s the company acted as a U.S. base for the German industrialist
Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance
Adolf Hitler. After the passage of the
Glass-Steagall Act, the partners decided to focus on commercial banking, become a
private bank, and spin its securities marketing and underwriting off into
Harriman, Ripley and Company, which eventually evolved into
Drexel Burnham Lambert via mergers. W. Averell Harriman, the founding partner in the firm, left to go into public service. He left the leadership of Brown Brothers Harriman to his younger brother,
E. Roland Harriman. W. Averell Harriman was the ambassador and statesman responsible for the relationship between
Winston Churchill and
Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Some historical records of Brown Brothers Harriman and its precursor companies are housed in the manuscript collections at the
New-York Historical Society. ==See also==