A Boy from Brocton
George Mortimer Pullman was born on March 3, 1831, in Brocton, Chautauqua County, New York. 1 His early schooling was limited to the country schoolhouse, and by the age of fourteen his formal education was complete. He found work as a clerk in a small store in Westfield, New York, earning $40 a year — but the occupation of a country storekeeper, as his biographer Joseph Husband wrote, "failed to fix the restless mind of the boy." 1
Three years later, in 1845, the Pullman family relocated to Albion, New York, where an older brother had established a cabinet-making business. 1 The family's move was prompted by opportunity: their father, James Lewis Pullman, was a skilled furniture maker who had patented a mechanical system using jack screws capable of moving buildings to new foundations. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 The Erie Canal, which passed directly through Albion, was about to undergo a major expansion, and Lewis Pullman saw a chance to put his building-moving skills to work.
Learning His Trade Along the Canal
In Albion, young George found "a wider field for his natural abilities, and at the same time acquired a knowledge of wood working and construction that was soon to afford the foundation for larger enterprises." 1 He worked alongside his brother in the cabinet shop, but the real education came from the canal.
New York State had begun to widen the Erie Canal — expanding it from forty feet at top to seventy feet, a project that would cost more than $30,000,000. 3 Clustered on the canal's banks in Albion were numerous warehouses and other buildings that needed to be moved back from the new channel. The young Pullman, drawing on skills learned from his father, "soon proved his ability to contract successfully for the necessary moving of these buildings back to the new banks of the canal." 1
It was also during these Albion years that Pullman experienced his first overnight railroad journey — and the miserable sleeping accommodations that came with it. As Husband wrote: "As Fulton and Watt and Stephenson, in the crude steam engine of their time, saw the locomotive and marine engine of today, so in this bungling sleeper George M. Pullman saw the modern sleeping car and the vast system he was in time to originate." 1 On his return to Albion, he discussed his ideas with Assemblyman Ben Field, a friend who would later help finance the first Pullman car. 1
From Albion to Chicago
When his father died in 1853, George, then 22, assumed control of the family business. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 In 1856 he secured a New York State contract to relocate 20 buildings for the canal expansion. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 But when the widening was complete, the field for his vocation was eliminated. "Westward lay the future," Husband wrote. "In the new town of Chicago, which had in so few years grown up at the foot of Lake Michigan, young men were already building world enterprises. Its romantic growth seized the imagination of the youthful Albion contractor." 1
In Chicago, Pullman applied the building-moving skills he had perfected in Albion to an extraordinary challenge: the city sat too low relative to Lake Michigan and its streets were swampy. In 1859, Pullman and his partner raised the massive Matteson House hotel. They subsequently elevated an entire 98-meter block of four- and five-story buildings on Lake Street. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2
The Palace Car
Pullman's first sleeping car was completed in 1864, inspired by the packet boats of his Erie Canal youth in Albion. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 It was President Lincoln's assassination in 1865 that brought Pullman national fame: he arranged for the president's body to be transported from Washington to Springfield aboard a sleeper car, and hundreds of thousands lined the route to pay tribute. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 Orders poured in.
By 1875, Pullman's firm controlled patents worth $100,000, operated 700 cars, and maintained substantial bank reserves. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 He hired African-American freedmen as porters, making his company "the biggest single employer of African Americans in post-Civil War America." Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 In 1880 he purchased 4,000 acres near Lake Calumet for $800,000 and commissioned architect Solon Spencer Beman to build a model company town — an enterprise that would end in the notorious Pullman Strike of 1894. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2
A Gift to His Hometown
Even as he built an empire in Chicago, Pullman never forgot Albion. In 1890, a longtime friend named Charles A. Danolds suggested that Albion needed a Universalist Church. Pullman agreed to fund the construction if local Universalists raised $5,000. The fundraising goal was met by Christmas Day 1892, and Pullman hired his trusted architect S.S. Beman to design the building. 4
Beman created a magnificent Richardsonian Romanesque structure using local pink Medina sandstone, featuring 56 Tiffany stained glass windows and a Johnson pipe organ. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 The Pullman Memorial Universalist Church was formally dedicated on January 31, 1895, with Pullman present to deliver the property deed. His brother, Rev. Dr. Royal H. Pullman, a Universalist minister, gave the dedication sermon. 4
Pullman died of heart failure on October 19, 1897, at age 66. Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.">2 The church he built in Albion still stands at the heart of the Orleans County Courthouse Historic District — a monument to the boy who learned to move buildings along the Erie Canal and went on to change the way America traveled.