Charles Barlow
Charles Barlow was born at Dudley, in the English Black Country, a son of William Barlow. His birth date is given three ways. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography says 26 October 1820. His own passport application of 1874 says "on or about the 8th day of October 1824". His gravestone says 8 October 1823. He had a good English education, and at about twenty he came to the United States. His first job in New York was with A. T. Stewart, the dry-goods merchant whose store on Broadway was then the largest in the city.
In October 1844 he went to work for The Mercantile Agency, then trading as Lewis Tappan & Co., as a copyist and correspondence clerk. It was the pioneer mercantile agency, the first business in America to sell reports on the credit of merchants. A wholesaler in New York could pay the agency to learn whether a storekeeper in Ohio was good for his bills. The reports came in by letter from local correspondents, often lawyers, and were copied by hand into the agency's ledgers.
In 1850 the agency sent him west to open an office at St. Louis. The river town was booming, its levee lined with steamboats, and its merchants traded across the whole Mississippi valley. The new branch ran under his own name, Charles Barlow & Co. He stayed in charge until 1854, when the office was well established. Among its first correspondents was Abraham Lincoln, then a lawyer at Springfield, Illinois, who wrote reports on Illinois firms for the St. Louis office. Among the young men there was Robert G. Dun. In 1859 Dun bought out Douglass's interest and set up a management of four men: himself, Charles Barlow, Robert B. Boyd and Matthias B. Smith. To the outside world all four were partners. Among themselves, Dun alone owned the business, and the other three were paid a share of the profits. The New York office traded as Dun, Barlow & Co. Under the two young partners it grew fast and came to shape the credit of the country's business. Barlow had general charge and supervision of the work. The firm built the Dun building at 290 Broadway.
He married twice. Three children of his first marriage outlived him, among them William Barlow and Mary Eberhardt. On 15 April 1866, at Englewood, New Jersey, he married his second wife, Annie C. Halley, the daughter of Robert Halley of New York. They had four children, two of whom outlived him: E. Dudley Barlow and Elizabeth, born in 1869. The family lived in Brooklyn and kept a burial lot at Green-Wood Cemetery, lot 10486, where several other Barlows were buried between 1857 and 1873.
In April 1874 he applied for a passport to travel abroad with his wife. He swore that he was a naturalized citizen, of Brooklyn, aged forty-nine. The clerk described him: five feet eight and a half inches tall, with a high and broad forehead, brown eyes, a medium nose and mouth, a round chin, brown hair, a dark complexion and a full, oval face. He signed it "Chas Barlow".
In the summer of 1879 the family stayed at the Hotel Brighton at Brighton Beach, on the Brooklyn shore, where the guest list printed in the Brooklyn Daily Times names Mr. and Mrs. Charles Barlow, Miss Gracie D. Barlow, Miss Lizzie Barlow and Master Dudley Barlow, with a Mrs. William Halley.
Charles Barlow died suddenly at his summer house at Long Branch, on the New Jersey shore, on Sunday 25 July 1880. He had been well when he went down to the cottage the day before. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called him "one of New York's most successful business men" and "a large owner of real estate". He had worked for the agency for thirty-six years. He was buried at Green-Wood on 29 July. His obelisk there reads: "He acted well his part in life." After his death the firm took the name R. G. Dun & Co. His daughter Elizabeth, then eleven, later married the leather merchant George Hall Hoyt, and in 1919 she was buried in the same lot.
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Cite: Heirology, "Charles Barlow (1823-1880)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/charles-barlow-1823-1880-ba3e06.