Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1879. Eddy Street to Wall Street

Providence Journal reporter Charles H. Dow in 1879 tried to add up the net worth of all the investors on the train to Colorado.

"I got as far as $90,000,000 and then gave it up," Dow wrote in a Journal story. He joked, "It is important to state that I did not include my own resources in this amount."

Charles Dow had started work at The Providence Journal in 1877, after working at the Springfield Republican and the Providence Evening Press. He was known for historical and financial writing, having produced journalism projects on the history of Newport and of steamship travel between Providence and New York.

In 1879, Dow accepted an assignment to accompany potential investors to Leadville, Colo., to report on a silver mine boom.

The first of Dow's "Leadville Letters" was published June 10, 1879, and described the railroad trip to Denver and his first views of the Rocky Mountains.

"Pike's Peak came first out of the hazy distance and then followed peak after peak until the whole magnificence of the range was in sight. The colors changed in the shadows from blue to brown and then to black, while the peaks, standing far up among the clouds, glistened with the sunlight falling on the snow."

Dow's meticulous dispatches from Leadville described the town, the mining and refining operations, the geology, and the legal conflicts over mining rights. His interest in business finance ran through his reporting:

"The increase in the number of smelters from three to seventeen in a single half year shows the degree of confidence felt in the mines. Capital is the most sensitive of all things. It costs from $30,000 to $150,000 to put up a smelter. Men do not build them where there is no mineral, and the fact that men have been found to build seventeen . . . is the strongest evidence as to the extent and richness of the Leadville mines."

Charles H. Dow

Dow left The Journal soon after his Leadville Letters were published, and worked briefly for a news agency in New York. In 1882, he started a financial reporting newsletter on Wall Street with Edward D. Jones. Jones was a Brown University dropout and former employee of the Providence Evening Press, according to a Providence Journal corporate history published in 1981.

Those newsletters published by Dow and Jones evolved in 1889 into a financial newspaper, which is still known by its original name: The Wall Street Journal.

Charles Dow also invented a new way to judge the overall performance of stocks by combining the performance of several major companies into an average. Now, more than a century after Dow's death in 1902, investors still follow the workings of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.