Lyon Block

My Great Great Grandfather owned a large printing concern in Albany, New York, The J. B. Lyon Company — that's a picture of the building it occupied, taken in early 1911. His company was regularly awarded very lucrative contracts to print materials for the State of New York. My Grandmother's house was full of old books, though most were hidden behind glass cabinets, or in the attic, never disturbed. I remember the copper printing plate for a family bookplate that sat on a shelf near the fireplace.

I was reminded of this while browsing through a book of old photographs. I know a bit about my family history, but there are missing pieces. Some questions were never asked, some I never knew to ask.

It's been frustratingly difficult to find information on The J. B. Lyon Company, even with a fine-tuned Google search — the company printed hundreds, even thousands of books through the years (the latest I was able to find mention of was in 1961), that most of the results are no more than references to those various books, in various collections. But I do know that the company was started in 1876 in a small shop on State street, in Albany, incorporated in 1899. In 1892 (when the company suffered heavy losses from a fire), the firm employed about 180 men — by 1900, more than 1,000 were working in two printing plants.

And there have been scraps of information, here and there. Some are hidden in books that are only available in fragments — others are contemporary accounts that lack necessary context. Have you ever heard of the "Printing Octopus"?

I'm still puzzling that reference out (it's from a 1901 edition of The Albany Law Journal), but there have been hints that my Great Great Grandfather's company was often awarded contract work under, shall we say, questionable circumstances. According to a 1915 New York Times article (covering the trial proceedings of a libel lawsuit brought against former President Theodore Roosevelt by former Republican State Chairman William Barnes) "...the J.B. Lyon Printing Company of Albany...obtained nearly $8,000,000 of State printing contracts during the last fifteen years, although several other printing concerns got the contracts first by bidding lower than the Lyon concern. The Lyon Company generally put in a bid at a high figure and when the contract went somewhere else, usually to what was practically a dummy concern, so it was made to appear, it was turned over to the Lyons company."

Another story (this one from 1914) alleges that former Governor Martin Henry Glynn, while State Controller, used public funds to surreptitiously purchase land owned by J. B. Lyon (upon which he built a large estate), and that there was no legal record of the transaction. "[Glynn] was poking the public's money into the bank and his friend Lyon was getting it out through an intermediary with never a penny of security. I can find no deed on record showing that Glynn ever paid Lyon anything for that part of the Lyon estate on which his beautiful home is situated — opposite the Lyon home."

The J. B. Lyon Company was sold in 1916, though the company continued to carry his name — I haven't been able to sort out to whom, or why. And there are so many questions: according to my Great Grandfather's obituary, J. B. Lyon Jr. was "associated" with his Father's firm before it was sold (he would have been in his mid-twenties). Did my Great Grandfather chose not to follow in his Father's business? Did he even have that opportunity? Could the details of J. B. Lyon's behind-the-scenes shenanigans, now brought before the public's attention, have been part of the motivation for the sale?

There have also been hints of his involvement among Albany's political machinery, not that this comes as any surprise. At least, that's the impression I get from the scraps of information I've been able to piece together. In this story published in 1905 (again, from the New York Times), "Mr Stock reports that he was in the Hoffman House on Thursday night, and that while there he met John T. Cronin, Dr. J.H. Byrne, James B. Lyon, and Marcus Mayer, who, he said, told him that although they had had no meeting, they intended to inform the newspapers that they had. The result of the meeting that did not take place, he said, was a story that the Greater New York Democracy had indorsed [sic] the Municipal Ownership League's candidates." Apparently, once this covert meeting (or non-meeting, as the case may be) was discovered, the Greater New York Democracy pulled its' support for a Hearst-sponsored candidate for Mayor, in favor of the incumbent. Hearst owned the largest daily newspaper in the Albany area, and I imagine he was heavily involved in local politics.

(I'm not really sure what it all means, either, but I thought it was an interesting anecdote.)

My Great Great Grandfather died in 1929, at age 70. His son, my Great Grandfather died some ten years later, at age 48.