London, sold, and reshipped, and was in Springfield at eight cents in the pound less than Musgrave offered."[1]
It was a great joke and it made American woolen men smile.
This English venture was a death-blow to the Perkins and Brown wool business. It was not entirely wound up until four years later, but in 1849 Brown removed his family from Springfield up to the silent forests of the farthest Adirondacks, where the great vision of his life unfolded itself. It was, however, not easy for him to extricate himself from the web wound about him. Two currents set for his complete undoing: the wool-growers whom he had over-advanced and who did not deliver the promised wool; and certain manufacturers to whom the firm had contracted to deliver this wool which they could not get. Claims and damages to the amount of $40,000 appeared and some of these got into court; while, on the other hand, the scattered and defaulting wool-growers were scarcely worth suing by the firm. Long drawn-out legal battles ensued, intensely distasteful to Brown's straightforward nature and seemingly endless. Collections and sales continued hard and slow and Perkins began to get restless. John Brown sighed for the older and simpler life of his young manhood with its love and dreams: "I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me
- ↑ E. C. Leonard, in Sanborn, pp. 67–68.
