Horstmann, W: One Hundred Years

Excerpt from One Hundred Years: 1816-1916

Hese are the chronicles of an old business house in the City of Philadelphia and a brief biography of the founder of that house together with some account of those who have followed in his footsteps.

The founder of the business now known as William H. Horstmann Company was William H. Horstmann, a native of Cassel in the Province of hesse-nassau in Germany. Born in the year 1785, in the days when Frederick the Great was about to close his striking career and when time had just given birth to the lusty new nation of those days, the United States of America, the boyhood of young Horstmann was marked by stirring episodes and epochal events that were momentous in the history of the human race. Individual liberty was asserting itself more and more, class privileges were being narrowed and swept away, and the old order was gradually giving place to the new. The French Revolution, too, was smouldering under the thin lava of armed sup pression and, uncontrollable, would soon break out in vio lent ferocity and atrocious disregard of the very human rights it was designed to champion. Napoleon Bona parte, also, whose youth was about to merge into the activ old cassel ity of early manhood, was soon to begin the marvellous career that enchained the attention of the whole world until his star paled and set beyond the heights of St. Helena.

It is reasonable to suppose that young Horstmann was deeply impressed by all these stirring events, and that hisviews at a later period would be founded on the experiences of his boyhood years as well as on the liberalism that was spreading then, like wildfire, over almost the whole extent of the civilized world.

In olden days many occupations required a seven years' apprenticeship to master their intricacies and some of these now termed trades were known then as professions. The ~art of the 'passementier' was one of this kind, and it, is of such importance that its name is found to have a similar root in most languages. A very old writer, Boyd, refers to an article of apparel 'passemented with gold,' and this brief reference supplies a generic meaning for the word: broadly that of ornamentation or decoration.

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