46 | Business World Magazine |
June 2013
forts to colonize America, and they may have
been the most prolific in terms of the prog-
eny produced by any of those early settlers.
They had ten children who went on to raise
their own respective families. Generations
later led to a descendent Amanda Alden
who married Kendrick E. Morgan. Aman-
da’s second cousin was John Alden Spoor
who was the General Manager of the Wag-
ner Palace Car Company in St. Louis – the
last competitor to Pullman in the railroad
sleeping car business. In 1887, Spoor and
some friends bought a laundry in St. Louis,
Missouri to clean the linens for Wagner Pal-
ace; Spoor was the first President. In 1888,
Spoor invited Morgan to move to St. Louis
with Amanda and run the business. Morgan
soon became President. Indicative of the era,
Morgan deployed horse and buggy teams to
collect and deliver laundry it cleaned for the
Wagner Palace sleeping cars. In 1899, the
Pullman sleeping car company merged with
