Graybar
American electronics distribution company
Graybar Electric Company, Inc. is an American wholesale electrical, communications and data networking products distribution business, which also supplies related supply-chain management and logistics services. The company is based in Clayton, Missouri and is an employee-owned corporation.
Graybar was incorporated on December 11, 1925, as the successor company of the general electric supply business of the Western Electric Company, which was founded in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Elisha Gray and Enos M. Barton. The separation of product lines was intended to provide a separate identity from the telephone supply function of Western Electric to the Bell System, given its importance as the largest merchandiser of electrical apparatus and related equipment in the world in the 1920s.
History
Early history
During the post–Civil War Reconstruction Era, entrepreneur Enos M. Barton (who had served as a telegrapher during the war) worked for Western Union in Rochester, New York. During this period, Barton met George Shawk, the foreman of the company's Cleveland, Ohio shop. When that shop was closed down, Shawk bought some of the equipment and went into business for himself, making various kinds of electrical and other apparatus, including inventor's models. While on a trip to Rochester, he and Barton, who was then 26, agreed to go into partnership.
To raise the $400 her son needed for his share of the business venture, Barton's widowed mother mortgaged her home.
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This entry incorporates text from “Graybar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.