Henry Ulen, the small town boy with a worldwide impact.
You may not have heard of Henry C. Ulen, who briefly had a public works business in Indianapolis. But the people of Greece, Poland and Bolivia have.
You may not have heard of Henry C. Ulen, who briefly had a public works business in Indianapolis. But the people of Greece, Poland and Bolivia have.
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| Henry Ulen's home in Ulen, Indiana |
Ulen was born in Boone County, Indiana,
in 1871. His father was a storekeeper in Lebanon. Young Henry exhibited a
disdain for standard education, a strong independence and a flair for making
his wishes to visit far flung places come true. He became known in Lebanon as a
boy who skipped school and jumped trains. His flair for adventure was part of
his early mystic; a part that didn’t particularly impress the mothers of
Lebanon.
When it became clear that transporting
the necessary machinery to the project areas would be nearly impossible
overland, Ulen purchased an American sailing schooner, the Alice M. Colburn, to transport the machinery to South America. Nothing
stopped can-do Henry Ulen.
In 1921 Ulen Contracting signed an
agreement with the Bolivian government to construct a railroad, including
stations and terminals through the country. The project had an expected
completion date in 1927 and a cost of $10 million dollars. With his feet wet in
this large project, in 1922 Ulen organized Ulen and Co. in New York City with
authorized capital of $5 million. He retained ownership of Ulen Contracting Co.
and was president of both companies. He was also vice president of the
Shandaken Tunnel Corp of New York. Ulen Contracting Corp. was in the process of
constructing the Shandaken Tunnel, the longest tunnel in the world at the time,
through the Catskill Mountains, to provide drinking water to New York City.
In
1922, a member of the Fortnightly Club in Lebanon, Indiana, decided to contact
Henry Ulen in New York because Ulen had expressed interest in building a golf
club in past discussions when he was in his hometown. Ulen agreed to build a
$50,000 clubhouse once the site for the course was determined. He also agreed
to become a member of the club’s first board of directors. In 1923, Henry Ulen
and his wife bought a house on East Washington Street in Lebanon and moved, at
least part time, back to their home state.
Meanwhile,
Henry Ulen’s companies were gaining work across the globe. Negotiations often
required Henry and Mary Ulen to travel to far parts of the world to secure
contracts and check on Ulen and Co.’s progress, which given the nature of the
work and the political unrest in some parts of the world, did not always
progress smoothly. In 1924, Ulen began work on water and sewer projects in ten
Polish cities. Arthur W. DuBois
signed on as General Manager of Ulen and Co.’s work in Poland. In a pattern that would become the norm for
many upper-level employees, Dubois went to Poland to set up
housekeeping and begin work and then his family sailed to Europe – in style--
to meet him.
DuBois's
son, Bill, recalled in a book about his father written decades later that
their ship was the President Roosevelt.
“Our
cabin was huge and mother had a big steamer trunk,” he remembered. In Poland,
the family had a maid, a gardener and a groom for their horses. Ulen took care
of his important employees.
A
chaotic political situation led to fighting in the streets of several Polish
cities, including the one where Ulen had its office. Bill DuBois personal
secretary, who had traveled with his family from America, was shot and killed
by a sniper’s bullet in the Ulen offices. DuBois hid out in his office for three
days until things settled down.
Setbacks
and tragedies did not slow the steady flow or Ulen and Co. projects. Nor did
they long hinder progress on the country club and golf course in Lebanon.
Although the Country Club building construction cost twice what Henry Ulen had
pledged toward it, he covered the inflated cost and the club opened in 1924 --
the same year that Bill DuBois was building waterworks across Poland. The
country club hosted U. S. Senator Samuel Ralston, who was at the time
favored as the next presidential candidate, at an early dinner with Henry Ulen as the toastmaster
of the event.
In
1928 Ulen & Co. landed a huge project in Persia to construct 800 miles of
railroad from the capital of Teheran to the Persian Gulf. Bill DuBois became
General Manager for the project. Ulen ultimately encountered
problems with the Reza Shah authoritarian government and had to leave the
project, seeking, but not receiving, help from the United States State
Department to recover the money owed the team for the construction of the
southern leg of the railroad.
By
this time Henry Ulen had decided to move his company’s headquarters to the tiny
town of Lebanon from New York City. The new country club may not have been
enough incentive to make his top executives and board of directors happy about
the move, so Henry Ulen sweetened the deal.
He began to build them a town full of high-end homes right next to the
country club to help with persuasion. By 1928 several of his executives and a
handful of Lebanon’s upper-crust business community had constructed a number of
homes on land that Ulen had purchased.
By 1929, the year that the Town of Ulen
incorporated, Ulen Co. had completed contracts totaling one billion
dollars in the 30 years that Henry Ulen had been in business. Principal
stockholders in the firm were American International Corporation, organized in
1915; Field, Globe and Company (a banking concern run by Marshall Field (son
of the Marshall Field retail magnate)); Stone and Webster, one of the largest
engineering contracting companies in the world; and Ulen Contracting Corp.
Ulen and Co. completed the
construction of the all marble Marathon Dam in Athens, Greece, and its men were
working on railroads and water and sewer facilities in Bogota, Columbia in 1929.
The firm acted as agents of the municipality involved on a fee basis to
find funding through bonds and securities, which Ulen invested in. Ulen
neighbor, Charles Jones, remarked that in his later years Henry Ulen had
leather satchels full of “millions of dollars” in the bonds that ultimately
failed on some of these project, but at the time Ulen was pioneering a method
of financing that would become a standard for public projects across the world.
In 1931 an Indiana
magazine reported that Ulen and Co. was the “largest engineering and
contracting corporation in the world” with millions of dollars in contracts
each year. Ulen’s work had taken him around the globe 30 or more times an
article in an Indiana magazine noted, which must surely have seemed exotic and extravagant to Hoosiers
caught up in the midst of the Great Depression. At the time the article was
written Ulen and Co. was constructing a 90-mile canal for irrigation and
hydropower in Texas.
As
the financial times remained hard, Ulen personally took on the mission of
keeping Ulen Country Club in the black. In 1933 when loss of membership and
finances forced the club to dissolve and reorganize, Ulen provided cash
infusion by underwriting newly issued shares of stock in the club, almost
single-handedly meeting the club’s expenses through 1938.
When
the U. S. entered World War II, Henry Ulen was hoping for an opportunity for
rebuilding and the potential for millions of dollars in new contracts that
could rise out of the destruction at war’s end. But by the time the war ended,
Ulen was no longer a major player in construction projects. An article in the Indianapolis Star referred to Henry
Ulen’s work in the past tense. Ulen and Co. had “financed, planned and
constructed big projects…No job was
too big.” The company was still in business, but by 1950, the Indianapolis News noted that Ulen “no
longer undertakes construction work.”
The
demise of Ulen and Co., probably as a merger into a larger firm, took place
in what seems to be a historical vacuum. No record of the end of the company
has been found, although there is some indication that the American
International Corporation, which had partnered with Ulen beginning at least as
early as 1922, purchased the company.
The
end of Henry C. Ulen is, on the other hand, well documented. Newspapers far and
wide published Ulen’s obituary in 1963, including the Nevada State Journal, Montana Standard, and the Kittaning,
Pennsylvania, Simpson’s Leader-Times. Henry C. Ulen passed from the world on May 16,
1963. He was 92. His legacy was worldwide, including water and sewer works,
dams, and railroads from South America to Iran, numerous philanthropic gifts,
and the still swanky town, country club and golf course named for him. He is
buried next to his wife, Mary, in Oak Hill Cemetery, Lebanon, Indiana.
