LEGENDARY COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 12-9-17

The Country House/Manhattan Shirt Factory

Shortly after building his own house and showcasing his talents, my grandfather began to establish himself as someone who could build a fine building. By 1929, he was finished with residential construction and formed a company that employed about 10 men. This figure surged occasionally if the size of the job warranted hiring extra men. He had very definite ideas about just how things were to be done and this was never more in evidence than in the following chain of events.

Only once did he attempt to grow large enough to have two crews and attempt to undertake the construction of two buildings at once. One of the two new projects was the Manhattan Shirt Factory on East Main Street in Salisbury. This is now the home of The Country House and is a rather sizable structure.

He started out on this job early one Friday morning. The footer had been put down and construction of the wall was ready to begin. Once he had given his foreman his instructions, he proceeded on to the second job site. Having worked on this all morning and seeing things were progressing as he wished; he went home for lunch and afterwards went back to the Manhattan building.

At this point things went steadily downhill. Apparently the foreman had decided on his own to make a change in the way the wall was constructed. My grandfather asked why he had done this and the foreman said that he thought it should be done differently than the way my grandfather had instructed him. At this juncture my grandfather told him that he didn’t pay him to think – just to do what he was told. One word led to another and my grandfather ended up by firing him and paying him off for the week. Some of the other workers took sides with the foreman and he repeated the scenario of firing the dissenters and paying them off – in cash out of his pocket, all the while kicking down the offending wall. Like some kind of wildfire, the remaining men saw that this was the opportunity to get off work early, get their money, spend a couple of hours in the bar, and still be home on time. The pervasive thought was that since there were a limited number of qualified men in the construction field, he would have to hire them back on Monday morning. He got down to one man who hadn’t said a word. My grandfather asked him, “How about you?”. To which the man replied, “You’s de boss, Capt. Albert”. At that, my grandfather said he’d see him Monday morning.

Now he was left with quite a dilemma. But with the same determination that had gotten him into this situation, he set out to solve it. He told me that he spent the next 48 hours going to every outlying community around Salisbury and finally finding enough men to finish the job. It should be pointed out here that he had fired 63 out of 64 men that worked for him and paid every one of them a week’s wages out of his pocket. Some of the 63 straggled back to the job on Monday morning, but he never flinched and finished the job without hiring any of them back. He did say that he used some of them on later jobs, but not on the Manhattan Shirt Factory.