Private company
Boston Fruit Company
American company (1885–1899)
The Boston Fruit Company (1885–1899) was a fruit production and import business based in the port of Boston, Massachusetts. Andrew W. Preston and nine others established the firm to ship bananas and other fruit from the West Indies to north-eastern America. At the time, the banana was "considered a rare and delicious treat" in the United States.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0
Last updated Oct 21, 2026.
Overview
- HeadquartersBoston1
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The Boston Fruit Company (1885–1899) was a fruit production and import business based in the port of Boston, Massachusetts. Andrew W. Preston and nine others established the firm to ship bananas and other fruit from the West Indies to north-eastern America. At the time, the banana was "considered a rare and delicious treat" in the United States. The major challenge for all banana importers was to get the highly perishable fruit to the American market before it spoiled." Ship captain Lorenzo Dow Baker served as president of the company and manager of the tropical division. By 1895 "the corporation own[ed] nearly 40,000 acres, included in 35 plantations, and deep-water frontage [in Jamaica] in the harbors of Port Antonio and Port Morant. They owned their own lines of steamships, which they operated between those ports and Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Besides carrying their own fruits, they carried some outside freight, and afford passenger accommodations for many tourists visiting the West-India Islands."2
Timeline
Links
- WikipediaBoston Fruit Company
- More imagesWikimedia Commons
- WikidataQ4947914
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataBoston Fruit Company on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaBoston Fruit Company on Wikipedia
- 3Wikimedia CommonsBoston Fruit Company photo by Popular Science Monthly, Public domain