Commercial war is hell and at the close of the 19th century, Brooklyn was the central battleground in an “epoch� bout: the Sugar War.

“The Arbuckles have declared war in earnest on the sugar trust and from all appearances it will be a fight to the bitter end,� reported the Eagle in 1897.

The Sugar Trust, a deceptively benign sounding designation, was also known as the American Sugar Refining Company, and it controlled 98 percent of the market at the height of its domination. But this was not a position it would be able to hold onto as federal regulations, or “trustbusting,� outlawed such configurations.

The Sugar Trust had already been disbanded once in 1891, but sugar baron Henry O. Havemeyer reorganized his trust around a new acquisition, the American Sugar Refinery of New Jersey. It wasn’t until 1922, after the trust renamed itself Domino Sugar, that the federal government finally slaked the giant’s ability to monopolize the market. But before its run-in with the federal government, the Trust had to contend with the Arbuckle Brothers.

Arbuckle, a coffee outfit whose best seller, the Ariosa coffee bean, was coated in sugar, was deemed a “worthy foe� and “Jack the giant killer,� and even now is remembered by economists as some sort of laissez-faire folk hero for attacking the trust using the tools of the market rather than government regulation.

In 1805, William and Frederick C. Havemeyer started a refinery on Van Dam Street in Manhattan, a business they would move with the opportunities that were opening up in a cheap and abundant Brooklyn in 1857, when they founded Havemeyer, Townsend, and Co. on South Third Street in Williamsburg.

In 1883, Havemeyer built a new refining facility, “the largest of the kind on the face of the globe� according to an Eagle report at the time. A complex bounded by South Second and South Sixth streets and First Street and the East River, Havemeyer’s colossal refinery was capable of producing one million pounds of sugar per day.

Twelve years earlier, in 1871, John and Charles Arbuckle expanded their coffee mills business, Arbuckle Brothers Company, from Ohio to Brooklyn on John and Jay Streets. The Arbuckles’ innovation was that they packaged their coffee in individually wrapped portions, something like the bricks we are accustomed to today, so that consumers could rely on a consistency that was lacking from the bulk stores at the markets. They also commissioned an engineer to invent a packaging machine that could fill, weigh, seal and label their coffee, thus reducing the cost of production.

In 1887, under the helm of Henry O. Havemeyer most of the refineries of Brooklyn were consolidated into the Sugar Refineries Company (a.k.a. the Sugar Trust) intended to control the price of sugar and labor. Arbuckle Brothers was the trust’s biggest customer, and trouble began when Arbuckle asked for a lower price on virtue of their volume of business, and the trust refused. So, in 1897, Arbuckle decided to go into the sugar business for themselves, and set about building a refinery right next to their coffee mills in Brooklyn, while also taking from the trust “one of its most valued superintendents, Joseph Stillman.�

In response to this renegade effort, “the trust promptly went into the coffee business on a large scale,� by buying the majority of shares of the Woolson Spice company of Toledo, Arbuckle’s biggest competitor. In doing so, the Trust hoped to artificially drive down the price of coffee, thus curtailing their enemy’s profits. They successfully drove the price of coffee from 6 cents to 2 1/2 cents per pound.

“Not to be outdone, representatives of the Arbuckles stepped in and bought the outstanding shares of the Woolson Spice Company … as minority share holders … filed an injunction restraining the company from running at a loss, as it must do when it is selling coffee at a rate lower than it can.�

For years the two companies tried to drive down prices and shake eachother out, losing millions of dollars in the process. Eventually, Havemeyer backed out of the coffee business, but Arbuckle continued to sell both coffee and sugar.

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