From Mansfield to Mexico: Community Investment in the Pan American Planters Company

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In early August 1916, Roy Antibus received a letter from an old friend, L. N. Loiselle, detailing the harrowing experience of Loiselle and his wife as they were “evacuated” from Vera Cruz, Mexico. According to Loiselle, “On June 20 they [Americans living in Vera Cruz] were all notified to go on shipboard [to the steamship Nebraska] for protection” where they were held for ten days.1 Loiselle and the other Americans had been instructed to take nothing with them except the clothes they were wearing, which resulted in Loiselle and his wife losing approximately $500 worth of valuables when their trunks were broken into at the large plantation house they had been living in. It was expected that war would be declared by the United States (not just to protect Loiselle and the other Americans in Mexico), but no such declaration was made and Loiselle tells Antibus that “a great amount of this pillage could have been stopped had President Wilson blockaded all the Mexican ports while the natives were fighting their differences among themselves.”2 Loiselle was writing from the front lines of the Mexican Revolution. In their report of this dramatic letter, The Mansfield News notes that Loiselle had left Mansfield in 1908 “to become manager of a plantation of 5,000 acres near Vera Cruz.”3 According to the newspaper’s editors, “all went well until the revolutions began.”4 Loiselle would only slightly disagree with this assessment, as he wrote in a 1917 affidavit for the American Consul in Mexico, “I came to Mexico in 1908 as General Manager of the Pan American Planters Co., a corporation then existing under the laws of the State of Indiana, on a ten years contract. The company gave me money to come to Mexico but failed to send any further funds. . . . I have been endeavoring to put through proceedings to sell the property which is located in a district controlled by the rebels.”5 So how did Loiselle find himself working for an Indiana company in the heart of Mexico at the height of the Mexican Revolution?

Louis Napoleon Loiselle in his 1920 passport photo
A clipping from The Mansfield News, June 24, 1910.
Loiselle’s Bakery as seen in The Mansfield News, December 17, 1899.

Louis Napoleon Loiselle was born in Montreal, Canada, on November 2, 1858, the first born of Edward and Rose Loiselle. The family immigrated to the United States in late 1862, settling in Keene, New Hampshire. According to A. J. Baughman’s 1901 Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Loiselle came to Mansfield in 1885 where he spent several years traveling as a representative of John W. Wagner’s “wholesale hardware establishment.”6 Loiselle later became associated with Crawford & Taylor, proprietors of a wholesale bakery. By January 1893, Loiselle had fully invested in the baking business and purchased the Uhlich bakery at Main and Bloom.7 It is unclear how much training Loiselle received in the actual process of baking but he was apparently so confident in his products that he took out advertisements in the top right margin of every other page of the 1894 Mansfield city directory – that equates to 75 one-line advertisements. These ads boast about “all leading grocers sell[ing] Loiselle’s bread, buns and rolls” and announce that “Loiselle leads the procession in fine bread, pies, cakes, buns, etc.”8 They also indicate that the bakery had moved into a new location at 7-9-11 North Sugar Street and had a secondary space at 159-161 N. Main. Loiselle moved quickly in the world of confections! In January 1900, he catered a celebratory dinner for the employees of The Mansfield News9 and the bakery became a favored meeting place for the Mansfield Lyceum and the trustees of the city union.10 Loiselle was even appointed to the Weights and Measures committee of the Mansfield Chamber of Commerce in 1902. It is no wonder A.J. Baughman had called Loiselle “one of the most prominent, influential and successful citizens of Mansfield, Ohio” in 1901.11

Loiselle’s bakery in the 1894 city directory.

As Loiselle’s business continued to grow and expand into a leading producer of purified milk and quality ice cream, Loiselle joined Roy Antibus and Byron Balliett in organizing “a business men’s bicycle club” of which Loiselle was elected president.12 He and Balliett also helped make Gatton’s Rocks in Bellville, Ohio, “a favorite summer resort” in the late 1890s.13 It is entirely possible that Loiselle’s circle of prominent friends at this time brought him into contact with Silas Arthur Jennings who, in his capacity as cashier of the Citizens’ National Bank in Mansfield, had traveled to Mexico in 1904 to inspect the Santa Isabel plantation operated by the Pan American Planters Company.14

“Bicycle Club,” Richland Shield and Banner, May 2, 1896, 2.

In a talk given by Jennings in March 1904, he praised the work being done on the plantation and The Mansfield News noted that “many Mansfield people” held interest in the plantation. It is unclear when Loiselle first became involved with the Pan American Planters Company, but his wife, Sara, wrote in 1919 that her husband was a stockholder in the company prior to their move to Mexico.15 Perhaps it was Loiselle’s passion for bicycles that attracted him to this venture in rubber cultivation or perhaps he was enticed by advertisements promising “a real estate investment of absolute security.”16 As Irving S. Hoffman, general manager of the Mansfield Telephone Company, said in 1903, “rubber culture is still in its infancy in Mexico but it is going to become a great industry in the near future.”17 After traveling to the Santa Isabel plantation, Hoffman was reportedly “enthusiastic over the possibilities.”18 Unlike Hoffman, Loiselle was a silent investor at best since he made no public statements related to his interest in the company prior to be called to Mexico in 1908.

The Mansfield News, October 4, 1904.
Popular Mechanics 3, no. 20 (May 16, 1903): 319.

The Pan American Planters Company was certainly not alone in establishing a presence in Mexico. In fact, a Missouri company (incorporated under the laws of South Dakota) owned land adjacent to the Santa Isabel plantation. So close were the two properties they employed the same plantation manager, James Brydon.19 The Indianapolis Journal suggests Brydon was a Mexican citizen, which makes it difficult to track his professional work beyond the few trips he made to Elwood, Indiana; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Mansfield to promote the plantations he managed.20 The India Rubber World, a leading magazine for the rubber industry, says Brydon joined both plantation ventures with “ten years’ experience in Mexico” while The Mexican Herald notes Brydon’s “long residence on the Isthmus” helped him gain “an intimate knowledge of the conditions necessary to carry to a successful issue an enterprise of this nature. He is widely and favorably known among Isthmus planters.”21 Countless advertisements soliciting investors through local newspapers in Mansfield and Elwood, Indiana, put a lot of confidence behind Brydon, promising “experienced and honest management.”22

Prospective investors in Mansfield were also likely to find it reassuring that Mansfield and Ohio were prominently represented on the advertised board of the company. Counted among the top brass were Charles Foster, former Governor of Ohio and former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and Charles Henry Voegele, manager of the confectionary company Voegele & Dinning. In the May 2, 1903 issue of Popular Mechanics, Voegele and Foster are the first two men listed under Officers and Directors. In fact, Charles Foster had served as the company’s president since its incorporation in 1900.23 His role as a former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury surely bolstered trust in the company for early investors. Although the company reportedly closed a deal in July 1905 for the erection of a sugar mill on the plantation property, things seemed to start falling apart following the death of Charles Foster in 1904.24

A lengthy and descriptive advertisement for the Voegele & Dinning Company from The Mansfield News, July 1, 1911.

We see, at least in Elwood where company reports were published far more frequently, classified ads for the sale of company stock. What these ads suggest is that at least one person in that city was trying to offload their stock and they were willing to take a 10% loss in their sale.25

Pan American Planters stock for sale, The Call-Leader, May 9, 1905.

News of the company dries up after that and in 1907, George H. Gilpatrick, one of the company’s eight directors, abandoned the company entirely in favor of running a drug store. The Elwood Daily Record cited Gilpatrick as saying “the Nomad life” of traveling to sell stock in the Santa Isabel plantation “was not to his liking and he cut out.”26 A 1904 advertisement in The Wayne County Democrat in Wooster, Ohio, indicates the company had a contract for “the development and equipment of the property for seven years, ending October 1, 1909,”27 but whether that 1909 date remained firm in the years after this advertisement was published is debatable since no other mentions of it in the press have been found. It is further debatable that the company held firm to this 1909 date if they offered Loiselle a ten-year contract in 1908.

Another Ohioan enticed by the promises of the Pan American Planters Company was Professor John C. Boyd of Wooster. In June 1904, he announced his resignation from the University of Wooster to “take up business” with the company and had even traveled to Mexico earlier that year to visit another Ohio man (J. E. Carnahan) who was president of the Tuxtepec Plantation company in Mexico City.28 Boyd’s direct involvement with the company in 1905-1906 shows the same pattern as Gilpatrick and others. According to the 1911 yearbook for the University of Wooster, Boyd returned to Ohio and took up work as a high school principal in Doylestown and school superintendent in Seville before returning to the University of Wooster in 1909.29 The Wayne County Democrat further clarifies that Boyd never permanently left Ohio and worked as a special agent in the state for Pan American Planters selling shares in the plantation.30 What prompted Boyd to abandon his sales job in that time remains a mystery.

John C. Boyd in The Wooster Voice XIX, no. 2 (September 29, 1909): 2.

As news of the company dwindled in the U.S., American companies in Mexico like the Pan American Planters Company were enjoying a robust relationship with the Mexican government. Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, had made it a priority (building off the goals of his predecessor, Benito Juarez) to court foreign investment from the United States and Europe. According to John A. Crow, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were “the golden age of Mexican economics” for the elite classes where one peso was worth 3.2 dollars.31 This led to rapid but highly unequal economic growth in Mexico and by the early 1900s, there was growing unrest within the working classes. Diaz had systematically worked to suppress worker’s unions through force of the police and army but workers still began to organize and orchestrate labor strikes. In 1906, a strike at the U.S.-owned Cananea Consolidated Copper Company resulted in 23 deaths at the hands of U.S. marshals who had crossed the border from Arizona. This strike and the violence that followed were evidence of the growing labor unrest in Mexico and the fact that Diaz’s regime did nothing in response to the U.S.’s outright violation of Mexican sovereignty only heightened tensions.32 Although we have no direct evidence, it is possible that Gilpatrick and others with the Pan American Planters Company saw this as a warning of what was to come and chose to get out of the Mexican enterprise before it was too late. That is, everyone it would seem except Louis Loiselle.

A crowd of Mexican workers during the 1906 miners’ strike in Cananea, Mexico.  Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-88749 (b&w film copy neg.)//www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b35165/.

In April 1908, The Weekly News in Mansfield reported that Loiselle and his wife had recently returned from a trip to Mexico and were “contemplating removing to that country” early in the fall.33 The particulars of what Loiselle observed on this trip to Mexico were not disclosed in the press at that time but any uneasiness he may have had did not deter him from “dispos[ing] of all his interests and holdings in the Loiselle Bread & Milk Co.” and resigning as the company’s treasurer and general manager in August 1908.34 He was apparently all in on the Santa Isabel plantation and the Loiselles sailed for Vera Cruz in early October.35 The pair were visited at Christmastime the following year by Loiselle’s old friend Roy Antibus who, according to The Mansfield News, viewed the Loiselle “pineapple plantation” as “quite an enterprise and liable to develop into a big thing.” The paper additionally reported that Antibus saw “the Mansfield people’s rubber plantation” while in the country.36 Loiselle’s 1917 account indicates that he was funding the plantation’s daily operations at this point out of his own pocket, allowing him to keep up appearances for visitors like Antibus, but in 1911, Loiselle “started court proceedings to recover the money due me.”37 He “obtained a judgment against myself as agent in 1914” and began almost desperately trying to sell the property.38 As he wrote to friend B. J. Balliett in May 1914, he and his wife fled the plantation “at the first sign of outbreak” but they had no intention of returning to the United States “unless compelled to do so” because they still had business interests in the country.39 According to Loiselle’s letter, the Mexican authorities “wished us to leave as they could not give us protection from the hoodlums they feared, in reality, bandits who have become quite numerous through our section.”40 Ironically, when Loiselle was still fighting for the money owed to him and the fighting was still raging in Mexico, The Mansfield News reported that the “big plantation” Loiselle was managing “has not suffered to any extent during the revolution in that country.”41 We know that Loiselle and his wife had lost property when the plantation was looted in 1916 which The Mansfield News had reported a year before they declared everything was fine, but, then again, they admitted in a 1914 article that they were slightly basing their judgment of the crisis in Mexico on the fact Loiselle, a steady subscriber of the newspaper, “has never sent any notice to have [his address in Mexico] changed.”42

At the time of Loiselle’s move down to Mexico in 1908, Porfirio Diaz, who had been in power for close to thirty years, indicated to an American journalist that he was planning to retire. In Diaz’s words, Mexico was ready for democracy and a true presidential election to determine his successor.43 The promise of Diaz’s retirement was shortlived as was a peaceful transition of power but Diaz wanted to secure U.S. support for his seventh run as Mexican president. In October 1909, he invited U.S. President Willaim Howard Taft to an unprecedented meeting in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Taft agreed to the meeting, according to historians Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler, specifically to protect the billions of dollars in American capital invested in Mexican industry.44 At the time, U.S. businesses controlled close to “90 percent of Mexico’s mineral resources, its national railroad, its oil industry, and, increasingly, its land.”45 As the Mexican election of 1910 approached, Diaz was challenged by Francisco I. Madero.

William Howard Taft and Porfirio Diaz in the Ciudad Juarez Customs House, October 10, 1909. Available through the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91789772.    

Historian Friedrich Katz claims that although Diaz’s regime was growing increasingly unpopular with Mexican civilians, “there was no foreboding in 1910 that a revolution was about to break out.”46 That is until Diaz ordered Madero to be jailed and Madero called for an armed uprising against him. Diaz was forced to resign in May 1911 and fled to Spain. Despite Diaz’s ousting as president, not everyone supported the newly elected Madero and he faced armed opposition from Emiliano Zapata, leader of the Liberation Army of the South whose forces had defeated the Federal Army in May 1911 leading to Diaz’s resignation. Madero and his vice president, Pino Suarez, were forced to resign in early 1913 following a coup d’etat staged by military leaders from the former Diaz regime and a new president, Victoriano Huerta, assumed control of the country. Huerta swiftly orchestrated the assassination of Madero and Suarez, which ingnited a new fight led by Venustiana Carranza. Huerta was ousted in July 1914, but the bloody fighting continued with Carranza on one side and Francisco “Pancho” Villa on the other.47 In his 1916 letter to Roy Antibus, Loiselle called Carranza “a worse bandit than Villa.”48 According to Loiselle, “Carranza took all the silver money from the people and compelled them to accept paper money which he thinks will always be worthless. . . . After Carranza had taken the money from the people, Villa took the land from them.”49 In Loiselle’s view, the situation in Mexico was lose-lose for the Mexican people. He, on the other hand, had secured a good job as a street commissioner during the American occupation of Vera Cruz but the money to pay Americans soon dried up.50 Carranza became president of Mexico in 1917 and served until the end of the revolution in 1920.

Loiselle and his wife remained in Mexico until 1925.51 According to Sara Loiselle’s 1919 passport application, she and her husband had lived in Vera Cruz until 1918 and then moved to Tampico where he had secured work with the Standard Oil Company.52 Much like G.H. Gilpatrick, Loiselle went into the drug store business upon his return to the United States. By 1932, he was operating the Loiselle drug store at 16 North Diamond Street,53 but they sold the business in early 1937 as Loiselle was approaching 78 years old and it became Kerr’s Medicine Store.54

An advertisement for Kerr’s Medicine Store, formerly, Loiselle’s, The Mansfield News-Journal, May 15, 1937, 2.

Loiselle passed away on June 24, 1939, at the age of 80. His obituary in the Mansfield News Journal states he “operated the Loiselle Bread and Milk company until his retirement some years ago.”55 No mention is made of the seventeen years he and his wife spent in Mexico during the Revolution.

The story of Mansfield and the Pan American Planters Company leaves several open questions: What happened to James Brydon that left an opening at the plantation for Loiselle? How and why was Loiselle chosen to manage the plantation? Why did the company largely disappear from the press and public record after 1907? I’m sure there are plenty of other mysteries to be found in the Sherman Room collections. Stay tuned to our blog for future posts and updates!

  1. “Intervention Would Please,” The Mansfield News, August 1, 1916, 4. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎
  4. Ibid. ↩︎
  5. “U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925 for Louis N. Loiselle, Boxes 1-40, 20, 7350-7749,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  6. A.J. Baughman, ed., A Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Ohio (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co. 1901): 194. ↩︎
  7. “Twenty Years Ago Today,” The Mansfield News, January 23, 1913, 6. ↩︎
  8. Mansfield City Directory, 1894 (Akron: The Burch Directory Co. 1893). ↩︎
  9. “News Family at Home,” The Mansfield News, January 5, 1900, 4. ↩︎
  10. “Lyceum Entertained,” The Mansfield News, January 25, 1900, 4 and “C.E. Notes,” The Mansfield News, May 12, 1900, 4. ↩︎
  11. A.J. Baughman, ed., A Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Ohio (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co. 1901): 194. ↩︎
  12. “Bicycle Club,” Richland Shield and Banner, May 2, 1896, 2. ↩︎
  13. A. J. Baughman, “Gatton’s Rocks,” Bellville Messenger, May 30, 1902, 1. According to the Butler Enterprise, Loiselle was the primary investor at Gatton’s Rocks, writing, “L. N. Loiselle of Mansfield has leased some ground at ‘Gatton’s Rocks’ south east of Bellville, and has erected three summer cottages. Next season he expects to erect several more cottages, for other prominent Mansfield people to occupy.” (Butler Enterprise, September 21, 1900, 7). ↩︎
  14. Both Antibus and Jennings’ wives were involved with the First Congregational Church and were elected to the group’s floral committee in 1903. See “Annual Business Meeting,” The Mansfield News, December 12, 1903, 7. ↩︎
  15. “Sara Elizabeth Loiselle Department Passport Application #67853 with Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  16. “Pan American Planters Company,” The Mansfield News, September 21, 1904, 3. ↩︎
  17. “A Fortune in Rubber,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, June 24, 1903, 4. ↩︎
  18. Ibid. ↩︎
  19. “Rubber Planting and Exploitation,” The India Rubber World, April 1, 1903, 225. The Mexican Herald further notes that a number of large tracts of land in the “immediate neighborhood” of the Santa Isabel plantation had recently been purchased by Americans. See The Mexican Herald, January 1, 1903, 9. ↩︎
  20. “Meeting of Plantation Shareholders,” The Indianapolis Journal, October 3, 1903, 2. ↩︎
  21. “American Rubber Planting Companies,” The India Rubber World, March 1, 1903, 193; The Mexican Herald, January 1, 1903, 9. ↩︎
  22. “A Demonstrated Success,” The Mansfield News, October 6, 1904, 5. ↩︎
  23. See The Elwood Daily Record, November 7, 1901, 4. ↩︎
  24. “Sugar Mill,” The Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), July 25, 1905, 1; The India Rubber World, February 1, 1904, 177. Following Foster’s death, Charles Voegele became the company’s president. See Audit Company of New York, Directory of Directors in the City of Chicago 1906 (Chicago: Audit Company of New York, 1906): 697. ↩︎
  25. The Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), May 9, 1905, 8. ↩︎
  26. “Purchased a Drug Store,” The Elwood Daily Record, August 12, 1907, 5. He was still listed as a director of the company by the Odon Journal in 1908 in a small mention about a company meeting in Indianapolis. See Odon Journal (Odon, IN), August 3, 1908, 2. ↩︎
  27. Wayne County Democrat (Wooster, OH), September 14, 1904, 2. ↩︎
  28. “Ohio Condensations,” The Mansfield News, June 3, 1904, 10; “Tuxtepec Plantation,” The Mexican Herald, March 3, 1904, 8. ↩︎
  29. Index Editors, “Index 1911” (University of Wooster), page 22, https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=index1870-1920. ↩︎
  30. Wayne County Democrat, June 22, 1904, 3. ↩︎
  31. John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). ↩︎
  32. Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1992): 144. ↩︎
  33. “Going to Mexico,” The Weekly News (Mansfield. OH), April 16, 1908, 12. ↩︎
  34. “Loiselle,” Richland Shield and Banner, August 6, 1908, 3. ↩︎
  35. The Mansfield News, October 5, 1908, 3. ↩︎
  36. “A Mansfield Man in the Tropics,” The Mansfield News, April 16, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  37. “U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925 for Louis N. Loiselle, Boxes 1-40, 20, 7350-7749,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  38. Ibid. ↩︎
  39. “Mansfield People Safe in Vera Cruz,” The Mansfield News, May 14, 1914, 17. ↩︎
  40. Ibid. ↩︎
  41. “Where They Are Now,” The Mansfield News, March 6, 1917, 14. ↩︎
  42. “Patriotism Runs High in Mansfield,” The Mansfield News, April 24, 1914, 9. ↩︎
  43. James Creelman, “Interview with President Porfirio Diaz,” Pearson’s Magazine XIX, No. 3 (1908), https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-3-mexico/primary-documents-with-accompanying-discussion-questions/document-4-president-diaz-hero-of-the-americas-by-james-creelman-1908-interview-with-president-porfirio-diaz/. ↩︎
  44. Charles H. Harris, III and Louis R. Sadler, The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 2. ↩︎
  45. Joshua Zeitz, “The Last Time the U.S. Invaded Mexico,” Politico Magazine, February 4, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/the-last-time-the-us-invaded-mexico-214738/. ↩︎
  46. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 3. ↩︎
  47. “Mexican Revolution,” Wikipedia, last updated February 22, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution. ↩︎
  48. “Intervention Would Please,” The Mansfield News, August 1, 1916, 4. ↩︎
  49. Ibid. ↩︎
  50. Ibid. ↩︎
  51. “Returned to City from Tampico, Mex.,” The Mansfield News, October 9, 1925, 20. ↩︎
  52. “Sara Elizabeth Loiselle Department Passport Application #67853 with Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  53. “Loot Weighing Machine,” The Mansfield News, July 11, 1932, 14. ↩︎
  54. The Mansfield News-Journal, May 15, 1937, 2. ↩︎
  55. “Louis Loiselle Dies at Age 80,” Mansfield News-Journal, June 26, 1939, 9. ↩︎

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