A SYLVESTER STEPHEN MARVIN. BOUT the earliest enterprise of Mr. Sylvester Stephen Marvin was given the writer in confidence by his father. He was a small boy, attending school. One morning the sidewalk in front of the Marvin home was carpeted with snow, and the elder Marvin concluded an agreement with Sylvester to remove the snow before school opened, the price to be 20 cents. Returning at noon, Father Marvin found that not a sidewalk in the block, six houses, held a flake of snow. Sylvester had hastily contracted with the women to clean all the sidewalks in that block on the terms proposed by his father. He was, of course, highly commended. But a neighbor called the elder Marvin aside and told him Sylvester had farmed out the contract to school chums at 10 cents a sidewalk, and without turning a shovel, cleaned up 60 cents, and trooped off on time to school, with the whole outfit. Mr. Marvin displayed the same business traits as collector on a Missouri river ferry boat; as a soldier during the Civil War, and at its close. He was the principal mover in the Pittsburgh Exposition Society, giving to the city an organization in which there were to be no dividends, but which provided an annual exhibition, the only one in the United States, and which provided also for the admission, free, of all school children. The World's War caused the first break in the exhibitions. Mr. Marvin is the Edison of manufacturing, and after having established one of the biggest baking enterprises in America, assisted in the organization of the National Biscuit Company. And when he should have retired to domestic life, he founded the Pennsylvania Chocolate Company, in Pittsburgh, the largest works west of the Allegheny Mountains, and just now being greatly enlarged. Personal attention is given daily to his manufacturing, banking and other interests, yet all through life he has had time to assist in establishing public institutions, such as the school for the education of the blind in Bellefield; the endowment of the Western Theological Seminary; the fund for pensioning veteran ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and many other worthy charitable, benevolent and religious enterprises. Thomas Edison has nothing on our enterprising townsman, S. S. Marvin, whose leisure hours are spent in a charming home-"Meri-mont," at Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia. Notwithstanding Mr. Marvin is approaching the eightieth zone of life, at this writing he is personally supervising the erection and installation, in his old home town, of an addition to the chocolate works, which will double its production, thus adding this industry to Pittsburgh's already colossal pyramid of industries. Mr. Marvin made the address at the laying of the corner stone of the Chamber of Commerce building, being the only surviving charter member, and his life-size painting by Chase will ultimately hang in the Carnegie Art Gallery, Pittsburgh. So much has been said during the World War of the work of the Y. M. C. A., and especially of the wonderful work of the Y. M. C. A. of Pittsburgh, that we must not overlook the day of beginnings, or the day of small things. The subject of this sketch is really entitled to the honor of subscribing the first thousand dollars for the first new building for the Y. M. C. A. in Pitts |