Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Christmas Eve 1924 and a Linseed Merger

People treat ADM as a Chicago river tower and a later nutrition brand.

The listed company was a Minneapolis linseed crusher that bought a rival and walked onto the New York tape on a holiday eve.

John W. Daniels organized Daniels Linseed Company in Minneapolis in 1902. George A. Archer joined the next year.

The firm took the Archer-Daniels name in 1905.

In 1923 Archer-Daniels Linseed bought Midland Linseed Products Company and incorporated as Archer Daniels Midland Company.

The company's own later account says that merger made it the world's largest producer of linseed oil.

ADM began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 24 December 1924. On 3 December 2009 the firm rang the Exchange closing bell to mark eighty-five years on that tape.

A grain division followed in 1927. Soybean crushing and flour milling came later.

Headquarters moved to Decatur and, in the 2010s, to 77 West Wacker Drive in Chicago.

The mechanism is a commodity crusher using a merger to concentrate mill capacity, then using a Big Board listing as permanent working capital for the next crop rather than as an exit.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the 1924 tape first carried the name.

Photo: Arild Vågen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.