A water company says goodbye to its president

John Vacher Bacot was president of the Consolidated Water Company of Utica, New York, and a leading figure in the city’s business life. On 30 October 1921 he died suddenly, while out walking in the woods on his property at New Hartford. On 17 November the company’s board passed a resolution in his memory, and the next year it had its tribute printed privately as this small book.

Its fifteen pages hold the board’s tribute and resolutions, a portrait photograph, the names of an official committee and a proposal to call the company’s offices at 712 Washington Street the John V. Bacot Building. A short life traces his family back to French Huguenot settlers in colonial America. Read now, it is a small window on a city whose water came from a private company, and on the people who ran Utica’s business early in the twentieth century.

This copy is bound in flexible black grained covers, leather or an imitation of it, with Bacot’s name stamped in gilt on the front. The spine is heavily worn, with material lost, and the edges and corners are rubbed; the endpapers are marbled, and the pages and portrait look clean.