Elbert Green Hubbard was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. Hubbard is known best as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Elbert Hubbard
Elbert Hubbard illustrated in the frontispiece of The Mintage.
Roycroft Campus Visitor Center, June 2019
Roycroft Campus welcome sign, 2008
The Larkin Company, also known as the Larkin Soap Company, was a company founded in 1875 in Buffalo, New York as a small soap factory. It grew tremendously throughout the late 1800s and into the first quarter of the 1900s with an approach called "The Larkin Idea" that transformed the company into a mail-order conglomerate that employed 2,000 people and had annual sales of $28.6 million in 1920. The company's success allowed them to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design the iconic Larkin Administration Building which stood as a symbol of Larkin prosperity until the company's demise in the 1940s.
John D. Larkin
Boraxine advertisement from 1882
Larkin Club from Auburn, NY in 1902
Larkin Company Factories c.1910