Lorenzo Dow Baker (March 15, 1840 in

Wellfleet, Massachusetts Wellfleet is a New England town, town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States, and is located halfway between the "tip" and "elbow" of Cape Cod. The town had a population of 3,566 at the 2020 United ...

– June 21, 1908) was an American sailor, ship's captain and businessman whose 1870 voyage from the

Orinoco The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers approximately 1 million km2, with 65% of it in Venezuela and 35% in Colombia. It is the List of rivers by discharge, f ...

Jamaica Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At , it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, west of Hispaniola (the is ...

and then to

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

launched the modern

banana A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry – produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus '' Musa''. In some countries, cooking bananas are called plantains, distinguishing the ...

production industry. In 1881 he partnered with his brother-in-law Elisha Hopkins to form L.D. Baker & Co. In 1885 he joined forces with Andrew W. Preston and eight others to form the Boston Fruit Company, which led to several successive partnerships, ending in the 1899 formation of the

United Fruit Company The United Fruit Company (later the United Brands Company) was an American multinational corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. The company was ...

, now Chiquita. Baker's success caused Wellfleet to become a summer resort. Baker left a fortune of $4 million () upon his death in 1908.

References

American sailors American food industry businesspeople American businesspeople in shipping 19th-century American businesspeople 1840 births 1908 deaths {{US-business-bio-1840s-stub