A few years after the Revolutionary War ended, he branched out into other metals too, building a foundry in Boston’s North End in 1787. There, he produced iron products, including everything from window weights to cannons, and he eventually began working in copper. That led to his developing a mill for rolling copper, as copper sheets were needed to sheath the hulls of ships being built for the fledgling United States Navy. 

The company our patriot Founding Father would establish from those efforts is still in operation today. Revere Copper in the small upstate New York community of Rome, just a bit northwest of Utica, traces its lineage right back to Paul Revere’s earliest commercial endeavors. 

A New Country and a New Company 

In 1800, Revere, then 65 years old, purchased and renovated a former ironworking mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Canton, Massachusetts, making it his commercial copper works, Revere Copper Company. There, he produced copper sheets and a variety of copper, brass and composition metal fittings, notably providing a variety of fittings for the USS Constitution and heavy copper sheets used to make the boilers for Robert Fulton’s steamboats. 

Paul Revere died in 1818. His son and business partner, Joseph Warren Revere, continued to run the mill until his death in 1868. Joseph’s son, John Revere, then took over, and John’s sons, William Bacon Revere and Edward H.R. Revere, kept the family involved in the business well into the 20th century. 

Through the many decades of the company’s existence, it would see a number of mergers, location changes and additions, and name changes. In 1900, a merger created the Taunton-New Bedford Copper Company, located in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Paul Revere’s original mill property in Canton was sold a few years later. Another merger in 1928 created a conglomerate named Revere Copper and Brass, Inc., which moved its headquarters to Rome, New York. 

Meanwhile, the company also continued to make sheet and bar-stock copper products and brass fittings, serving industries ranging from architecture to building and construction, from automotive to electrical connectors, and even jewelry. But many of those businesses were also taking a beating toward the end of the last century. 

“Prior to the late 1980s, Revere was called Revere Copper and Brass, and it was a publicly traded company, and it declared bankruptcy in the late 80s,” said Amy O’Shaughnessy, the company's vice president of sales and marketing. 

Mike O’Shaughnessy, Amy’s husband, is Revere’s CEO.  Mike’s father, Brian O'Shaughnessy—now the company’s chairman—worked his way up from the copper mines and was asked by a group of investors to help run the company while they wound it down. 

“Brian was asked to run the two plants for one year in the late ‘80s,” Amy explained. “He did. And as he was on his journey, he said, ‘I think I can make a go of this. There's opportunity here. There's a good workforce. They're making a quality product.’ And he loved the story. He borrowed $56 million, and he bought Revere out of bankruptcy.” 

The former miner wound up saving Paul Revere’s company. 

Establishing an ESOP 

At first, things got right back on track. 

“I would say between that time and 2001, there was still kind of a strong business, and the two plants were doing okay,” said Amy. “Just a few years later, maybe by 1994, Brian turned it into an ESOP so every single employee at Revere owns shares, and nobody outside of it does.” 

That decision, in Amy’s eyes, was a gamechanger. 

“Maybe another story is the culture that gets created when you become employee-owned. It's a powerful culture,” she said. “You might not see it every day, you might not see it every week or every month, but gosh darn it, when you reflect back on decisions we've made and how we've come together to accept pay freezes or cuts or a reduced workforce or reduced working hours, we came together and got through that because of we all had a stake in it, all of us here, and we wanted to get through it and see a new Revere, a better Revere.” 

But tougher times were on the horizon. 

“And then they let China into the WTO,” Amy said, somewhat ominously. 

That normalizing of trade relations with a country that had long been a hostile power—and that has since violated trade rules and regulations constantly—will be seen by historians as one of America’s biggest self-inflicted economic and policy catastrophes. A huge number of U.S. manufacturers didn’t survive it, and whole swaths of industry were destroyed. 

The folks at Revere, however, weren’t going to give up. 

'Burning the Furniture' 

“Massive change started happening after 2001,” Amy told me. “We had probably five or six different layoffs, reducing the workforce significantly. We took pay freezes, then we took pay cuts, then we closed our New Bedford plant. Then we liquidated copper inventory because it had value, just to pay the bills. And then we made a big, courageous move in 2016. We said, ‘We have got to get out of unprofitable product lines. We must simplify our business, and this is our last chance to do it.’ Part of that decision was to eliminate brass from our portfolio and focus on copper. We thought that's where the future is.” 

There were a few more lean years after that consolidation, but as time would tell, that move by what was now called Revere Copper Products Inc. would position the company extremely well. The shipping and material supply disruptions during the COVID pandemic had manufacturers that rely on copper (and lots of other stuff) re-thinking their supply chains.