Bernardo Braga Rionda, 1875-1960.
Records, 1891-1953
(bulk 1901-1953)
3.5 linear ft. (10
vols., 8 boxes)
Bernardo Braga Rionda,
the third child of José Braga y Diaz and Bibiana Rionda y Polledo,
was born in the town of Noreña in the Spanish province of Asturias
in 1875. He came to the United States sometime around 1886, several
years after the death of his mother. Like so many nephews before
and after him, Braga was placed under the care of his uncle, Manuel Rionda
y Polledo, and educated in the Abbott School in Farmington, Maine.
He later graduated from the Packard Business School.
In 1900, Braga joined
the firm of Gillespie Bros. where he created an export department to do
business in Cuba. He was asked to establish an export department
at Czarnikow, MacDougall the next year. Czarnikow, MacDougall's Export
Department grew quickly. In addition to supplies and provisions for
sugar mills, the Export Department also served as a sales agent in Cuba
for several American companies. Braga was later transferred to the
Sugar Department and was appointed a vice president in the Czarnikow-Rionda
Company. He rose to executive vice president and assumed the presidency
and chairmanship of the company when Manuel Rionda died in September, 1943.
Braga relinguished the presidency to his eldest son, George Atkinson Braga,
in 1950. A series of strokes in 1954 ended his career. He died
on December 23, 1960.
Bernardo Braga was
married to Margaret (Maud) O'Reilly Atkinson (d. 1922) in 1903. (See
Series 17 for her papers.) George Braga was born in 1904 and another
son, Bernardo Rionda Braga, was born in 1911. He remarried to Helen
Wright in 1923.
Bernardo Braga's records
and papers are divided into three parts: letterbooks, subject files, and
autobiographical notes. The first part consists of ten letterbooks
containing copies of his letters. The earliest letterbook is dated
1891-1896 and consists of personal letters to his grandfather, aunts and
uncles, and his sister, Josefa. Many of the letters are illegible
or difficult to read; all but a few are in Spanish. This letterbook
is followed by eight business letterbooks documenting his tenure as head
of the Export Department from 1901 to 1910. In addition to copies
of his letters, these letterbooks also contain letters from the Export
Department written to him dur-ing his trips to Cuba. The remaining
letterbook in the series covers the years 1920-1922 and was found with
other documents that had been pulled for a 1936 court case. (See Series
10 for further information.)
The second part of
Series 8 consists of fragments of Braga's subject files. The earliest
records cover the period 1915-1926 and appear to have been part of a file
for incoming mail. These were originally filed by year and then alphabetically
by subject. Many of the annual files are missing. The years
documented under each file heading are noted on the contents list.
The files for 1915-1926 contain incoming mail, reports, minutes of meetings,
financial statements, and copies of letters routed to Braga. The
remaining files are believed to be files selected by Braga's son, George
Atkinson Braga, as research materials for his memoire, "A bundle of relations".
They contain the same types of records as the earlier files, but also include
copies of Braga's letters. The files have been divided into two time
periods: 1927-1943, when Braga was still a vice president in Czarnikow-Rionda,
and 1944-1953, the years that Braga led the company. These last files
represent the only documen-tation from the president's office during his
tenure. Although the records are few in number, they shed considerable
light on conflicts within the company and provide some evidence of the
company's ef-forts to recover its standing in the trade after the collapse
of the sugar market in the 1920s and 1930s.
The third part of this
series consists of autobiographical materials in which Braga reflects on
his youth in Spain and the United States and his years with the firm.
The text is undated, but reference to Manuel Enrique Rionda's death (in
1950) indicate that it was written between 1950 and 1954.
There are also a few
miscellaneous items that do not pertain to any of the three parts.
These have been placed at the beginning of box 1 and are listed in the
contents list.
The materials in this
series--with the exception of the 1920-1922 letterbook-- were donated to
the Libraries by members of the Braga family in 1993.