“Albert H. Platts was the second native of Ithaca who was its president. He was born where Ralph C. Christiance now resides, No.
214 N. Aurora street in 1845 and was 34 when first elected president in 1879.
…he was a traveling salesman for a wholesale boot and shoe house in Syracuse when he was 17, from 1863 until 1865. He was one year a partner with his father in a store where the Sprague Block now stands, groceries and boots and shoes being their main stock. He then traveled for the Ithaca Calendar Clock Company.... He had been so successful that in 1867, when only 22, with Captain John W. Farrand, he purchased the Kellogg tobacco and cigar factory that had formerly been the Hibbard and St. John silk factory on the
northwest corner of Seneca and Meadow streets. Success continued to reward his ventures in commercial affairs and he sold his interest in the firm to Charles Tourtellot in 1870.
The next year, 1871, when 26, he with Albert S. Gaskin and James Patterson purchased the stock and good will of the Grants, Henry, Chauncey, sr., and Chauncey, jr., in the
tobacco and cigar store and factory on East State street. And there he remained as he began, except that he owned the business at the time of his death, having bought his partners’ interests a couple of years ago. His partnerships have been: From 1871 to 1875, Platts Gaskin & Patterson; from 1875, the date of Mr. Gaskin’s death, Platts & Patterson until 1877; from 1877 to 1882 he had no partner; in 1882 the firm became Albert H. Platts & Martin S. DeLano; in 1889 he took into partnership one of his traveling salesmen, Peter Crise, and his foreman in the cigar shops, Albert L. Niver. In 1896 Mr. DeLano died.....”
“Albert H. Platts Dies Suddenly,” Ithaca Daily Journal, March 28, 1910, 3, 5.