Albert Pope

Early life

Charles Pope never recovered from his business downfall, according to the family story. Albert was already the breadwinner at age nine: first plowing fields, then selling produce, and at the age of fifteen, working the Quincy Market. A few years later he worked as a store clerk for $4 per week. Yet an Albert Pope biographer writes, "a study of his life suggests that his well-connected wider family helped him to get ahead and that his leaving school had less to do with providing for his needy family than with perceiving he could go, further, faster on his own." Another historian argues that Charles Pope invested with Albert in Boston real estate and was an original investor in Pope Manufacturing Company.