B. Brohm was a manufacturer of cast steel files and rasps from the best English cast steel, improved metallic temper. But to judge by the space devoted to it in this ad from the 1869 Albany directory, the real money was in sharpening (re-cutting) files and rasps. Brohm gave an unusually detailed price list for every size and type of file by the dozen, so let’s presume his audience was the growing industry and perhaps the lumber district in the north end, rather than homeowers and hobbyists who had let their flat bastards get dull.
For those who aren’t up on file terminology, “bastard” refers to the roughness of the file. Files are rough, middle, bastard, second cut, smooth, or dead smooth.
I suspect the “B.” may stand for Bernard, for there is a Bernard Brohm (born 1835, died 1893) buried in the Evangelical Protestant Church Cemetery just off Krumkill Road.
The company was continued by his son George for some time after his death, as Brohm and Molitor at 257 South Pearl St. His son Bernard was listed in 1907 as the superintendent of Van Rensselaer Island; as the island had been sold by the Van Rensselaer family to the New York Central Railroad in 1903, I have no idea what the superintendent’s duties might have been in 1907. We know the island today as what may someday become the DeLaet’s Landing development.