Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Allied Corporation
In 1920, publisher Eugene Meyer and noted chemist William Ripley Nichols founded Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation in order to address this shortcoming in American industrial production. Allied was an amalgamation of five existing companies with a total capitalization of $175,000,000, including Barrett Chemical Company (est. 1858), General Chemical Company (est. 1899), National Aniline & Chemical Company (est. 1917), Semet-Solvay Company (est. 1895), and the Solvay Process Company (est. 1881).. All manufacturing was consolidated in Buffalo, and much attention was given to improving the processes hastily introduced during World War I. Allied's first venture into new markets was the construction of a synthetic ammonia plant near Hopewell, Virginia in 1928. This would soon become the world's largest producer of ammonia.