Delmiro Augusto da Cruz Gouveia

In 1886 he established himself in the leather business and started to work, on commission, for the Swedish immigrant Herman Theodor Lundgren (Casas Pernambucanas) and for other companies specialized in this trade, such as Levy & Cia.

This undertaking was a great success and a source of pride for Recife, and attracted crowds estimated at more than 8,000 people, until it was deliberately set on fire on January 2, 1900, by the Pernambuco police, on the orders of the Conselheiro Rosa e Silva, at the time vice-president of the country, who was a fierce political enemy of Delmiro, and at the behest of the then governor Sigismundo Gonçalves, faithful rocista.

[7] After the fire, started for political reasons at the Derby Centro Comercial, and also because he fell in love with, and later kidnapped, a natural 16-year-old daughter of the then governor of Pernambuco, his political arch-enemy, Delmiro concluded that his life was in danger in Recife and, in 1903, he moved to Pedra, in Alagoas, a village lost in the heart of the sertão, but strategically located for its trade, in the Microregion of Alagoas in the Sertão do São Francisco, bordering Pernambuco, Sergipe and Bahia, and today called Delmiro Gouveia in his honor.

Delmiro bought a farm in Pedra, on the margins of the Paulo Affonso Railroad, where he centralized his lucrative fur trade and built corrals, a dam, his residence, and buildings to house a tannery.

[5] Planning to build a sewing thread factory there - which until then were imported from England, the well-known Linhas Corrente, which monopolized the Brazilian market, and appealing to nationalist, nativist ideals and civic interests then in vogue, he obtained concessions from the government of Alagoas that included the right to own vacant land, tax exemption for the future factory, and permission to capture energy from the Paulo Afonso waterfall, in addition to government resources for help build 520 kilometers of roads connecting Pedra to other locations.

In 1914, the new factory began its activities under the corporate name Companhia Agro Fabril Mercantil, producing lines with the trade name "Estrela" for Brazil, and "Barrilejo" for the rest of Latin America.

After his murder - still unclear - the original machinery of Companhia Agro Fabril Mercantil was thrown over a cliff in the São Francisco river by the Scottish group Machine Cotton who bought the company from its successors , to destroy it, thus getting rid of its competition in the field.