Frog Hollow. Susan Campbell
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in the manufacture of the sewing machine’s shuttles, the part of the machine beneath the needle that creates a lockstitch.
The reputation of Weed’s machines quickly reached almost mythical proportions. “If you desire a real ‘peace commissioner’ in the parlor,” said one New York Times article, “or a gold mine ‘constantly on hand,’ or a mint ready for ‘home use’ which will only require the touch of gentle hands to produce a currency the range of which is universal,” then you were urged to buy a Weed sewing machine.31
Originally, Weed machines were made by contractors spread around the state. In the summer of 1865, sensing there was efficiency to be had in consolidation, the owners of Pratt & Whitney began building their new machine shops along Flower Street, using H. & S. Bissell as contractor. The main building was four stories high and 150 feet long, and Weed was one of the early tenants.32
The next year, 1866, Weed took over the space formerly filled by Sharps, which was eventually purchased by showman P. T. Barnum, who moved that operation to Bridgeport. Weed officials eventually bought the entire factory, and many Sharps employees stayed on to make sewing machines.33 In the manufacturing process there was not much difference between guns and sewing machines.34
The sewing machines sold for a princely sixty to two hundred dollars, depending on the cabinetry. Some of the fancier cases were made of black walnut and were decorated with inlaid pearl. The popularity of the machines is hard to square with the economics of the time. The Civil War was followed by a six-and-a-half-year financial crisis in the United States, and household income hovered around ten dollars a week. A sewing machine was a substantial investment, but consumers ordered the machines anyway and sometimes waited months for delivery.35
That same year, Weed bought the most ornate horse carriage imaginable (from George S. Evarts on Albany Ave.) for advertising and delivery purposes. The carriage alone—never mind the machines it carried—merited a three-inch write-up in the Courant.36
Owner T. E. Weed had moved operations to Hartford, but it was Billings who brought the machine to the level where it rivaled the better-known Singer machine. A Chicago Republican writer, in the flowery language of the day, wrote that the Hartford factory “provided with the most ingenious mechanical devices of modern invention for perfecting every part of the machine.”37 No other machine, raved one New York Times article, had grown so rapidly in popularity: “It would seem that this machine will soon have, and deservedly so, a world-wide reputation.”38
At their Frog Hollow factory, workers turned out two hundred machines a day—a short five years after receiving a patent.39 Industrial historians have given far more attention to the manufacturing of cars in American production, but sewing machines gave birth to the principles of interchangeability, which could be applied to clocks and guns and automobiles and munitions—just about anything that could be made in a factory.
Where the sewing machine actually started is unclear. Elias Howe Jr., who was born in Massachusetts, patented what’s considered the world’s first sewing machine in 1846, though there were machines that accomplished the same task before his. Howe gave credit to his wife, Elizabeth J. Ames Howe, who, he told others, created in two hours what he had struggled to finish for fourteen years. Whatever his wife’s contribution, Howe applied for a patent in his own name, according to Russell Conwell, a minister and orator who served with Howe in the Civil War. In a speech Conwell would give more than five thousand times, called “Acres of Diamonds,” he said Howe’s “wife made up her mind one day they would starve to death if there wasn’t something or other invented pretty soon, and so in two hours she invented the sewing-machine. Of course he took out the patent in his name. Men always do that.”40 Prior to Elizabeth Howe’s breakthrough, Howe earned nine dollars a week as a machinist, and Elizabeth, with their three children, sometimes took in sewing to help with family finances.
As with most new technology, early adopters anxious to protect their investments hired good lawyers, and sometimes history remembers the ones who were successful not so much in the lab but in court. (Edison brought skills to the public sphere both as an inventor and as a scrappy battler in court.) Howe spent five years in court suing Isaac Singer for patent infringement in what the newspapers of the day called the Sewing Machine Wars. Howe eventually won.41
There was at the time no equal to the rapid adoption of the sewing machine by the American public. Between Howe’s 1854 court victory and 1870, some 1.5 million machines were built.42 Of those, 70,000 came from the Weed company in Hartford. In 1869 Weed produced 20,000 machines, and nearly 30,000 the year after that.43 The Weed Sewing Machine Co. completed its one hundred thousandth machine in September 1871. The machine’s relative high cost did not stop its fans. One account of a Weed tour in the Courant called the machines “a kind of iron poetry.” The brief was signed “Old Curiosity.”44
The factory proper was one of the largest in the city, and the machine was a marvel in “take-up,” or the process by which the needle looped around the thread beneath the fabric being sewed. For that, consumers could thank the man Pope was so anxious to hire, George A. Fairfield, designer and patent holder of the two-lever system that allowed this smooth dance between needle and thread:
As the needle bar passes down and the point of the needle enters the goods, this “take up” remains stationary until the needle has penetrated to the eye, when it passes down rapidly until the needle has reached its lowest descent, throwing out the slack to form a loop for the shuttle to pass through, and is again stationary until the shuttle passes the loop and the needle bar commences to rise, when it ascends rapidly until the loop is taken up, when it is again stationary while the needle bar goes up to tighten the stitch, the “take up” in the meantime holding the thread firmly until the feed has given the desired length of stitch.45
Genius.
The machine won honors at fairs in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and New Hampshire, as well as the behemoth Windham County Fair in Brooklyn, Conn. The machine also won international acclaim, including three awards in 1873 and a “best family sewing machine” award at an exposition in Paris.46 This was exciting news back home, considering the company had sent two of its three models strictly for exhibition, and not for competition. “There is no boast, therefore, in claiming this award … places the Company’s beyond the reach of rivalry,” said a subsequent advertisement’s humble-brag.47 One testimonial from circa 1874 listed the ways in which the Weed machine was superior, including, from a female customer, “Because it never vexes me.”48
With Weed and others, Frog Hollow’s factory district grew, and by 1880 the neighborhood’s streets were laid out and the manufacturing heart of the city was beating fast. The increasingly crowded neighborhood drew tradesmen like Charles Thurston, a machinist who lived with his family at 18 Putnam Street. Thurston was one of nine hundred men who lost their tools in a suspicious fire at Colt’s in 1864. The fire was detected around 8 a.m. in the morning of February 4. The Portland brownstone walls and slate roof—thought to be fireproof at the time—were destroyed. The factory’s yellow pine floors had been soaked for nearly a decade with machinery oil, and when ignited they went up like a match—“faster than a man could run,” according to one eyewitness. Neighbors gathered and watched from nearby buildings as the ornate Byzantine dome fell within an hour of the fire’s detection.49 The Courant speculated that the blaze, which destroyed the older part of the factory, home to the most expensive machinery, was the work of an arsonist, though the miscreant was never found.50 Though he had to replace his tools, the booming economy delivered Thurston work fairly quickly and in his own neighborhood.
While Thurston was losing his tools, his neighbor, Peter Kenney, was trying to extinguish the flames. Kenney, also a Frog Hollow resident, Irish immigrant, and Colt’s employee, had been a volunteer firefighter for three years before the fire. He and others tried to save the factory, but the water supply was inadequate. The fire was especially damaging because it was during the height of the factory’s Civil War production. From the New York Times: “Those who had friends employed at the armory were foremost in the rush, and