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Thursday, May 10, 2018

Celebrating the "Lost Cause": a Neo-Confederate Stove, 1869

A couple of weeks ago [24 April 2018], a member of the Antique Stove Collectors' Facebook Group posted about a stove he had found in a ditch in Port Royal, VA.  It was made by (or for) a Baltimore firm I had never heard of, Conklin & Willis, but its name and iconography were, to say the least, immediately arresting.  Four years after the end of the Civil War, and in a state that had remained in the Union, Conklin & Willis were patenting, making, and selling a stove they called the "Stonewall," marked with the arms of the state of Virginia, and embellished with a medallion showing one person in classical dress standing over the dead body of another, and still carrying the unsheathed sword used for the murder.  This image is accompanied by the slogan "Sic semper tyrannis," and is a version of the seal and official motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia adopted in 1776.  But these words had more recent connotations too -- they figured in the pro-Confederate song "Maryland, My Maryland," popular with secessionists and pro-Southerners in Maryland during the Civil War, and now the state's official song, and they were shouted out aloud by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theater on 14 April 1865, just after he had shot President Abraham Lincoln.  This otherwise unremarkable old cooking stove certainly bore its bitter heart on its sleeve.





Cf. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seal_of_Virginia.svg#/media/File:Seal_of_Virginia.svg



Who made this stove?  Daniel E. Conklin was the designer, taking out Design Patent 3532 in June 1869.  He was a partner in the firm of Baltimore stove merchants Conklin & Willis, and went on to a long and successful business career in Baltimore, notably as a hardware importer and merchant, but apart from that I can find out little about him.  His patent was assigned to (purchased by) the partnership, then including John H. Harbeck 1st, another merchant, who also served as one of the witnesses, alongside Joseph T. Atkinson, a notary public, and A.B. Dishman, who went on to a career including more stove invention.  Z.L.C. Willis, Conklin's partner and another of the assignees, is the only of the men involved with this patent whose biography seems to have a bearing on this distinctive design: he had been a Captain in the Virginia Artillery during the recent War.

[t.b.c.]
 

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Cox, Whiteman, and Cox's Penn Stove Works -- Philadelphia Stove Makers, 5.

Cox, Whiteman, & Cox's Penn Stove Works, 1853-.

{in progress; edit of 2 Feb. 2018} 

Cox, Whiteman, and Cox, later the Abram Cox Stove Co., were the fifth of Philadelphia's stove-makers, by date of founding, but differed from the firms that came before them in that they were the first to be able to walk into an established stove foundry rather than having to build their own.  1853 was when Charles Warnick gave up the property at Sixth and Germantown Avenue that he had occupied for the previous decade, and the new partnership of Joseph & Abram Cox took it over as the Penn Stove Works.  Twenty years later, they were the fourth largest stove manufacturers in Philadelphia, with an annual production capacity of about 2,000 tons. [Wiley 1874, pp. ##]


The Firm: People and Partners

Joseph Cox was born in New York City in 1819, and by the early 1840s was engaged in stove making with his brother David in Troy, New York, a key center of innovation in design and manufacture.  In 1846 he moved to Philadelphia, and entered the retail stove trade.  [Obit., 1881]  He showed up in the 1847 directory (i.e. late 1846) with a home address but no stated occupation, and in the course of that year he acquired both, as a stove maker at 59 North Second Street in partnership with Edward M. Boughton, doing a retail and jobbing business.  That partnership lasted until some time in 1852, after which Joseph continued as a sole trader, and Boughton disappeared.  

The "Report of the Committee on Exhibitions" at the city's Franklin Institute in 1847 explains the new firm's business: it brought up-to-date Troy stoves into the Philadelphia market, though it may not have been simply a distribution depot for Joseph's brother's firm's stoves -- it exhibited and won awards for other companies' products too, e.g. an "air tight parlor stove for coal, by A.T. Dunham, Troy, N.Y. ... A cast-iron stove, with radiating flues; a very serviceable and good stove" as well as "Pierce's American air tight cook stove, for wood or coal, by Johnson & Cox, Troy, N.Y." [pp. 373-4].  The 1848 and 1849 Exhibitions demonstrated continuing successful efforts by Boughton & Cox to bring Johnson & Cox stoves into the Philadelphia market, and win Franklin Institute endorsements for them.

In 1853 Joseph's older brother Abram, born in 1816 in Schuylerville, Saratoga County, joined him in place of Boughton.  Abram had spent the previous ten years in Troy, i.e. he had overlapped with Joseph there.  At first he worked for the firm of Elias Johnson, Gilbert Geer, and their brother David, which turned into Johnson, (John S.) Perry, and Cox in 1845, plain Johnson and Cox in 1846, and then into Johnson, Cox, and (Joseph) Fuller in 1850.  Abram himself had too much "natural ability and energy" [Obit., 1885] to remain for long as an employee, so in 1847 he branched out on his own in the old Mechanic Street foundry, which he took over from his brother's firm when it relocated to the newer and larger Clinton Stove Works, and remained in business, as a sole trader or eventually in partnership with J.H. Warren and Alex Morrison, until his departure for Philadelphia.


The Cox brothers' experience in the stove foundry business in Troy as well as in the wholesale and retail trade in Philadelphia equipped them well to go into large-scale manufacturing in Philadelphia on their own account.  
They had enough capital to acquire the lease on Charles Warnick's old foundry, as well as the knowledge to run it -- Abram, in particular, was certainly up to speed with modern methods of stove design and manufacture.  He even had direct experience of the design patent system, after taking out two for cook stoves in 1851 (numbers 382 and 383; see below) in partnership with Johnson and Cox, and witnessed by Fuller.


The brothers' partnership was originally just themselves (they lived at the same address as well as working together), but in 1854 they acquired a third member, P.F. Hagar, a Germantown stove maker and dealer, and in 1856 (i.e. by the time of the 1857 directory) their foundry was listed too.  In 1857 they moved to new premises on North Second Street (no. 106), lost Hagar, and in 1858 the lasting partnership uniting the two brothers and John Whiteman began, only to be ended by the deaths of Joseph and Whiteman in 1881.  By that time Abram was seriously ill as well as quite old, but fortunately he had a trustworthy assistant: his nephew Abram Cox Mott, born in Glen Falls, New York, in 1850.  Young Abram had joined his uncles' business in 1865, starting out as a clerk and moving steadily through the ranks to become superintendent by the time of Joseph's death, and vice-president of the corporation formed in 1882 to replace the old partnership and prepare for Abram Cox's own departure from the business, which took place in two stages: Abram C. Mott became president in 1884, and Abram Cox died in 1885.

["Abram C. Mott" in Ellis P. Oberholzer, Philadelphia: A History of the City and Its People, a Record of 225 Years (Philadelphia: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., ####), Vol. 4, pp. 230-232. 


* * * 

Unlike some of their local competitors,  Cox, Whiteman, & Cox do not seem to have advertised in the press.  But this does not mean that they did not figure there, and their several appearances in Pennsylvania papers over the next few years provide the outline of a narrative of the early years of the firm, and also an idea of what it was about the everyday life of a small manufacturing business that might qualify as newsworthy at the time.


(1) "Fires," Philadelphia Press 12 June 1860, p. 2.  

Their "manufactory" caught fire as a result of a spark from the cupola, causing $150 worth of damage [c. $62,000 in current money].  Foundries were always burning down -- the close proximity of plenty of dry wood (molding flasks, patterns) and sources of intense heat was always a big risk, and helps explain the preoccupations of insurance surveyors in the Hexamer reports.  The article adds that the building was owned by a Jacob Carrigan.  Interestingly, Carrigan and a John Whiteman of Philadelphia were both trustees of Dickinson College in 1846.  Carrigan was a Philadelphia merchant -- an artisan metal worker (a silver-plater) who became owner of a saddlery hardware store; he was a prominent Methodist layman, protectionist Whig, and, by the late 1840s, a dealer in anthracite and an investor in canal and railroad companies.  [The other biographical snippets are all the products of a Google Books search of C19th texts too.]  

This helps explain the low barriers to entry into the foundry business for Joseph Cox and partners -- they could rent their initial premises, not buy; but I do not know whether Carrigan already owned the foundry while Warnick & Co. occupied it, i.e. did Warnick & Liebrandt enjoy the same easy route from small merchant into manufacturer in the mid-1840s as their successors a decade later, or did Carrigan buy the property from them?  Probably we will never know, but my guess is that Warnick & Leibrandt owned and built the foundry, and Carrigan later acquired it.  This is just based on the timing of his branching out beyond the hardware business into a range of other investments.

Catalogue of Dickinson College for the Academical Year 1846-47 (Carlisle, PA: Herald Office, 1847), p. 3.    


(2) "For Sale and To Let," Philadelphia Press 23 Jan. 1863, p. 4: 

"THE LARGE Iron Foundry now occupied by Cox, Whiteman, & Cox to rent. Possession 1st April. Inquire 520 ARCH Street, second story."  This gives us a time for the opening of the new foundry.  Calling the old foundry "large" is a bit of realtor's traditional licence.  It was small, which was why they were leaving it.


(3) "Moulders Wanted," Columbia [Pa.] Spy 7 March 1863, p. 3 -- 

"THE Stove and Hollow Ware Moulders employed  by the undersigned have struck for the control of our Shop after having received an advance of prices.  We now offer employment to Moulders at liberal prices, and guarantee them constant work.

Apply to LEIBRANDT & McDOWELL, STUART & PETERSON, ABBOTT & NOBLE, COX, WHITEMAN & CO. Philadelphia. Pa.


N.B.  Young men, with any knowledge of the business, taken under instructions, and paid liberally." [ad first posted 28 Feb. 1863].

This is interesting.  Cox and partners opened their new, larger foundry at just about the worst time they could have, in labor relations terms.  The dislocation of trade at the outset of the Civil War had caused stove foundry operators a massive headache -- the South provided Philadelphia stove makers with one of its major markets -- but there was a silver lining: the resulting layoffs and unemployment disrupted the Iron Moulders' Union, though less so in Philadelphia than elsewhere, to the point where it almost disintegrated.  However, by 1863 business was booming, prices were rising fast, labor markets were tight, and the 400 stove molders of Philadelphia's Local 1 were spearheading the rebuilding of the national union, as well as pursuing their own aggressive agenda.  [Grossman, pp. 43-44, 55-62]  

In the winter of 1862 their efforts seemed to have forced their employers to concede a 10 percent wage increase, but in fact the foundrymen were just keeping their plants active, building up a large surplus stock, and delaying the confrontation with their men until the best time, the middle of winter.  All but two foundries (one of them probably Isaac Sheppard & Co.'s, given that its owners were all former molders and union activists; the other North, Chase, and Thomson) agreed to do battle, and each pledged a $10,000 [$24 million] stake to be forfeited if they withdrew.  The above advertisement was part of the resulting campaign, which involved: attempts to get employers nationwide to blacklist Philadelphia molders -- because the usual way in which striking or locked-out union members survived a strike was by leaving town and working elsewhere; out-of-town recruiting for replacements; and bribery ("liberal prices") to local union men to break ranks and return to work.  They also tried to increase the labor supply by breaking the union's restrictions on the training of large numbers of cheap younger workers, misnamed "apprentices". [Grossman, pp. 65-66]


(4) "Legal Intelligence. Court of Common Pleas -- Judges Thompson and Ludlow.  Master and Apprentice -- Construction of Moulders' Indentures," Philadelphia Press  2 Nov. 1863.

An interesting case, explaining why the Iron Moulders were so opposed to employers' hiring as many "apprentices" as they liked, because it was just a way of securing cheap labor and flooding the market with half-trained competition.  Paul T. Bowen, aged about 16, had been bound by his mother to an apprenticeship with Cox, Whiteman, and Cox "to learn the trade, art, and mystery of Stove Moulding."  The firm agreed to give him work "at such times as their foundries may be in blast," i.e. there was no guarantee of support, or indeed training; simply a schedule of payment while he was learning the  job by doing it.  For his first three months he would get $3.50 a week, when a skilled workman's minimum was supposed to be $10 [Grossman, p. 23].  After that he would get half as much per piece as a journeyman's rate for 11 months, 5/8ths for the next 14 months, and 3/4ths for the remaining 9 months of his "apprenticeship."  Bowen must have broken his contract -- whether simply by finding a better job elsewhere, or perhaps by going on strike -- and the company was prosecuting him for it as a criminal act under Pennsylvania law.

The judges invalidated the agreement, because it was so one-sided and exploitative.  A master was supposed to stand in loco parentis, but there were explicit and "peculiar" terms making it clear that this was just an employment contract in disguise: the company was "not to be responsible for any acts done or committed by [Bowen] during such times as he is not at work, nor are they to be under any expense for medicine or medical attendance, it being fully understood that [he] is under the guardianship of his mother."  There was "no express covenant for maintenance, nor do the masters agree to give the apprentice any education."  All of the risks of employment were thrown on the young man's shoulders, with none of the compensating protections that gave a good master the right to be able to resort to law to compel his apprentice's loyal service.  "[S]hould the furnace go out of blast and he at the same time be afflicted with sickness, [he] may starve or die."

This is a revealing illustration of the clash of values between the judges, with their attachment to the ideals of an older artisan economy as enshrined in the laws of the Commonwealth, and the behavior of the company, for whom the relation between masters and men, even adolescents, was simply one of money in return for labor, when required, and obedience.  In this case, the older mutualism won, and Paul Bowen walked free.  In the molders' trade, though, all that stood between employers and their ability freely to exploit young workers, and thereby weaken the bargaining power of skilled men, was the strength of the union, greatly depleted as a result of the long and fruitless 1863 strike.
    

(5) "A Dastardly Act," Philadelphia Press 24 Dec. 1863, p. 4:

Samuel Cline, an employee of Cox, Whiteman, & Cox, had been attacked a couple of evenings before Christmas near York Road and Susquehanna.  A pint of sulphuric acid was thrown over him by an unknown assailant, "burning his head, face, and clothing in a shocking manner.  Mr. Cline is a worthy and harmless workman, and has a large family dependant upon his labor.  His complete recovery is beyond possibility.  The only cause assigned is that he was not a member of the 'Moulders' Union.'"

Even more clearly than the Bowen case, this horrific incident was part of the bitter aftermath of what was by then a failed strike.  The union had raised a $13,000 fighting fund from local sympathizers back in the Spring, and its (initially 200) strikers engaged, as they had during the battles of the mid- to late-1850s, in forceful picketing at places of work, intimidatory gatherings outside scab workers homes and lodging houses, and payment of travel expenses to encourage out-of-town strikebreakers to quit and go home.  But all of these efforts failed -- the strike almost wiped out the local union, though it also cost their employers because of "incompetent workmen and a terrific labor turnover" [Grossman, p. 21].   



(6) "Relief for the Sufferers by the Great Fire," Philadelphia Press 15 Feb. 1865, p. 5:

Cox, Whiteman, & Cox gave $50 of $125 donated to sufferers from a conflagration at Ninth & Washington Streets.


(7) "Special Notices. The Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon acknowledge the following contributions to their fund" Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin 6 June 1865, p. 1:

Cox, Whiteman, & Cox gave $10.


(8) "Robbing His Employers," Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin 17 Feb. 1868, p. 8:

The watchman, Thomas Johnson, at Cox, Whiteman, & Cox's new foundry was caught by a policeman in the act of stealing his masters' goods.  He was driving away in a wagon with a keg of oats, a keg of corn, 50 ft lumber, and other saleable items.  He was freed on $1,000 [c. $250,000] bail.  


(9) "List of Patents issued from the United States Patent Office for the week ending June 15, 1869, and each bearing that date," Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin 16 June 1869, p. 1:

J.R. Rose & Edward L. Calely, assigned to Cox, Whiteman & Cox, for the body of a heating stove, Design Patent 3549.

[t.b.c.]


(B) Plants:


The Sixth and Germantown Avenue foundry in an 1862 map.  The buildings around the open foundry yard (below) still show quite clearly.  The interactive map viewer allows for a wider appreciation of the area in which it sat. 





From G.F. Hopkins's 1875 Philadelphia Atlas -- note how much of the block remained undeveloped, for outdoor storage etc. The 1862 Samuel L. Smedley atlas showed the block empty -- see Interactive Map Viewer.  See also this zoomable 1874 map, showing a railroad siding direct into the works.


The Hexamer Survey of the Penn Stove Works in 1878 -- The 5-storey building on Dauphin was built in about 1870, possibly replacing a smaller original; the rest in 1862.
[t.b.c.]



(C) Products:


Design Patent 382 -- the "Irving Airtight" Cooking Stove, 1851


Design Patent 383 -- The Domestic Air Tight, 1851.
It looks as if the design may have been sold (assigned to) a New York City maker.

Cox, Hagar & Cox and Cox, Whiteman & Cox (hereafter CWC) left little other trace in the public record throughout the 1850s and early 60s, except for many more new design patents bought from Philadelphia's leading pattern makers, Garretson Smith and Henry Brown (DP#830, 1856 -- "The Gem," a neatly decorated cast-iron heater; DP#1133 and DP#1167, 1859, plates for two part-wrought heaters; and DP#1622, 1862, for a "Complete"-style stepped cooking stove, "The Monitor."


[t.b.c.]



The scale of production in their original foundry cannot have been very large.  The output of a stove foundry was not just limited by the size of its workforce and the amount of iron it could melt and pour in a day, i.e. the capacity of the cupola furnace, but also by the amount of room for storage of raw materials, molding flasks, and patterns; for cleaning, finishing, and assembling ["mounting"] castings; and crucially, the space on the molding floor for making molds and setting them out until they were poured.  And the Germantown Road foundry was small -- the site was approximately 80 x 100 feet.  


Cox, Whiteman & Cox's product range was accordingly narrow -- much less than Leibrandt & McDowell's or Abbott & Noble's at more or less the same time -- but even so the company rapidly outgrew its premises.  Some time in 1862 the partners bought a whole block 500 x 122 feet at American and Dauphin, about a dozen blocks east of their original site and right on the Reading Railroad tracks.  It was large enough to accommodate most of the company's continued expansion for the next several decades.  The 1878 Hexamer Insurance Survey allows us to see that the foundry's molding floor alone was more than 50 percent bigger (165 x 75 feet) than the entire original site, which was given up.  

[t.b.c.]


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sources:

Abram Cox Stove Co., [Illustrated Catalogue] (Philadelphia: The Company, 1892).

Abram Cox Stove Co., American & Dauphin, Philadelphia, c. 1890-1910, Warren-Ehret Company Photographs, http://digital.hagley.org/2002251_033A and Lansdale, PA, http://digital.hagley.org/2002251_034.

Abram Cox Mott bio -- http://bergergirls.com/getperson.php?personID=I270172&tree=Strausstown.

Tony DiDomizio, "Ever Wonder?The Reporter (Montgomery Co., PA) 15 July 2006.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Isaac A. Sheppard & Co. -- Philadelphia Stovemakers, 6

Advertisement in Freedley, Philadelphia and Its Manufactures (1867 ed.), p. 460. [For full citations, see at end.  The links all worked, as of 27 Jan. 2018] Freedley notes:
The "Excelsior Stove Works," on Girard avenue and Marshall street, of which Messrs. ISAAC A. SHEPPARD & Co are proprietors, are fitted up with a full assortment of modern patterns and appliances for the manufacture of Stoves, Heaters, Ranges, and Hollow Ware.  They employ from seventy to eighty men, and melt from twelve to fifteen hundred tons of iron per year. The gentlemen in charge of these works are men of large experience in iron founding, and as a result of their experience, they have found they can produce castings of greater strength and tenacity from a proper mixture of brands of American Iron, than from Scotch Iron, and consequently they use only American Iron of the best brand. Besides Stoves, etc., Messrs. Sheppard & Co make castings for Plumbers, in fact all kinds of light and fine castings 

Isaac A. Sheppard & Co. was the last of the big Philadelphia stove foundries to be established, in 1860, and one of the most successful, its growing business requiring the opening in 1866 of a smaller branch plant in Baltimore to meet the anticipated demands of the postwar market in the ex-Confederacy, and the building of an entirely new Philadelphia plant on a larger site in 1872-3.  Most of its history therefore lies outside of the antebellum period on which I have concentrated in the other posts in this batch of essays on the Philadelphia stove business, but its creators' careers were firmly rooted within that young industry, so they belong here too. 

From Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County, p. 428.  Sheppard divided his time about 2/3 Philadelphia, 1/3 Baltimore during the branch plant's first 5-6 years, and by 1881 it employed about 150 hands and melted 40 tons of iron a day.  This factory covered the whole block between Eastern and Canton Avenues (now Fleet Street), and Chester and Castle Streets.  The company closed in 1933, but the building survived in recognizable form until at least 1980.  The site has since been entirely cleared and is now occupied by a Burger King and a Royal Farms Gas Station and their car parks.  Scharf also has, opp. p. 428, a fine engraving of a rather younger Sheppard than the photograph below shows.

Another version of the same view in an 1880s billhead -- resolution is poor, but it's more or less legible.  Only three of Sheppard's old partners were still alive, and his college-educated son Franklin had joined the firm.


(A) The Sheppard Firm: The Principal and His Partners.

Unlike the other entrepreneurs we have encountered so far, Isaac Allin Sheppard and his colleagues all came up from the foundry floor.  Sheppard and his partners -- Jonathan A. Biddle, James C. Horn, John Sheeler, and William B. Walton, joined by Daniel Weaver and Thomas Wallwork in 1862 -- were all working men.  The three of them who showed up in the 1860 and 1861 directories all gave their occupations as moulder or stove moulder; Weaver was foundry foreman at Leibrandt & McDowell, and Wallwork was a machinist at another stove foundry, probably Cox, Whiteman & Cox's Penn Stove Works, successors to Charles Warnick in his second [Sixth and Germantown Avenue] foundry.  As an 1891 history of the firm put it, they relied "on their intelligence and labor to supply the place of capital in the rivalry they had commenced with the wealthier and long-established houses who, in order to drive them out of the market, sold their own goods below cost."  

But they must have had some access to capital, in order to be able to establish their original foundry at the south-west corner of Marshall and Girard Avenue, on the site of an omnibus stable in the Poplar district of the city's Northern Liberties and just round the corner from Sheppard's row home.  The most probable explanation is that they -- particularly Sheppard himself -- had just saved it.


Sheppard was born on the family homestead in Back Neck, Cumberland County, New Jersey, in 1827, in the marshes south of the Cohansey River between Bridgeton and the Delaware, where his ancestors had first settled in 1683.  His parents moved to Fairfield in the north of the state when he was 10, and young Isaac stayed behind and had to start work.  He took farming jobs with old neighbors in Sayre's Neck and Cedarville, NJ, 150 miles away from his parents, and only went to stay with them during the three winter months when work dried up and the schools were open -- almost the only full-time, formal education he ever received.  

His parents moved to Philadelphia in 1839 to improve their children's chances of getting an education and getting on in life, and Isaac did get one term of school.  But his father quickly fell ill, lingering until he died in 1848, so Isaac was "thrown almost wholly upon his own resources" aged 12, having to work to support the family, and when his mother died in 1842 the household broke up. [p. 566]  Isaac took whatever unskilled, poorly paid jobs he could find -- errand boy in a shoe store, cabin boy on a coasting vessel, packing boy in a cracker factory, and others -- chasing opportunity and more money, and eventually got a break: an apprenticeship as a molder in a brass and iron foundry in summer 1843.  But within six months his master died, the foundry closed, and he had to start again in January 1844, fortunately for him in Charles Warnick's stove foundry at Sixth and Germantown Avenue, a business with a future.  

Stove molding may have appealed to him as a familiar as well as a growing craft: Cumberland County was a center of the stove furnace business when he was a child.  Warnick also provided him with a good apprenticeship, i.e. not just an excuse for cheap labor (for an example of a degraded, exploitative apprenticeship, see this case involving the Cox, Whiteman, and Cox stove foundry in 1863): he was required to spend two evenings a week on writing and arithmetic, and two on reading and general improvement.  As an obituary reported, "being studiously inclined he made the best of the opportunities presented by a residence in a large city" too, including joining musical societies ["Stove Trade Notes: Isaac A. Sheppard," The Metal Worker 12 Mar. 1898, p. 49.]  His devotion to self-improvement, and Warnick's support, meant that he acquired the education and cultural awareness he had missed out on, and as  result "he was enabled to stand well with men who had received much better educational advantages."  He carried on with this habit of self-improvement even after his apprenticeship was finished and he was his own man.  [p. 567

By 1847, when Warnick was having to staff his new foundry on the Delaware waterfront, Isaac was a qualified journeyman, trusted and respected by his employers, including, most probably, Warnick's foundry superintendent Archilus Lawrence: Isaac's first surviving son Franklin, born 1852, was given Lawrence as his middle name.  He was "assured that he could have employment as long as they had work for anyone." [p. 567]  His obituary explained why: "As a molder he enjoyed the enviable reputation of being the best in the land.  Some of the feats of work he performed when a young man are to this day considered remarkable."  He worked with his head as well as his hands: one of the fullest as well as, probably, the earliest biographies of him, and a source for the others, spells out that "By paying careful attention to the peculiarities of material used in his business, [he] made himself thoroughly familiar with the nature, strength and qualities required to produce the best results.  His proficiency in these respects was noted by his employers." [p. 36

Sheppard did not just believe in individual  improvement, but in collective effort: he was a tireless joiner, particularly of fraternal organizations.  His first was the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, via a new lodge of which he was a charter member, in 1847; the role of secretary, for which his evening studies as an apprentice qualified him, gave him book-keeping and administrative  experience.  Next, he brought his habit of saving -- another biography says he always intended to go into business eventually -- together with some of his friends, founding a savings and loan association requiring them to save at least a dollar a month until they had acquired $200, enough for a house.  (It was only the second in the city; Sheppard had read about long-established British building societies, and they were his model.)  Sheppard reached his goal by 1849, bought a small lot, and built the house at 989 Sixth Street in the Northern Liberties district of the city where he lived for the remainder of his long life.  In 1850 he married the daughter of English immigrants, and within almost exactly nine months the first of their sixth children was born, only to become a few weeks later the first of three to die.  

The Isaac Sheppard House today.
Biographies of Sheppard mostly skip over the 1850s, simply described as the period when he was accumulating the capital with which, in 1860, he could buy the lot on which he and his partners would build their foundry, and the big story of his life could begin.  But in fact they were full of plenty of action.  

Warnick's foundry was the birthplace of labor militancy in the Philadelphia molders' trade, as well as being a training-ground for skilled workmen and future entrepreneurs.  Stove foundries were labor-intensive workplaces.  The principal ways for employers to increase production and reduce costs were by extending the work day, cutting the rates paid for every casting successfully completed, maintaining constant pressure, reorganizing work to make tasks simpler and more repetitive, and diluting skilled workers with cheaper assistants.  According to Joseph A. Barford's "Reminiscences of the Early Days of Stove Plate Molding and the Union," Iron Molders' Journal 38:3 (March 1902): 179-82, there were three rate cuts, two of 10 percent and one of 15 percent, between September 1847, when he started at Warnick's, and early May 1855, forcing him to increase his output to maintain his wages.  "The burden had become unbearable and the worm at length turned.  Smarting under a sense of the injustice done me one day, I threw my rammer into the sandheap, and with a terrible oath swore I would not make another mold at their prices."  [p. 181] 

Barford turned first to his work mate (molders often worked in pairs, helping one another out with heavy lifting), James C. Horn -- later one of Sheppard's original partners -- and asked if he was with him.  Horn agreed, and they went around the shop, gaining the backing of all but two men, then organized a meeting to which the molders in other city stove foundries were invited, and which Horn chaired.  The sense of grievance was general, but molders had few resources apart from their solidarity.  "We dared to come out and demand our rights and stayed out until we got them.  It was a hard battle, though, for the men were very poor, as they had been out of work all the previous winter." [p. 181]  

They got their union  organized by 16 June [or July? -- accounts differ] 1855, after a month of almost nightly meetings, with Isaac Sheppard as President and Horn as Secretary, and embarked on a ten-week strike involving all of the city's stove and hollow ware molders apart from Stuart & Peterson's, whose employers promised they would match any deal the strikers finally achieved -- a reversal of the last rate cut, and maintenance of 1854's rates.  Among the other early activists Barford recalled were two more of Sheppard's future partners, John Sheeler [whom he calls Shuler] and William B. Walton.  

The Stove and Hollow Ware Molders Union of Philadelphia, aiming to enlist all "practical molders" as members (i.e. not limiting themselves to time-served journeymen?) and to elevate the position and maintain the interests of the craft, announced its presence with a proclamation as well as a strike.  "'Wealth is power' ... and practical experience proves that its possessors ... oppress and degrade the daily labourers.  In the present organization of society, labourers single handed are powerless ... but combined there is no power of wrong they may not openly defy."  [Grossman, William Sylvis, Pioneer of American Labor, p. 23.]  Its objectives were straightforward -- establishing a $10 a week minimum for day work, and giving union members first preference in getting jobs -- as were its methods: vigorous picketing, and assessing members in order to pay strike benefits and to help and encourage strikers to leave the city and travel to work somewhere else.  

The 1855 strike was followed by another, less successful, in 1857, but also by similar eruptions in other major stove manufacturing centers -- Baltimore, MD; Reading, PA; Jersey City, NJ; Troy, Albany, Utica, Buffalo, Peekskill, and Port Chester, NY; Stamford, CT; Providence, RI; Worcester, MA; and, over the mountains, Cincinnati and Dayton, OH, Louisville, KY, and St Louis, MO.  Philadelphia molders, with Sheppard still their president and William Sylvis as their corresponding secretary, headed the movement for a national union, which alone could increase the chances that local struggles would achieve lasting benefits, and that they could reverse the fresh wage cuts that the depression of 1857 had forced their employers to impose, and them to accept.  Finally, on Independence Day in 1859, the first national convention met in Philadelphia, with representatives of local unions claiming more than 4,000 members represented.  

Where was Sheppard in all of this?  In the thick of Philadelphia Local No. 1's work as its president, and the national union's first treasurer.  But I do not know how long he held this office, or whether organizing and presiding over the grand dinner at the end of the founding convention may have been his last major service to a working-class movement he was soon to leave.  [Grossman, pp. 23-29; Sylvis, The Life, Speeches, Labors, and Essays of William H. Sylvispp. 26-29; "National Convention of Iron Moulders," Philadelphia Press 8 July 1859, p. 2.  Henry E. Hoagland's "The Rise of the Iron Molders' International Union: A Study in American Trade Unionism," American Economic Review 3:2 (June 1913): 296-313, p. 307, makes the interesting point that Philadelphia Local 1 had invested its surplus funds in Pennsylvania Railroad stock and was receiving an income from them, hoping thereby to avoid the necessity for dues.  This sounds like Sheppard's idea to me.]

Because, at the same time, Sheppard's career was taking a new course.  According to another late nineteenth-century biography, he stayed with Warnick's until Charles W. Warnick died at the end of 1857 and the old firm was dissolved (in fact, the partnership had already changed to Leibrandt & McDowell in 185#).  He was still working as a moulder, but he was beginning to branch out.  In 1858 he was elected to the Pennsylvania State Legislature representing the victorious People's Party (the local predecessor to what became the Republicans), whose high-tariff program he endorsed ["Protective Tariff Meeting at National Hall," Philadelphia Press 16 June 1858, p. 2 -- Sheppard and Daniel Weaver, a fellow-molder at Warnick's and his future partner, were appointed vice-presidents under the president, Henry Carey, and alongside leading manufacturers].  

For the next three years, involving two more successful annual elections, he was an influential legislator as well as a labor activist, and then an entrepreneur beginning to realize his intention of becoming a businessman rather than just a skilled employee.  At Harrisburg, Sheppard's first major achievement was a law to regulate building and loan associations, institutions so central to improving the life-chances of skilled men like himself, but he soon got swept up in charting the state's course through the crisis of Secession, serving as chair of important committees and eventually as Speaker pro tem. before the end of his last term.  Alongside these commitments he and his partners were buying a site, building a foundry, and getting it established through the economic disruption of the early Civil War years and against his established rivals' strenuous competition.  As one of his biographers explains, 
From the beginning of its career the firm encountered the most determined opposition from the older establishments, which, to drive their young rivals' products from the markets, in many instances sold their own wares below cost.  Mr. Sheppard had been too well schooled in trials and adversity in his earlier years to be overcome or even intimidated by those he now encountered.  A born manager, as well as a thorough workman, he persevered despite the bitterest opposition, and although he was obliged to compete at ruinous prices with much wealthier firms and combinations avowedly seeking to destroy his business at its inception, he persevered without flinching, and by the close of the third year [1863] had the pleasure of finding that his tactics had prevailed, that opposition had been conquered, and that his business was at last firmly established on its merits. During the critical period of the Civil War and the years immediately following, Mr. Sheppard's energetic management sustained his business through many and severe trials. [p. 37]
And about all of this, as opposed to Sheppard's busy 1850s, and his continuing public life as a Republican political activist, community benefactor, director of other companies (gas works, banks, petroleum exploration), and leading member of fraternal and religious organizations, there is almost no public record.  There are, for example, 96 newspaper articles dealing with these aspects of his life in the Philadelphia press in the database of Pennsylvania newspapers in the Civil War Era.  None mention his principal business.  What we have instead is just the sort of documentation I have used elsewhere to provide some information about other Philadelphia stove foundries, all of which are almost equally unremembered.


(B) The Foundries:

The First Excelsior Stove Works, 7th St. and W. Girard Avenue,
c. 1860-1873:

The arrow points to Sheppard's home, a few minutes round the corner.  From the 1875 G.M. Hopkins Philadelphia Atlas -- see Map Viewer

The Excelsior Stove Works, c. 1870.  The online version permits enlargement and easier legibility.  There does not seem to have been any raw material storage space on site.  The main molding floor is 144 x 49 feet, with a c. 20 x 50 annex, total c. 8,000 square feet. 


The Second Excelsior Stove Works, Berks St. and Third, c. 1873-. 

The new Excelsior Stove Works, from the 1875 G.M. Hopkins Philadelphia Atlas -- see Map Viewer.  The site's great advantage, apart from its size, was its direct railroad access.  It had previously been a railroad depot.   See also this zoomable 1874 map


1873 Hexamer Insurance survey -- zoomable version.  The new foundry was 350 x 65 feet, c. 24,000 square feet, i.e. three times as large as the old, with two cupola furnaces.  The legend to the plan says that there was an 1859 building on the site (the old railroad depot) when he bought it in 1871, and he built his additions in 1872-1873.  He and his partners employed 250 people, two-thirds men, the rest boys, suggesting that these ex-union activists were not averse to diluting skilled labor with cheaper employees.  Six men worked in his on-site pattern shop.  All power came from a 30 h.p. steam engine.  

The Excelsior Works, ten years later (1882) -- by which time the proportion of boys had declined to a quarter, though there were still only 250 employees.  See zoomable version for more detail and legibility.

Principal recent changes were (a) extension of buildings 2-3-4-5 fronting on Montgomery Avenue, and (b) new cupolas, with pollution-controlling cowls, and an overhead rope system for carrying anthracite and pig iron to them; or is it a rope drive from the engine house to the blowers and freight elevators serving each cupola?

There is a good online copy of a lively 1876 engraving of the plant which gives more detail, including the ?rope drive, but not the cowls; instead, it shows why they were needed, probably as spark- and dust-arresters.  It truncates the long buildings to the rear of the front block, probably to suit the dimensions of the print better.  I can't reproduce it here because there is a fee.  But there are no such restrictions on the above, less clear version, which is almost as serviceable.

The Excelsior Stove Works, from the 1895 G.W. Bromley Philadelphia Atlas -- see Map Viewer.  The principal changes in twenty years were the transformation of the Reading Railroad corridor along American Street into a packed industrial district.
  
The Excelsior Stove Works in 1900, viewed from the south-west corner (Fourth and Montgomery).  From Moses King, Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians (New York, 1902), p. 161.    

All that is left of the site today -- basically, the street grid, and not even all of that -- the stretch of Montgomery south of the plant is now grassed over.

Apart from his old home, there is precious little sign of Sheppard's life and work left in Philadelphia now -- the Central and Northeast Manual Training Schools, which he did so much to establish and encourage, have been demolished, the latter as recently as 2013.  But there remains, for the moment, the Isaac A. Sheppard Elementary School, a small, struggling, and vulnerable school for the inner-city poor.  It was named after him in 1908 when it was new, probably because the original Northeast Manual Training School at Girard Avenue and Howard Street, which he had paid to have built, and which was renamed in his honour after his death, was replaced then with the fine building that finally died five years ago.  When it is finally closed and demolished too, almost all trace of Isaac Sheppard will have been erased the city for which he did so much.

The Sheppard School, from this page -- does the plaque over the door memorialize Isaac himself?  I hope so!  See also this image of the other side of the building, and this, in its prime.


(C) The Products:

I have neither seen, nor even seen any references to, surviving early Sheppard catalogues in public collections, though they certainly exist in private hands, and much more research would be needed to discover the patents the firm may have bought.  So here, as a stand-by, are Sheppard's own early patents, as examples:

Isaac Sheppard & Julius Holzer, Cook Stove ("The Monumental"), Design Patent 2098, 1865.  A "square cook" (standard 4-boiler stove) with very conventional sunburst patterns on the panels.  Sheppard & Holzer took the cheap and easy option the Patent & Trademark Office permitted after the mid-1850s of submitting photographs of the plates made to their designs rather than drawings which reproduce better in the PTO online copy, so they are usually not worth showing here.  Sheppard's partners Horn and Biddle witnessed the pictures.  Holzer is in the 1865 Directory as a carver, living at 1215 Jefferson.

Isaac Sheppard, Front Plates of a Range, Design Patent 2099, 1865.  A standard "portable range" decorated with Romanesque arches filled with latticework on its front panels.

Isaac Sheppard, Columbia Cook Stove, Design Patent 2196, 1865.  Another square cook.

Isaac Sheppard, Myrtle Heating Stove, Design Patent 2673, 1867.  A tall, cylindrical heating stove with a cast base, top, and door, the remainder wrought iron.

Isaac Sheppard, Stove Plate or Door, Design Patent 2790, 1867.  A banner with a pseudo-heraldic device -- see below.

Isaac Sheppard, Stove Door, Design Patent 3583, 1867.



Isaac Sheppard, Stove Ornament, Design Patent 3945, 1870.  Less unoriginal than the previous designs.  Sheppard and partners had called their business the Excelsior Stove Works -- whether in imitation of Giles Filley's famous St. Louis enterprise, or simply inspired by the famous Longfellow poem.  What he produced here was the key image from that poem, not just the "banner with a strange device" -- "the figure of a man ascending a rocky hill, and carrying a flag bearing the word 'Excelsior,' ... cast in relief."  Highly decorated, figurative stoves like this were all the fashion in the 1870s.  Sheppard was establishing a brand identity and trademark with this design.



Isaac Sheppard, Plates and Door of a Cook Stove, Design Patent 4319, 1870.  Another square cook, with a floral motif.

Isaac Sheppard, Plates and Door of a Cook Stove, Design Patent 7803, 1874.  Rather fine photo, so worth reproducing here.


Isaac Sheppard, Range, Design Patent 11815, 1880.  A rather old-fashioned 5-boiler "portable range," with its name, The "Magic," emblazoned across its oven door.


What do these design patents show?  Mostly that Sheppard's designs were competent from the beginning, and entirely conventional, as one would expect.  He produced what the market required and contemporary taste demanded, and did so very successfully.  So did his sons Franklin (b. 1852) and Howard (b. 1865), who joined him in management of the business almost as soon as they graduated from college, and kept it going and adapting well into the twentieth century.  (See e.g. their Perfect Cooking [1890], a clever, consumer-focused range catalogue, claiming 75,000 range sales in Philadelphia alone, and Hints About Heating [1892, with an Architects' Edition in 1897], a similar plug for their furnaces.)  They replaced his original partners as the old men died off (Sheeler in 1878, Biddle in 1882, Walton in 1883, and Horn in 1886) and Isaac bought back their shares from their estates, under the terms of their original agreement.  As his sons' roles grew with their experience, they were able to lift the burden of business from his shoulders and leave him free to pursue a career of public service until the end of his life.

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Sources, in chronological order: