it was eventually changed to Putnam.24
Patented in 1848, Christian Sharps’s breech-loading rifle quickly replaced the cumbersome muzzleloader.25 For Frog Hollow, the Sharps factory was a goose laying one golden egg after another. During the Civil War, the Sharps rifle was popular with both U.S. and Confederate troops.26 The Sharps company was paid a royalty of one dollar per rifle, or nearly thirty in today’s dollars. Henry Ward Beecher, who was the younger brother of Harriet, said that one Sharps—later known as “Old Reliable”—carried more moral weight than one hundred Bibles, a statement that confounded some of the members of his Brooklyn, N.Y., church. Newspapers carried stories that rifles were shipped in boxes labeled “books” and “Bibles” to aid people in Kansas who opposed slavery. The press had a field day with “Beecher’s Bibles.”27 Throughout the war, the Daily Courant carried notices that the factory was hiring.28 Unemployment was minimal.
Sharps was the first factory of any significant size in Frog Hollow, but it was quickly followed by others. Jobs brought people like Charles Billings, a machinist of old New England stock. One of Billings’s ancestors, Richard, had been granted six acres in Hartford in 1640, but later the family moved north to Vermont. At age seventeen Billings began an apprenticeship with Robbins & Lawrence Co., gun makers and machinists in Windsor, Vermont. As was common at the time, Billings’s family agreed to provide board, lodging, and clothing in exchange for his instruction and a salary of fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty cents for the first, second, and third year of labor. Billings served his indenture then moved to Hartford to work at Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co., which was then considered the premier gun maker on the East Coast.
Colt’s, which was located east of the neighborhood near the Connecticut River, was also an early laboratory for many early industrial innovators. There on the oil-soaked floors, Billings worked as a die-sinker in the drop-forging department, where the machinery was complicated and expensive to maintain. Drop forge is a process used to shape metal into complex shapes by dropping a heavy hammer with a die on its face onto a piece of metal. The process involved “a rough-forming stroke in a drop forge, a pressing operation to trim off the unwanted ‘flash,’ and a finishing stroke in another drop forge.”29
Weed Sewing Machine plant, c. 1889, Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1862 Billings moved to E. Remington & Sons in Utica, N.Y., where he began streamlining the drop-forging process and increased the company’s efficiency by “40-fold,” according to the 1901 Commemorative Biographical Record of Hartford County, Conn.30 After saving Remington some fifty thousand dollars, he returned to Hartford in 1865 to work at Weed Sewing Machine Co., where he revolutionized drop-forging 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
