An American Manufacturing Story: American LaFrance

 By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

Last week I spent two days cataloging a collection of 163 photographs of the final assembly process for an American LaFrance fire truck. Paul Walker, the company’s Director of Engineering from 1983 to 1985, had taken the photos in January 1985 in order to document the process and see how it might be improved. It wasn’t like a modern auto plant with robots on an assembly line. It was just a team of guys working together to assemble a series of pre-fabricated parts to make a fire truck. 

 

The LaFrance Manufacturing Company, founded by Truckson LaFrance, built its first fire engine in late 1873. In those early days, the company made all sorts of things: rail fence machines, cotton pickers, corn shellers, and even railroad locomotives. By the 1880s, however, it was strictly focused on fire engines. In 1903, the company merged with serval other companies to found the American LaFrance Fire Engine Company. For the next 80 years, the company was the premier name in American firefighting equipment and a major Chemung County employer. Then the company left Elmira in 1985 for points south. For the next few decades, it dwindled in size and quality before being picked apart by vulture capitalists. The once-proud company filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and ceased operation altogether in 2014.

At its peak, the American LaFrance plant covered over 48 acres on Elmira’s Southside. The plant included a machine shop, paint shop, warehouses and a main office, plus buildings for pump assembly, cab & body assembly, frame and ladder assembly, engine assembly, and truck assembly. In 1957, 975 people worked at the plant itself with another 1,200 employed as salesmen throughout the country. At the time, they had an annual payroll of $6,500,000 (approximately $73,974,857 today). They completed two trucks a day.

Given the company’s long history in Elmira, it’s no surprise we have quite a bit of it. Here’s a quick rundown of our collections related to the American LaFrance Company:

1.    Two motorized and one horse-drawn fire engines
2.    Collection of 150^th American LaFrance anniversary celebration material, 1982
3.     4.5 linear feet of American LaFrance promotional literature and product guides
4.     2 linear feet of Blazes, the American LaFrance newsletter from 1919-1928, 1940-1954
5.    2 linear feet of photographs of American LaFrance facilities, products, and employees
6.      2 linear feet of glass-plate negatives of American LaFrance products, 1890s-1910s
7.      Nearly 100 technical drawings of American LaFrance products
8.     Papers of former American LaFrance employees including Carol A. Hall, Marshall Cecce, and John Darrow

While none of this material is currently on display, most are available upon request during our regular research hours from 1pm to 5pm, Monday through Friday. The fire engines are stored off-site and researchers must make an appointment at least a week in advance if they want to see them.

The last American LaFrance truck produced in Elmira rolled off the line on June 28, 1985. Paul Walker had a photo of that too. Thank you to his son who donated it along with all the others. If you have American LaFrance material or stories you’d like to share, we would love to hear from you. Contact me at (607) 734-4167 ex. 207 or archivist@chemungvalleymuseum.org. 

Last fire truck from the Elmira American LaFrance plant & team who built it, June 28, 1985

 

Elmira Rolling Mills

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

There’s something neat about shows like How It’s Made. If you, like me, have never worked in manufacturing, industrial processes can feel like something of a mystery. Over the years, Elmirans have made everything from aluminum cans to woolen cloth. From 1861 to 1883, the Elmira Rolling Mill Co. made iron.

The Elmira Rolling Mill Co. was founded in 1860. On May 16, 1861, the plant, located on Hatch Street between East 5^th and East Washington Streets, began operation. The original structure was 180’ by 80’ and had five furnaces and three steam engines. The plant grew substantially during the 1860s with the addition of two new buildings. By 1865, the mill consisted of three buildings housing the original rolling mill, plus two pudding mills, and a merchant bar mill. The equipment included 24 furnaces, 8 steam engines, 5 trains of rolls, two roll lathes, and one Burden squeezer. The company was using all this equipment to manufacture 22,000 tons of iron each year.

Here’s how it all worked.

Step 1 – Arrival of Raw Materials

In order to make their iron, the Elmira Rolling Mills needed massive amounts of raw iron and coal. These materials arrived at the plant on canal boats and on the dedicated rail spurs which ran to the factory. 

Canal boats unloading in front of Elmira Rolling Mills, ca. 1870

 Step 2 – Heating the Materials

The raw iron needed to be heated in order to burn off any impurities and to make it malleable. It was usually heated to somewhere above 462 degrees Fahrenheit. This is iron’s recrystallization temperature, or the point at which the iron’s previous crystalline structure is broken down and reformed anew but not yet melted.

At the Elmira Rolling Mills, this was done in coal-fired pudding furnaces. Pudding is the process of converting raw iron into usable wrought iron by heating it in a special furnace where the metal and the fuel were not in direct contact. The process was first developed in England in the 1780s. I have no idea why it’s called pudding. Heated iron can absorb chemical impurities given off by the burning fuel. Coal, for example, gives off sulfur which can make the metal brittle. By using a pudding mill, the Elmira Rolling Mills could heat their iron using coal without having to worry about introducing sulfur to their iron.

Diagram of a pudding furnace

 Step 3 – Squeezing

Once the iron was removed from the pudding furnace, it needed to be forced into a useable shape. Traditionally, this was done by teams of strong men with big hammers. In 1840, Henry Burden of Troy, New York, invented his rotary concentric squeezer which performed the same task with a lot less time and effort. The Elmira Rolling Mills had a Burden squeezer they used to force their heated iron into shape.

Step 4 – Rolling

Rolling is a metalworking process where heated metal stock is forced through one or more pairs of rollers to reduce thickness or give it a more uniform shape. A series of multiple rollers is known as a train. The first roll produces a plate of metal. A slitting, latte, or bar roller is used to slice the metal up into bars of various widths, shapes, and thicknesses. 

 The Elmira Rolling Mills had five trains of rolls which could produce square bars, round bars, oval bars, half-round bars, and half-oval bars in various thicknesses.  The company used coal-fired steam engines to power their rollers. 

Step 5 – Sale

Initially, the Elmira Rolling Mill’s main clients were railroads for whom they made rails. In 1863, the company added a merchant bar mill so they could offer iron bars in more shapes and sizes to a wide variety of clients.

 

At its peak, the Elmira Rolling Mills employed around 400 people and was one of the city’s largest employers. By the 1880s, the railroad industry had switched to using steel for their rails. The company was not equipped for steel manufacturing and found it could not keep up with the manufacturing centers of Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. In 1883, the workers went on strike for higher wages. In response, the company permanently shut their doors. Although iron is no longer made in Elmira, the process used at the Elmira Rolling Mills is largely still used today, abet with different power sources.

Working at the Elmira Knitting Mills

by Erin Doane, Curator

Elmira Knitting Mills was one of the first industries in Elmira Heights. It was founded in 1893 by five Elmira men – Matthias Arnot, Charles M. Tompkins, Harlan H. Hallock, Casper G. Decker, and William Bilbrough – for the manufacture and sale of woolen, cotton, and silk goods and garments. For 70 years, it was a major employer of hundreds of men, women, and children in the area. From the beginning, it drew in new employees with promises of steady work in a pleasant, clean, safe environment. The company was not always able to keep those promises.

Elmira Knitting Mills in Elmira Heights with employees, c. 1895

There’s no real way to know if the promise of a pleasant workplace was fulfilled. The company ran frequent help wanted ads in the local newspapers to recruit new employees. That may be a sign that it wasn’t as pleasant or clean a place to work as the company claimed. Conditions in the factory were likely similar to other textile mill at the time with stifling temperatures in the summer, loud machinery, and clouds of lint in the air that was impossible to keep out of employees’ lungs. In 1956, there were reports of noxious odors emanating from the mill property. The smells were coming from a pond next to the factory into which waste dyes used in the plant were dumped. That doesn’t seem particularly clean or pleasant.

Star-Gazette, July 16, 1956

The promise of safety is a bit easier to quantify. Over the years, various accidents at Elmira Knitting Mills made it into the newspaper. In 1895, a 14-year-old boy who had just started working at the mill that day was injured while riding in the elevator. He was looking over the edge when his head got caught between the elevator and the floor. Fortunately, a worker saw and was able to stop the elevator before he suffered more than a bad scalp wound, a broken chin, and several knocked-out teeth. In the 1910s, at least two employees cut their hands so badly on machinery at the mill that they had to have fingers amputated. In 1944, an 18 year old suffered chemical burns on his hands. That same year, a man lost two toes when his right foot got caught in an elevator. No word if it was the same elevator in which the 14-year-old was injured years before.

View inside the sewing department at Elmira Knitting Mills, c. 1900

The promise of steady work was one that was fairly easy for Elmira Knitting mills to keep during both World Wars. In 1918, the factory turned to war production. It manufactured 159,000 winter drawers and 13,000 winter undershirts for soldiers fighting in the Great War. The recession after 1920 brought hard times, but the company was able to partially overcome its financial problems by introducing the production of women’s rayon underwear. When World War II came around, the company received lucrative contacts to produce gloves, sweaters, underwear, and other clothing for the U.S. military.

Display of products of Elmira Knitting Mills, 1944

In 1945, right after the war, the plant underwent major upgrades. New sewing machines, new tables, and better lighting were added. Changes were also made in how employees worked. Better groupings of workers on single projects were made, rest periods of 10 minutes were added in mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and a public address system played music for about 15 minutes each hour. The previous staff of about 350 was reduced to 250, but production increased because of the improvements that had been made. So, for about 100 employees, work abruptly stopped being steady.

Elmira Knitting Mills, 1941

Despite the reduction in the workforce, Elmira Knitting Mills enjoyed post-war prosperity for years. In 1957, the mill manufactured 120,000 cotton garments a week including shirts, panties for women, children’s sports shirts, pajamas, and children’s bibs. It produced 25 different items in all. It sold primarily to chain stores, but also did work for the military, making over 12 million shirts for the Army, Navy, and Marines. The company did about $2.5 million in business a year.

By the early 1960s, however, business went into steep decline because of increased competition and the loss of major contract from two of the company’s large customers. In September 1963, Elmira Knitting Mills closed its doors for good.

Typhoid and Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Company

by Rachel Dworkin, archivist

The other day, I watched an interesting YouTube video on the long-term cultural and political impact of the Bubonic Plague in Western Europe. At this point, it’s too early in the game to speculate about the fallout from COVID-19, but you would be surprised at just how much earlier diseases have impacted our local economy. Let’s talk typhoid.

Typhoid is an infection caused by the bacteria Salmonella enterica entrica. Symptoms include high fever, body ache, abdominal pain, rash, and vomiting. It is contracted by consuming food or drink contaminated with feces from an infected person. Today, it is perfectly treatable with antibiotics, but, before their invention in the 1940s, it was often fatal. During the Civil War, for example, some 80,000 soldiers died of it. While there are still the occasional outbreaks throughout the developing world, typhoid is incredibly rare within the United States and one local company is part of the reason why.

During the 1880s, there were a series of typhoid outbreaks across upstate New York. Dr. Hervey D. Thatcher of Potsdam, New York, was convinced contaminated milk was the culprit and began devising a way to fight the spread. In those days, the collecting of milk was extremely unsanitary. Cows were milked into open pails in barns filled with dust and dung, often by farmers who had not washed their hands. In 1883, he patented a device he called the milk protector which allowed the milk to flow into a covered container without human hands coming in contact with either the milk or the cow. It was a step in the right direction, but it still wasn’t enough for Thatcher.

Dr. Hervey Thatcher

At the time, the milkman would come around with a large can from which he would ladle a customer’s milk into a vessel of their choice. In the spring of 1884, Thatcher was horrified to witness a little girl dropping her rag doll into an open can of milk, only for the milkman to fish it out and continue serving her mother. For the next two years, Thatcher worked on perfecting a sealable, reusable glass milk bottle to prevent such contamination. In 1886, he obtained a patent and began having his bottles hand blown by a company in New Jersey. Throughout the 1880s, he made a series of improvements to his designs to make them easier to seal and manufacture.

Thatcher's first bottle design

In 1898, Elmira lawyer and businessman Francis Baldwin met Dr. Thatcher and soon purchased the company. Hand blowing the bottles was slow going and he wanted to try making them on the Owens vacuum machine, which would allow for fully automated manufacturing. Over the next decade, he opened plants in Kane, Pennsylvania (1906); Streeter, Illinois (1909); and Elmira, New York (1913).

Throughout the 1900s and 1910s, the company campaigned hard to get dairy farmers to see their sealed, reusable glass bottles as a more sanitary and economical alternative to the old milk cans. By the 1930s, states and municipalities across the country had laws requiring the use of milk bottles for distribution. As series of competitors sprang up across the country, producing bottles for local their dairies.

The Elmira plant was located just north of Eldridge Park. At the time, it was the largest milk bottle manufacturing plant in the world at 86,000 square feet with three furnaces capable of producing 500 bottles a day. The plant continued to expand. During its heyday, it was making 1.25 million bottles a day. In 1957, they employed 1,350 people locally with an annual payroll of over $6 million. Although the company had half-a-dozen plants across the country, Elmira was the corporate headquarters. In 1962, they constructed a research center in Big Flats on the corner of Colonial Drive and County Road 35.

Aerial view of the Elmira plant, ca. 1960s

Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Company became a subdivision of Dart Industries in 1966. In 1985, they were acquired by Diamond-Bathurst which then went bust in 1987. Today the site is the home of Anchor Glass, which still uses it to make bottles. Between 1913 and now, literally thousands of Chemung County residents have had jobs, all thanks to one man’s quest to stop the spread of typhoid.

Digitize This!

by Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

Who doesn’t love a good digital collection? It’s just so handy having everything right there at your fingertips instead of having to schlep all over creation to track it down.  Why isn’t everything digitized? Well, for one thing, it takes a whole lot more effort than you think.

Way back in 2015, the folks from the Corning Museum of Glass’s Rakow Library approached me about digitizing the Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Company Collection. From 1905 to 1985, the company produced milk, beer, and juice bottles, as well as other food containers right here in Elmira. Our collection includes bottle and container designs, company newsletters, advertising, annual reports, financial reports, correspondence regarding corporate lobbying, and other administrative records. If you’re into the history of bottles or glass or manufacturing or labor or environmental lobbying, this is the collection for you. I was excited at the prospect of digitizing it, but I knew from experience it would be a job of work, and one which would keep me from my usual duties. We decided to apply for a $10,000 grant from the South Central Regional Library Council so we could hire someone to help with the project. In the spring of 2016, we received $5,000 and off we went.

 Contrary to popular belief, the first step in any digitization project is not scanning: it’s planning. Since we only received half of the money we requested, we needed to prioritize which parts of the collection would be digitized. We decided to start with the 3.5 linear feet of bottle designs, then move on to company newsletters, and finish with as much promotional material as we could until the funds ran out.





Priority 1 - bottle and jar designs

Priority 2 - Company newsletters

Priority 3 - Advertising and promotional material

Next, we had to figure out metadata. For those of you who aren’t professional librarians, metadata is information about an image. The right metadata can not only let viewers know what they are looking at, it can also make it easier to find that image in the first place. The trick is figuring out the right metadata for the project. When we collaborated with the Chemung County Library District on a digital collection of historic flood photos our metadata fields included photographer, location, date, and flood. Since those fields wouldn’t work for the Thatcher bottle designs, we settled on project number, client, bottle type, designer, and date(s) of creation.

With our plan in one hand and a big wad of cash in the other, we hired Corning Community College student, Christina to do all the scanning and data entry. She got started working back in December and has already fully digitized 570 items. At this rate we will be on schedule to have the collection on-line by this time next year.

Remington Typewriters: "To Save Time is to Lengthen Life"

by Erin Doane, curator

There is a lot of history in old typewriters. CCHS has a collection of nearly a dozen Remington typewriters spanning nearly three-quarters of a century of history. Remington produced the first commercial typewriter in the 1870s. Mark Twain is said to have been the first American novelist to produce a manuscript on a typewriter. That typewriter happened to be a Remington. For over 35 years, the Remington Rand plant produced typewriters and office machines on Elmira’s south side.

Remington Rand employees having lunch at the plant

Christopher Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin began developing the first practical typewriter in 1866. For seven years, he and two friends, Samuel W. Soule and Carlos Glidden, built and tested various designs until they finally had a working model – the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. In 1873, Sholes and his financial backer, James Densmore, contracted with E. Remington & Sons to produce the typewriter. In September of that year, the Remington No. 1 became the first ever commercially produced typewriter. The Remington No. 1 was also the first to have the QWERTY keyboard that is still used today rather than an alphabetically arranged keyboard. Sholes developed the new layout to keep the type bars from colliding so one could type faster.

Remington Standard Typewriter No. 6, produced from 1894 to 1914

In 1886, the Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company bought the typewriter business from Remington. Standard Typewriter also bought the rights to continue using the Remington name, which by that time had developed a solid reputation. In 1902, Standard Typewriter changed its name to Remington Typewriter Company. The company merged with Rand Kardex Bureau in 1927 to form Remington Rand.

Remington Portable Typewriter, produced from 1920-1925

In the 1920s Remington adopted “To Save Time is to

Lengthen Life” as the advertising slogan for its typewriters.

In 1935, the idle Willys Morrow plant on South Main Street in Elmira went up for auction. Elmira Industries, Inc. bought the factory for $350,000 and offered it for free to Remington Rand if the company would relocate there. In 1936, Elmira Precision Tool Co. started making typewriter parts at the factory on contract for Remington Rand and a year later Remington Rand purchased the plant. During World War II, Remington Rand switched from manufacturing typewriters and business machines to wartime production. The top secret Norden bombsight was produced by Remington Rand in Elmira.

Remington Rand Model No. 17 was widely used

in government offices during World War II

Remington Rand had a huge backlog of civilian orders to fill when the war came to an end. In 1945, the Elmira plant produced 2,500 typewriters and 700 adding machines a week to try to catch up on the orders. Each typewriter had 2,893 parts and every one of them (except for the electric motor) were made at the plant. In the 1950s, the plant in Elmira was one of the largest office equipment factories in the world. At its peak, it employed over 6,500 employees. Remington Rand was acquired by Sperry Corporation in 1955. Sperry-Rand Corp. continued to use Remington Rand as a brand name.

Remington Standard Typewriter, c. 1950s.

The plant underwent an extensive redesign and modernization program in 1963 but business was beginning to slow following the post-war boom of the 1950s. The 119-day strike at the plant in 1969 had a considerable impact on Remington Rand and on the local economy as well. Workers lost pay during the strike and the plant fell behind in orders. The company threatened to shut down the plant and lay off the 1,850 workers but eventually both sides came to an agreement and the plant reopened. In 1972, however, the Remington Rand plant in Elmira closed for good. It just could not compete with cheaper machines being manufactured overseas. 

Elmira’s Remington Rand plant, April 1965

Remington Typewriter, c. 1960s