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.

The 1619 Project

by Rachel Dworkin, archivist

In August 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia. It would be the first of many to arrive in what would become the United States. Between 1619 and the end of the Civil War, some 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped from their homes and transported against their will to work in American farms, homes, and businesses. A recent issue of the New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project, a series of articles about the long-reaching effects of slavery on America’s history, culture, . A PDF of the article can be found here. I recommend you check it out.

When I was in school, we were taught that slavery was a uniquely Southern institution which our Northern forbearers had rightly put a stop to, but that’s not remotely accurate. The Dutch West India Company brought the first batch of eleven enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in 1626. By 1703, roughly 46% of New York City households held slaves, a higher percentage than any other American city outside of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1799, New York began to gradually abolish slavery. Children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 would be born free, but were required to serve a period of indentured servitude until their 25^th birthday (for girls) or their 28^th (for boys). All slaves born before July 4, 1799 were freed on July 4, 1827, but the children of formerly enslaved mothers were still forced to provide their mothers’ former masters with their unpaid labor until as late 1855. See blog post "Strayed, Stolen or Run Away" for details.

New York’s slaves played an important role in its economy.  The first slaves were owned by the Dutch West India Company and were forced to clear the forests, lay the roads, and do other heavy labor to build the infrastructure of the budding colony. By the time the English took over the colony in 1664, enslaved Blacks were the primary laborers on farms up and down the Hudson River Valley. Under English rule, the importation and sale of slaves became big business, with a slave market established on Wall Street in 1711. Even after the abolition of slavery within the state, New York banks continued to invest heavily in the Southern slave trade.

New York Slave Market, 1730. Image courtesy of New York Public Library

 

While the vast majority of enslaved New Yorkers lived downstate, there were some right here in Chemung County. By 1810, there were thirteen slaves in eleven Elmira households, plus their children who were technically indentured servants. Jacob Lowman, for whom Lowman is named, owned an entire family of enslaved people, including a man called “Black Charley” Smith. Both Jacob Lowman and his son, Jacob Jr., made provisions for Smith’s family in their wills. It is unknown just what sort of labor the Smiths performed for the Lowmans, although the book The Lowmans of Chemung County insists that they were “almost exclusively domestic servants.” The book also tried to paint the Lowmans as especially benevolent masters, which is unsurprising considering it was written by one of their descendants.

Home of Jacob Lowman Sr., built 1819

 

As popular and pernicious as the myth of the good master is, the sad truth is that there were no good masters. The great Terry Pratchett once said that the root of all evil is treating people as things and that is exactly what slavery is. People as things: tools, financial assets, collateral, property. Even if a master never raised a hand to the people they enslaved, they were still relying on the threat of violence to compel labor. State and local laws restricted enslaved people’s ability to travel and runaways were hunted by the community and publically flogged upon capture as a matter of law.

Slavery has left an indelible mark on nearly every facet of our nation. New York State rose to financial prominence on the backs of enslaved peoples and that’s something we should be talking about.  

 

Bank or Canal?

by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

This summer, groups of local students visited the Chemung Valley History Museum. They looked for museum artifacts and documents on a scavenger hunt; heard the true story of the building’s exploding vault (see The Exploding Vault published January 11, 2016); and toured our new exhibit Getting Around: Transportation in Chemung County. They also challenged their engineering skills by designing, building, and testing simple canal boats.

Sometimes an unexpected question or answer gives us to pause and think about history from a different perspective. One of those moments came as we talked about canal boats. When students heard Chemung Canal, many thought we were talking about the bank. But I’ll bet you back in the 1800s, every kid in the area knew about the Chemung Canal.

 

Drawing of Elmira including canal and boats

  

Brief history of the Canal

Inspired by the robust success of the Erie Canal to the north, plans were made to build a canal between Elmira and Watkins Glen. This would connect Elmira’s Chemung River to the Erie Canal, and tap into the growing wealth and prosperity the canal was beginning to bring to western New York. Supporters of the Chemung Canal petitioned the state legislature who granted them the  go-ahead in 1829. Construction on the canal began July 4, 1830. A fairly modest sum of $300,000 was allocated for the project, which in today’s money would be close to 9 million dollars. The proposed canal would be the least expensive canal to date.

 

Photograph of canal construction

It took three years for construction crews to dig the 20-mile canal. Like other canals, it was shaped like the letter ‘u’ and only four feet deep. It reached twenty-six feet across at the base or bottom of the canal and spanned forty-two feet across at the surface. Canals didn’t need to be deep, because traffic on them consisted of canal barges or flat-bottomed boats. Canals were also fairly narrow because tethered humans, horses or working mules pulled them on towpaths along shore. Initial cargo consisted of lumber and agricultural products from the area until increasing demand for Pennsylvania coal dictated the canal be deepened to accommodate larger boats. To do this, workman simply raised the side banks another two feet. Navigating the Chemung Canal took boats two and a half days. They had to travel through the forty-nine locks situated from Elmira to Watkins Glen.

Chemung canal pathway on right side of map

When active, the canal brought prosperity to the area. However, yearly rains damaged the canal, and by 1878 it fell into disrepair. While the canal had been one of the least expensive to build, it had become one of the most costly to maintain. By this time railroads were shipping goods and moving things faster and farther. The Chemung Canal was abandoned and parts of its rights-of-way sold off.

Barge boats at dock along Chemung Canal

Today, parts of the Catharine Valley Trail follow some of the original Chemung Canal towpaths, and the Clemens Center Parkway navigates another part of the canal’s pathway. Unlike the better known Erie Canal to the north, little physical evidence is left of the 20-mile long canal that started in Elmira. 

This summer and fall various Erie Canal events are taking place. The Erie Canal challenge https://eriecanalway.org/explore/challenge is promoting biking, hiking and walking along the pathway at distances of 15, 90, 180, and 360 miles. Although they don’t mention the Chemung Canal, their website does include where to rent kayaks and places to explore near Watkins Glen and Montour Falls. At both places you can see short parts of the Chemung Canal still visible. Mostly the Chemung Canal is a memory.

https://fingerlakessum.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/catherine-valley-trail-bike-from-watkins-glen-to-horseheads/

This map of the Catharine Valley Trail and link share more Chemung Canal hiking and biking opportunities in the area to explore yourself.

The Bank

The Chemung Canal Bank Company started operations in 1833, the same year the nearby canal opened. The very first bank statement issued ten days after opening showed the bank had assets of $318,525 and deposits of over $10,000. A year later, the bank moved into its first permanent home, on East Water Street, now the site of the Chemung Valley History Museum. One of the bank’s founders, an entrepreneur and financier by the name of John Arnot, had emigrated from Scotland and settled in Elmira. He took over as bank president in 1852, and the bank changed its name to the Chemung Canal Trust Company in 1903.

Former Chemung Canal Bank, now home of The Chemung Valley History Museum

It’s easy to assume everyone knows these things, but for people new to the area-which if we think about it includes young students, history needs to be shared. Keeping that memory fresh is what we do here at the Museum.