American Heritage MagazineAugust 1974    Volume 25, Issue 5
POSTSCRIPTS TO HISTORY
 

THE SHOVEL AS HISTORY


The troops digging in on the heights above Boston Harbor in 1775 used shovels manufactured by a neighbor named John Ames in nearby North Easton. A hundred and seventy years and many wars later the Ames Shovel and Tool Works sent upward of eleven million entrenching shovels to Allied troops in the Second World War. Today the Ames company, now in Parkersburg, West Virginia, is still prospering. With a two-hundred-year history behind it Ames is America’s oldest hardware manufacturing company still producing its original product.

The Ames company ceased its operations in the North in the mid-1950’s, and two years ago Arnold Tofias, a Massachusetts real-estate developer, bought the old Easton shovel works. Along with the property there came an enormous trove of old records and memorabilia dating back to the origins of the company. Tofias was so impressed by the scope of these archives that he donated them to Stonehill College in Easton. During last summer members of the history department there cleaned and began to sort the great amount of material, which will eventually be catalogued and arranged for scholarly research. What is emerging is the unique record of a business that grew step by step with the country—payroll data, bills, accounts receivable, material on work hours, and so forth.

The shovel, simple tool though it is, has played a major part in the development of America. John Ames started out in 1774 and continued producing his iron shovel until his son Oliver took over the business in 1803. Thirty-three years later Oliver Ames & Son employed sixty men in three factories, turning out nearly five hundred shovels a day. Ames shovels dug trenches in the Mexican War and the Civil War, moved dirt for the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal, and, in the widening scope of twentieth-century conflicts, saw service in the Argonne, at Bastogne, and at Iwo Jima. The two centuries of records, with their implications of great events and changes in American business practices, represent a most unusual historical find and one that we are pleased is being preserved.

 

FAREWELL TO THE FEATHER DUSTER


In sad contrast to Ames’s history is the quiet passing of another American industry. When a Chicagoan named William Hoag got snowbound in Monticello, Iowa, in 1872, he passed the time by inventing the turkey feather duster. It was a simple enough idea, but nobody had thought of it before. Turkey feathers are a natural magnet for dust, and Hoag’s invention made things a little easier for generations of janitors, librarians, housewives, and maids. Hoag set up a factory in Monticello, and for a century he and his descendants manufactured millions of brightly colored feather dusters. In his three-story factory feathers were steam-cleaned, sorted out by length, and dyed, split, and bundled together on wooden handles. Monticello residents grew old in the service of the Hoag Duster Company and passed on to have their places taken by their children and grandchildren. In its peak years the small town accounted for half the world’s production of feather dusters. What is surprising, perhaps, is not that the company has folded but that it held on for so long. The last few years have not been kind to the industry; turkey feathers, which once went for fifteen cents a pound, now cost three dollars a pound, and the machines that pluck turkeys today tend to mutilate the feathers. Labor has gone from ten cents an hour (seven and a half cents for women) to a dollar sixty. Still, for all this, Mrs. Shirley Hoag Eden, last owner of the company started by her great-grandfather, managed to stay in business. But finally, last winter, the plant’s antiquated boiler blew, and production came to a halt. Mrs. Eden considered paying the ten-thousand-dollar repair bill, but the new era of vacuum cleaners and aerosol cans dissuaded her. A company that manufactures computer circuit boards bought the old factory, and the Hoag Duster Company went to join the thousands of other small privately owned manufactories that once played so large a role in our national enterprise. When the doors closed, the company that had at one time been the economic mainstay of Monticello employed twelve persons.

 

BULBS


It would seem that anybody who wishes to see a feather duster will, in a few years, be out of luck. Not so the person who feels a pang of nostalgia for those huge old clear-glass light bulbs, with their spectacular coils of filament. The Society for Industrial Archeology has announced that its latest member is an unlikely institution that has been operating for over a decade—the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting, in Baltimore. Here the visitor can see the whole panoply of the history and development of the incandescent electric lamp. On display are six hundred bulbs—historical, miniature, decorative, and the longest and largest. These wonders represent only 20 percent of the museum’s collection, as the rest are out on loan to other institutions.

 

THE GIRLS THEY LEFT BEHIND THEM


Mrs. Angela Davalos Moran, who lives in a small town near Mexico City, has been tracked down and given some good news by the Veterans’ Administration—her Veterans’ Administration pension will be increased from seventy dollars to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Mrs. Moran is the hundred-and-seventeen-year-old widow of a Civil War veteran. In announcing this the Veterans’ Administration added the astonishing fact that at last count there were two hundred and seventy-two Civil War widows still alive and drawing their pensions.

 

AMERICAN DYNASTS


The formidable family firm of Burke’s Peerage, Ltd., which for a century and a half has been publishing a Who’s Who of British aristocracy, is now looking across the Atlantic to our republic for a new publishing venture. Hoping to start an American counterpart to Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, Burke’s has a squad of freelance researchers tracking down living descendants of United States Presidents for inclusion in a forthcoming nine-hundred-page work to be called Burke’s Presidential Families of the United States of America. It is a formidable task —Jefferson alone, for example, has more than eleven hundred legitimate descendants. In a fine spirit of democracy the female descendants of Presidents will be listed among their brothers in order of their birth—Burke’s lists British noblewomen after their brothers because of the English tradition of primogeniture. Daughters of the Confederacy will be happy to hear that there will be a special section on the descendants of Jefferson Davis, and Tories will glory in an appendix dealing with Presidents of royal descent. The book is to appear late this year or early in 1975. We wish Burke’s all good luck with this project, but we can’t help feeling that somehow they’re missing the point.