Matchless Mechanicville
MATCHLESS MECHANICVILLE
Paul Loatman, Ph.D-May 9, 2007
Mechanicville City Historian
“GOT A LIGHT?” This innocuous query was often posed to complete strangers during the hey-day of America’s love-affair with cigarette smoking in the first half of twentieth century. More likely than not, the questioner received a positive response. Even some non-smokers were known to carry book-matches that allowed them to perform small favors at little or no cost to themselves. Today, disposable lighters have made book-matches obsolete, obscuring the fact that what is now an everyday convenience was once regarded as a costly luxury. The Diamond Match Company would begin mass-producing inexpensive book-matches in Ohio in 1896, but this breakthrough was largely dependent upon innovations introduced by two Mechanicville “inventors” six decades earlier.
Jehu Hatfield and Joll Farnam, local spittoon and pottery makers, are credited with taking a giant leap forward in lighting the way to the future in the early 19th century. Lest we forget, America in the1830s was still a frontier society where the ability to start a fire and keep warm for the night often meant the difference between life and death. Thus-any innovation simplifying this process came to be regarded as something of a Godsend. Initially, wooden Prometheans were deemed sufficient to keeping the home fires burning. However, they required users to carry a small vial of sulfuric acid surrounded by flammable papers in their pockets. You do not need to be a chemist to see the danger this posed. An alternative method was available, but it required the rubbing of wooden fire-sticks between two pieces of chemically treated glass-like papers. While the process worked in optimal circumstances, the expense involved and its unreliabilty made it unappealing to most people. Into this breach, our two Mechanicville entrepreneurs stepped forward to simplify the whole process.
While bargaining with an importer for dishware, the partners became fascinated with some French “fire-sticks” offered for sale on the New York docks. After returning home, Hatfield spent a good deal of time attempting to crack the chemical formula that ignited the devices. Once he succeeded in doing so, he immediately realized the potential his breakthrough created for establishing a lucrative monopoly to meet the growing demand for his product throughout the United States. He now claimed that he had invented the first friction matches, widely known as locofocos, the name from the term’s Latin roots: loco, “self-moving” and fuoco, “fire.” With visions of fame, glory, and fortune dancing before his eyes, Farnam filed a patent, expecting to turn his local pottery plant into a massive match-making operation. As fate would have it, a technical filing error exposed the incipient monopoly to the competition of those equally willing to “reinvent” French originals as our two Mechanicville industrial pioneers had been. Yet, despite their failure to strike it rich, our local industrial pioneers did leave an indelible imprint upon American political history.
In 1835, the conservative wing of the New York Democratic Party attempted to squelch a factional challenge to its authority during a political caucus by extinguishing the gas-lit lamps illuminating the meeting. However, the undaunted insurgents succeeded in continuing their rebellion with the aid of candles fired by Mechanicville friction matches. Subsequent attempts to denigrate these political upstarts by derisively dismissing them as “locofocos” backfired. For decades thereafter, liberal Democrats across the nation proudly adopted the banner of “locofocoism” on their political escutcheons to identify their program.
A denouement of sorts occurred many years later in Mechanicville. Both Hatfield and Farnam quickly abandoned their original venture to seek greener pastures elsewhere, with Farnam turning match production over to his assistant, Thomas Terry, who peddled his wares throughout the Northeast down until the Civil War era. Before his death in 1883, this Mechanicville native used the money he had earned in merchandising friction matches to put his two sons through law school. In due course, each of them went on to play a significant role in local politics in both Saratoga and Washington counties. They both won seats in the New York State Legislative Assembly and held various political offices well into the 20th century. Although they were elected as Republicans, it might well be argued that their success testified to the persistency of “locofocoism” long after match-making had passed from the local scene.
[This is another of occasional pieces written for a journal that features brief aspects of communities in “Tech Valley” in upstate New York.]