USA > Virginia > Rockbridge County > Rockbridge County > A history of Rockbridge County, Virginia > Part 39
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In this case there was a verdict of the jury for the complainant awarding $7,750.00 as damages, and judgment was entered in favor of complainant for over $10,000.00. The case was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States as Seymour v. McCormick, (19 How. 96). That court affirmed the judgment below except with respect to the taxation of costs, and gave McCormick the full amount of damages awarded.
In the subsequent suit of McCormick v. Manny and others for the infringe- ment of the patents of 1845 and 1847, Justice McClean, of the United States Supreme Court, after finding that no infringment was shown, concluded his opinion as follows (6 McClean 557) :
Having arrived at the result, that there is no infringment of the plaintiff's patent by the defendant, as charged in the bill, it is announced with greater satisfaction, as it in no respect impairs the right of the plaintiff. He is left in full possession of his invention, which has so justly secured to him, at home and in foreign countries, a renown honorable to him and to his country-a renown which can never fade from the memory, so long as the harvest home shall be gathered."
Although as the result of widespread opposition stirred up by rival manu- facturers, neither the Patent Office nor Congress would grant McCormick an extension of either his original or subsidiary patents, he succeeded, neverthe- less, by sheer force of ability, in keeping ahead of all competitors. He did this by continually improving his reaper through the adoption of new devices and by the creation of business methods which carried his machine into every section of his own country and into all the great harvest fields of the world. He sold his machines on credit, and he made it a rule never to sue a farmer for the price of a reaper.
It was shortly after the expiration of his first patent that his triumphs in the way of formal recognition of the value of his invention began. In 1851 he was awarded the silver medal of the Michigan State Agricultural Society, the gold
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medal of the Mechanics' Institute of Chicago, the first premium of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, and the first premium of the State Agricultural Society of Wisconsin; in 1852 he was awarded the first premium of the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society and the gold medal of the New York State Agricultura! Society But his greatest triumph was the Council Medal of the World's Fair at London, 1851, the first great international exposition. Here the reaper created a veritable sensation. The London Times of September 27. 1851, said :
"It will be remembered that the American department was at first regarded as the poorest and least interesting of all foreign countries. Of late it has justly assumed a position of the first importance, as having brought to the aid of our distressed agriculturists a machine, which, if it realizes the anticipations of com- petent judges, will amply remunerate England for all her outlay connected with the great exhibition. The reaping machine from the United States is the most valuable contribution from abroad to the stock of our previous knowledge that we have yet discovered, and several facts in connection with it are not a little remarkable." Mr. Pusey, a member of Parliament, and one of the committee of award, said in a letter to the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society : "It's novelty of action reminded one of seeing the first engine run on the Liver- pool and Manchester Railway in 1830. * It is certainly strange that we should not have had it over before, nor indeed, should we have it now, but for the great Exhibition, to whose royal originator the English farmer is charly indebted for the introduction of the most important addition to farming ma- chinery that has been invented since the threshing machine first took the place of the flail."
Referring to the sensation created by McCormick's reaper at the London Exhibition, William H Seward, in an argument before the Circuit Court of the United States in 1854, said: "The reaper of 1834, as improved in '45, achieved for its inventor a triumph which all then felt and acknowledged was not more a per onal one than it was a National one. It was justly so regarded. No General or Con ul drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome by order of the Senate, ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus vindicated the geum of our country at the World's Exhibition of Art in the Metropolis of the British Empire."
Thi was merely the first of a series of European triumphs achieved by Mccormick A few years later he received the cross of the Legion of Honor at the bands of the Emperor Louis Napoleon, and a similar decoration from the Emperor of Austria He was elected corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences "as having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
Reverdy Johnson said in 1859 in an argument before the Commissioner of
ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY COURT HOUSE
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Patents : "He (McCormick) has contributed an annual income to the whole country of fifty millions of dollars at least, which must increase through all time."
Some idea as to the tremendous significance of the reaper as an economic factor in the life of the nation may be formed from the following expressions. Edwin M. Stanton said: "The reaper is to the North what slavery is to the South. By taking the place of regiments of young men in the Western harvest fields, it releases them to do battle for the Union at the front, and at the same time keeps up the supply of bread for the nation and the nation's armies. Thus, without McCormick's invention I fear the North could not win, and the Union would be dismembered." In the same address Stanton, pointing to a map to prove his statement, said that "McCormick's invention in Virginia, thirty years before, had carried permanent civilization westward more than fifty miles a year." Seward once made substantially the same statement as to the effect of the reaper in carrying the frontier westward at a rapid rate.
The reaper has made life easier for the toiling millions and enabled the production of food to keep pace with the vast increase of population. The name of Cyrus Hall McCormick is one that Rockbridge County may well hold in proud remembrance.
JAMES E. A. GIBBS AND HIS SEWING MACHINE
In the latter half of the eighteenth century the more civilized nations were slowly yet surely feeling their way toward an abandonment of the well-nigh ex- clusive absence of labor-saving machinery which had been true of the world's history since time immemorial. The movement has been marked by a constant gain in momentum, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the ultimate dominance of machinery was an assured fact. This tendency of the age had first to obtain a mastery over the stubborn conservatism which even yet influences the greater portion of mankind. Thus the first practical sewing-machine, the device of a French tailor, excited the rage of a furious Parisian crowd in 1841. The little factory was wrecked and the inventor was nearly murdered.
Yet the French machine aroused very little attention in Europe. It was in America that mechanical sewing was perfected. About 1834. Walter Hunt, of the state of New York, elaborated a machine with a vibrating arm, a curved. eye-pointed needle, an oscillating shuttle, and a lockstitch action. But no patent was sought, and no serious attempt was made to exploit the invention. An Englishman saw his opportunity and patented the needle in 1841. The first patent for a lock-stitch machine was taken out by Elias Howe, of Massachusetts, in 1846, and yet the essential features in his device were present in Hunt's. Allen B. Wilson came forward in 1850 with a rotary hook and bobbin combination and a feed for making the cloth move after each stitch. Next year William O.
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A HISTORY OF ROCKBRIDGE. COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Grover, a Boston tailor, patented his double chain-stitch action, and a differing machine was patented by Isaac M. Singer. These four machines, the Howe, the Wheeler and Wilson, the Grover and Baker, and the Singer, were holding the field when James E. A. Gibbs appeared with his chain-stitch invention in 1856. All four were crude and noisy as compared with the artistic machines of the twentieth century. At first the apparatus was designed to lie on a table or other support, and to be turned by the right hand. The foot-working attach- ment came later.
Richard Gibbs, born in Connecticutt in 1788, became fatherless when only four years old, and was sent to Vermont to be reared by a Mr. Allen, a great uncle. The boy was a descendant in the male line of John Gibbs, an early settler of the Nutmeg State. On the maternal side he sprang from John Burr, John Talcot, one of the founders of Hartford, and Joseph Hawley, an ancestor of the late United States Senator of the same name. About 1815 Richard Gibbs came to Fairfax county in a wagon, bringing the first carding machinery yet scen in the Old Dominion. A carding mill on Bull Run proved unsuccessful because of the unfavorable influence of the slavery system. In quest of a more favorable location, he came to Rockbridge, and thus secured somewhat of the advantage which would have been his had he gone Westward rather than Southward. In this county he spent the rest of his days, his death taking place in 1858 at the age of seventy. In 1819 he was married to Isabella G. Poague, of the Raphine neighborhood. His health permanently failed, but he followed the carding business until his mill was destroyed by fire in 1845.
James Edward Allen Gibbs, son of Richard and Isabella, was born near Raphine, August 1. 1829. Until he was sixteen he carded in the summer season and went to school in the winter. After the burning of his father's mill he left home with no more than his mother's blessing and the clothes he wore. For a while he continued to work at the carding trade. For a year or so he operated a carding mill at Lexington, leasing it from the owner, but the experi- ence threw hun into debt About 1850 he went to Huntersville, then the county set of Pocahontas, where he was taken into the carding business as a partner. but the mill was not financially successful and he sold out his interest. He per- ceived that carding was being absorbed by the large woolen factories that were 11 tene up It wa in this village that Gibbs originated his first invention. y laclo was an improvement in carding machinery He was without the means to follow up ha drenvers, and the machine was not patented.
The best hiteen years in the career of the young man mark a period of ventade He joined a surveying party in the woods of Randolph and cut la redt kier the comrades bandaged the wound as well as they could, left limon a flat rock with food, water, rifle, and ammunition, and went fifteen miles
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for help and a stretcher. He was in some danger from the wolves, panthers, and bears that haunted the unbroken wilderness, but there was no other harm than the delay in a proper treatment of his hurt. Gibbs was taken to the house of Alexander Logan at Mingo Flat, where he lay six months, crippled with a white swelling. He had nothing with which to pay his kind entertainers, and nothing was exacted from him. But when his circumstances had become easy, he remembered William Logan, the young man who was his principal nurse, and set him up in business at Midway.
After his recovery, Gibbs went to Nicholas county, and in the winter of 1851-52 built a saw and gristmill for Colonel Samuel Given. It was in this household that he found a wife. He was married to Catharine Given, August 25, 1852. The father-in-law offered 500 acres of land and the other essential help for a start in farming. Preferring to see what was going on in the world, Gibbs went back to Pocahontas, where he worked three years as a carpenter. The new trade was one he had never learned in any formal manner, yet he worked on a new courthouse at Huntersville, and was the architect of several buildings considered fine at that time.
It was during this episode at the carpenter's bench that the attention of Gibbs was first drawn to the sewing machine. As yet he had never seen a sewing machine of any description, and his only knowledge was derived from a woodcut of a Grover and Baker machine. He studied the picture very much as the men of his day used to study the rebuses which were a feature of the newspapers. Yet Gibbs had the inventive insight to devise a successful revolving looper. This feat appeased his curiosity for the time and he thought little more about the matter. But several months later he saw a Singer machine and read the Patent Office description of the Grover and Baker machine. He perceived that his idea was new and patentable, but before securing his right, he took out two patents on other features. Gibbs was still too poor to indulge personally in the luxury of paying fees to the Patent Office, and to get himself "grub-staked," he sold a half interest to John H. Ruckman.
The year 1857 was eventful. He visited Philadelphia to sell one of his early inventions, and there met James Wilcox, finding in him not only a business partner, but a lifetime friend. It was arranged that Gibbs should go to the shop of Wilcox and construct a model of his machine. In October, the two men entered into an agreement. The early patents were lost, but in June Gibbs had been granted a patent on the revolving looper which is the distinguishing feature of the Wilcox and Gibbs machine. Yet when the trial machine was nearly ready, the Patent Office announced what is known in patent law as an inter- ference. A Boston man instituted a lawsuit, and the priority of the Gibbs in- vention was so bitterly contested that it was not decided in his favor for thirty-
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three years. The Wilcox and Gibbs machine was placed on the market in Novem- ber, 1859, the factory being located at Providence, Rhode Island. Wilcox put $25,000 into the business, but this did not prove enough. T. S. Arthur, then a noted publisher of Philadelphia, came to the rescue with a loan which enabled the enterprise to be pulled forward into comparatively smooth water.
There had hitherto been many attempts to perfect a machine using a single thread, but none had proved successful. Contrary to the belief of the sewing machine experts of that day. Gibbs was able to demonstrate that a single thread would make the stronger and more durable stitch. But the four companies already in the field were fighting one another in a short-sighted manner. Each company controlled at least one feature that was needed by all the others. Rufus Choate, a famous attorney, induced the several companies to live and let live. Each company was to use the patents of the others, so far as necessary, paying a royalty on them, and reserving the control of its own patent or patents. The invention of Gibbs was original, but as some of the features of the older machines had to be used in the new one, it was necessary to enter the combine. Several of the good points of the improved Wilcox and Gibbs machines are due to Charles Wilcox, the son of James. Silent work, one of the newer features, was a mania with the younger man.
Gibbs spent two years at Philadelphia and Providence, giving his time to the successful launching of the new enterprise. Immediately after the news of the firing on Fort Sumter, in April, 1861, he left Providence to live on the farm he had purchased in Pocahontas. Matters political had a keen interest for Gibbs. Hle was a Democrat, and in the state campaign of 1855 he had made speeches in Pocahontas in favor of Henry A. Wise as a candidate for governor. For the Lewisburg Chronicle he wrote a parody in ridicule of the American. or Know Nothing, party. In the present crisis his sympathies were with the extreme Southern program. He went on the stump in advocacy of secession. and went to Richmond to get arms and uniforms for the first company of cavalry These uniforms were sewed on two of his machines. Old guns and pistols were repaired in his shop. He went out with the Pocahontas cavalry, but his constitu- tion was never streng, and in three weeks he was sent home. ill with typhoid- pneumonia. The advance of a Federal army caused Gibbs to return as a refugee to his native county and neighborhood. He bought the farm near Raphine which became the nucleus of an extensive possession. In Rockbridge he was assigned to the ordnance service to superintend the making of saltpeter. When General Hunter approached, he was ordered ont with his twenty men, and they fought in the battle of Piedmont.
The return of peace found Gibbs in such financial straits that he was very desirous of knowing about his interest in the sewing machine business. His wife thought it unsafe for him to go North, yet he set out in June. 1865, after borrowing a broadcloth suit from a brother-in-law. After leaving Virginia
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he was shadowed all the way to the door of the sewing machine office by a detec- tive who thought he was Gibbs of Louisiana, a man whose name was associated with mortar guns. But when Gibbs entered the office of Wilcox, the detective recognized that he had been trailing a man who was not known to have been particularly harmful to the Federal cause. Wilcox received his partner with open arms, and politics stood "adjourned." The conversation scarcely ranged outside the sewing machine industry. The books of the company showed a credit to Gibbs of $10,000. The inventor was now, at the age of thirty-six, and for the first time in his life, a dweller on Easy Street.
In 1866 the partnership between Wilcox and Gibbs gave place to a stock company. Of this, Mr. Gibbs was secretary and treasurer, and for some years it was necessary to spend a large share of his time in the North. But in the years immediately following the war he traveled extensively in the South, demon- strating his machine and establishing local agencies. In 1869 and again in 1870, he was called to the British Isles to defend his company in suits for infringment of patent. He continued to work for the company until 1886, a considerable share of his time being given to developing improvements in the machine. In all he took out twelve patents. The company is still in business, and more than one million of the Wilcox and Gibbs machines have been sold. The earlier patents have expired, but there is an income from the stock owned by the heirs.
By 1874 Mr. Gibbs was in independent circumstances. After having seen much of the United States and considerable of Europe, he became settled in the opinion that no locality suited him so well as the one where he was born and had spent his boyhood. In 1866 he spent $6,000 in improving his estate, which he called Raphine. This word is derived from the Greek word raphis, which means a needle. He had seen it used in "My Raphine," the title of a sewing machine advertisement story. During the latter half of his life, Mr. Gibbs lived very contentedly in the comfortable brown country house on the border of the town of Raphine which is still occupied by his widow. When the Valley Rail- road came along, he donated to it a right of way through his lands, the distance being one mile and a fourth. The only condition he imposed was that he should name the station and determine its site.
The only schooldays known to James E. A. Gibbs were those of the old field school, and they came to a close when he was only sixteen years of age. But there remained the impulse to intellectual improvement. He was not one of those who are content if they never outgrow the world of their boyhood. So he read and observed, and pondered on what he read and observed. He ended his second visit to Europe by making a considerable tour of the Continent. After he came to enjoy a comfortable income, he gradually provided himself a good library, and was recognized as a cultured, well-informed gentleman, inter- ested in lines of study quite outside the field of invention that gave him his
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wealth. His versatility was in thorough accord with his Connecticut ancestry Hle could survey a new road or build a house of complex design. He could superintend a mill and unriddle many a mechanical problem. In 1861 he took ont a Confederate patent on a breech-loading firearm. His last invention was a bicycle which he did not patent. Yet Mr. Gibbs was a man of very rural tastes, and he was at home in the management of his farm. His memory was very strong, and his power of concentrating his mind on a mechanical or other question was very unusual. In his opinions he was very positive, yet he was affable and tolerant. With the young he was popular, and he was an upholder of innocent amusements. He was a member of the Presbyterian communion, and was prominent in Sunday school work. Only once was Mr. Gibbs a candidate for an elective office. In 1879 he was a nominee of the Funder wing of the Democratic party for a seat in the House of Delegates. But the Readjuster wing was in the lead in this county, and he was defeated by a majority of about 200 votes.
The first wife of Mr. Gibbs was the mother of his four children. She died in 1887, and six years later he was married to Miss Margaret Craig. of Augusta county. Florence V., the eldest of the family, married Benjamin C. Rawlings, of Spottsylvania county ; Cornelia A. married Robert G. Davis, and moved with him to Hot Springs, Arkansas; Ellabel B. married John C. Moore ; Ethel R. married first George E. Wade, and second, Lancelot C. Lockridge. The last named lives near Raphine on a portion of the paternal estate. Captain B. C. Rawlings, a native of Spottsylvania, was the first Virginian to volunteer for the Confederate army, and the youngest all-the-war soldier. Ile joined the First South Carolina Regiment the first week in January, 1861, and sur- rendered with General Lee at Appomattox when twenty years and three months old Before he was eighteen he was a lieutenant and commanded his company in the battle of Fredericksburg. He came to Rockbridge in 1874 and died on his farm near Raphine in 1908. His son, Doctor James E., of Florida, joined the British Expeditionary Army in the present war.
Few other inventions seem to have originated in this county. Samuel Houston, a progressive farmer, as well as a divine of long service, patented a thre lung machine. Doctor William Graham, a nephew to the William Graham who figures so largely in the founding of Liberty Hall AAcademy, invented a fire extinguisher, the principle of which is the same as that of the Babcock and other well known extinguishers. In recognition of the fact that Graham we fit in this field, a patent was issued long after his death, and to his ad- 111111 trater (Harkes H. Locher is the inventor of an aerial dump used in excava- tion work- Probably the most striking of the inventive discoveries named in this paragraph are those by Michael Miley on color photography. They were pef- fected by himself alonc.
A HISTORY OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA
PART II
INTRODUCTION
In three of the author's earlier works on local history lines of descent were traced from the original settlers,-so far as this could be ascertained,-and car- ried far enough forward to include the adult living posterity. This was possible only by reason of a small population and a comparatively small number of group- families.
But family names in Rockbridge are exceedingly numerous. To trace the lines of ancestry on the scale practicable in the other counties would have caused an expense prohibitive to the getter-up of the book, and would have placed on the book itself a price prohibitive to many prospective purchasers.
This department of the History of Rockbridge does not purport to be any- thing more than a source-book. While collecting his material, the compiler put down all the surnames he came upon, together with the accompanying fact in each instance. In Sections II to XIII, inclusive, the names are classified accord- ing to the source from which they are derived. Miscellaneous facts, such as dates of birth, marriage, and death, lists of children, and sundry other particulars, are given in Section XIV. A complete index of names is not given, for the rea- son that all lists in Part Two are constructed in alphabetic order. The genealo- gic index that does appear is in the nature of a cross-index, wherever a cross- index is indicated. It also includes the genealogie particulars scattered through the other divisions of the book.
The authorities are as follows: For Section II, the deed-books of Orange and Augusta, and the chancery papers in the suit of Peck v. Borden ; for Section III, the books of the Virginia Land Office; for Section IV, the deed-books of Orange, and Augusta, and Botetourt; for Section V, the first will-book, Rock- bridge county ; for Section VI, the personal property book on file in the Virginia State Library; for Section VII, order-book, Rockbridge county; for Section VIII, the tax-list for 1917 ; for Section IX, the deed-books and will-books for the years, 1778-1816, inclusive; for Section X, chiefly the order-books for the period prior to 1860, but the McDowell roster is quoted from Waddell's Annals of Aut- gusta; for Section XI, the roster on file in the office of county clerk ; for Section XII, the return of the selective draft of 1917-18 for Rockbridge county ; for Sec- tion XIII, Orange order-book for 1739-41, Rockbridge order-books to 1886, Au-
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