Troy is famous as the Collar City and ironmaking. But that wasn’t the only industry that made a mark on the American frontier. How about barb wire?
The importance of barb wire was instrumental in taming the Midwest, especially those lands that were vast expanses of open prairie. With no trees, no fences, or stones to build walls, how did you keep your cattle confinied and your property separated from neighbors? Barb wire.
Credit to Michael Kelly in 1868 who invented the basic design of twisted wires together to create the cable for the barbs. In 1874 Illinois’ Joseph Glidden patented a wire barb to a double stranded wire. That began a flood of improvements. Other inventors added their own barb variations. There were 500 patents between 1868 to 1874. Many farmers just made their own 2,000 variations from 500 patents.
Trojans would get into that act. John Wool Griswold, son of John Augustus Griswold, Troy Mayor and builder of the Civil War USS Monitor. He was related to John Ellis Wool, Civil War General who commanded Fort Monroe during the battle between Monitor and Merrimac.
Griswold was superintendent of the first Bessemer Steel Mill in America that his father and others set up in South Troy. By 1879 he had his own three-story factory located just below Mt Ida Falls off Congress Street.
He did well. On July 14, 1873, Troy Daily Whig announced: “John Wool Griswold’s steam yacht which was built at Athena was launched on Friday. The hull in now lying at Starbuck’s Island, where she will be fitted with a boiler forty-two inches in diameter and six feet long, which will contain two hundred and forty-one and one-half inch tubes, each two feet long.
The boiler shell will be made of 5-16 of an inch iron.” It cost $8,000, that’s $208,221.33 today.
You can see parts of the factory, and his patented rolling system, on the north bank of the Poestenskill. Millstones once lined the stream bed when I was a kid exploring the gorge. The mill made iron and steel, wire, bale ties, nails and staples. His first barb wire patent was April 3, 1888 for a barb wire fence #633 “Folded Sheet Metal Barb.”
On Dec 22, 1891, he had another with two opposing pointed barbs. Commercial names were Griswold’s Flyer, Side Lock, Folded Wing and Griswold’s Savage. They made 3000 tons of wire a year with over 130 wire drawing blocks. He had eight patents in total. His patents included two fence posts in 1888. Griswold’s wires were considered one of the best.
He partnered with others (Dillon-Griswold Wire Company, 1892) and lived not only in Troy. His 500-acre summer farm home in Bennington Vermont, known as The Orchards (recently Southern Vermont College) is on the National Register. According to the National Register nomination “Wool “greatly improved” the farm that he bought in the early 1880’s took great pride in his agricultural pursuits and improvements to his summer home.
He tore down the original 1789 house, a local landmark, and replaced it with a Colonial Revival version that, as the local paper noted approvingly, “anyone who was sober would swear was a house one hundred years old, newly painted.” On his farm, Griswold kept 25 – 30 horses and some cows and goats, but “the premises are too sacred for even a single hen to scratch or cackle thereon.”
The Bennington newspaper said: “This farm is one of the finest in Vermont and the price is perhaps among the highest paid for strickly farm property. It is located at the eastern base of Mt Anthony and comprises splendid meadows and uplands and some of the finest building sites in town.” Edward H. Everett, CEO of the American Bottle Company, built the beautiful stone mansion that is there now and more familiar as the former college.
Griswold was married twice. His daughter Elizabeth married her cousin Chester from New York. His wife had book reviews and talks during social season.
Around 1900 Wool moved his machine company from Troy to Braddock, Pennsylvania. Two years later on Jan.2, 1902, he died while looking at another factory in Chicago. The flag over the Osgood steamer house was flown half-staff out of respectful since he was formerly an active fireman.
Mt Ida Gorge where his factory was, now a “park,” was destroyed by the city. They decided to remove debris from the demolition of the sanitarium buildings across the road and dump it to “create” the park and see the falls from the parking area. If you’re too lazy to walk down you shouldn’t be allowed to see the falls.
It has been vandalized and closed when someone died. It should be reopened. Why is the rest of the world punished because one person is irresponsible?
Got History? Don is the author of a dozen books about his hometown. You can reach him at drittner@aol.com
