How slowly
Christmas comes to the young! They can hardly wait for its advent; but the time
will come to them, as it has to the rest of us who have advanced in years, when
the days and weeks and months will fly with electric speed, and no sooner will
one Christmas pass than they will be making preparations for the coming one.
Like a ship passing in the night, they glide by never to return. But here we
are, right on the eve of Christmas, and hardly a sign of winter to remind us
that Jack Frost and Santa are to pay their annual visits on runners and not on
wheels. Instead of Canada being the Lady of the Snows, as Kipling once said, we
are enjoying weather suitable to a reasonably mild winter resort. We are told
somewhere in the good book that the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb; and may
not this account for the mild weather that spares the coal bin to the
unfortunate who has not a savings bank account to fall back upon, now that the
pay envelopes from the factory are few and far between? (When this article was
written atmospheric conditions were much milder than they are at present.) When
Hamilton was just emerging from its infantile days, say sixty years ago, the
winter began earlier, and at Christmas time the young people enjoyed sleigh
rides to the merry jingle of sleigh bells. Out in the country, the churches and
the Good Templars’ associations held their annual tea meetings and socials and
invited their city cousins to partake of the feasts of reason and the flow of
soul, but to be sure and not forget the quarter or half-dollar that was an
essential sesame at the door. Young men did not have much money in those days,
as wages were small, but they always managed to save up a little so as to chip
in their share for a couple of seats in the bed of straw for their best girls
and themselves. And then, muffled in blankets and buffalo robes, they defied
old Jack Frost, and went skimming along the well-beaten snow roads to Ancaster
or some one of the suburbs of the Ambitious City. Ah ! those were times never
to come again to those who participated in them sixty years ago! Those were the
happy days, when young people married early in life and became the staid
citizens of the Hamilton of the future. Old maids and old bachelors were an
unknown quantity, for every young man wanted a home of his own, with the girl
he loved best to keep house for the both of them. The return of those days
would be a blessing, and there would be fewer blasé young men and frivolous
girls.
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Along in the middle
of this month there was a good old-fashioned snow, and for two or three days
there might have been excellent sleighing if horses had not gone out of date.
Not a solitary jingle of a sleigh bell was to be heard in the clear and frosty
air, day or night. Instead we had the raucous toot of the motor car as it sped
at the rate of thirty or forty miles through the streets in what they called
joy riding. Call that pleasure! It is not to be considered in the same calendar
with old Dobbin and his string of silvery bells. When you and I were young, my
ancient Hamiltonian, good sleighing was always looked forward to, by the
merchants, especially about Christmas times, for then the farmers living from
twenty to forty miles from Hamilton would bring in loads of dressed pork,
poultry, butter, eggs and indeed produce of all kinds, and what they could not
sell for cash, they traded with the merchants for goods. Money was a scarce
commodity in those days, and if the farmer could only manage to get enough cash
to pay his taxes and the interest on the mortgage on his farm, he felt
fortunate and was perfectly willing to change his pigs and poultry for
groceries and dry goods. There were but few farms that were not blanketed with
a mortgage, but as the original price was small, the mortgage was
correspondingly small. The sturdy farmers did not mind the mortgage a bit, for
they had a sure thing on being able to pull through it. Farms that could have
been bought sixty years ago from five to twenty dollars an acre have long ago
passed the hundred dollar mark, and the farmers are not only rich, but the most
independent men in Canada.
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In a large factory in
Hamilton, a man who had fought under the Union Jack in foreign wars was holding
a position as a bookkeeper, and as he was competent and trustworthy, he was in
receipt of a good salary. The years were slipping by quickly, for he had passed
the three score milepost and his hair was beginning to silver over with the
frosts of time, and wisely he came to the conclusion that the time would come
when his hands and his brain might lose their cunning in adding up columns of
figures. Being a prudent man, blessed with wife and daughters who were not
extravagant, he had lain by some of his salary each month, and learning of a
twenty acre farm, with a comfortable house and barn, he made the purchase, and
when the time came for him to leave the office, he moved on to his little farm.
He is a practical man and not afraid of work, and not long ago he told the
Muser that his little farm paid the expenses of his family and at the end of
the season, he was able to lay by a little nest egg in the savings bank for a
rainy day. How many industrious men in Hamilton, who are depending upon their
daily labor to support their families but could do as our good friend the
veteran soldier has done. To own a comfortable in the town costs, and then all
the owner has is a bare home. Buy a bit of land with the same money, and you
have not only a home but an assured living for your family by tilling the soil;
then you are independent of bosses, and when hard times come and work in town
is scarce, you can thank God for your little farm, with the luxuries as well as
the necessities of times. In these troublous times, when the factory doors are
closed and labor is a drug on the market, the owner of a farm, be it small or
large, is the most independent of men, for everything he raises commands the
cash and at prices that would the farmer of sixty years ago green with envy.
But we started in to say something about the old-time Christmas, and here we
are telling the story of an old soldier who put his money into a savings bank
instead of squandering it, and now when the years have come upon him and his
faithful wife, he can snap his fingers at hard times and sit down under his own
vine and fig tree and smoke his pipe in perfect content that he and his family
are provided for, let the business world wag as it will. Probably some others
will take the hint and buy a bit of land, on part credit if they have not all
of the money to pay down.
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While sitting under
the droppings of the sanctuary last Sunday listening to an old Hamilton boy
tell the simple story of the cross to a large congregation, the thought came,
how many ministers of the Protestant churches, and of priests to Catholic
churches have the workshops of Hamilton furnished to the pulpit? When we glance
backwards, say a trifle of fifty and sixty years ago, in the days when revivals
of religion came as regularly as the beginning of the new year, there was
generally a shaking up among the boys, and after the Rev. James Caughey and
Revs. James Elliott, Ephraim B. Harper and Jonathan Betts, of the Wesleyan
church; and good old Faithful Shepard, the editor of the Christian advocate;
Rev. William McClure, of the New Connexion church; Rev. William Stephenson,
Primitive Methodist; Rev. Thomas Puller, Congregational church, and Rev. Alfred
Booker, Baptist church, had spent a month or six weeks in exhorting, praying
and singing, there were generally accessions to the church, and always from one
to a half dozen fellows would be persuaded to study for the ministry.
Blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, shoemaking and tailoring shops, machine
shops, and, would you believe it, even printing offices would send their quota
into the ministry. There was not a fortune in the business in those days to
tempt the young fellows into the pulpit, for a minister to get a salary of $600
or $800 a year must have had superior talents for his job. Two of the most
eloquent preachers that went from the workshop to the pulpit were blacksmiths,
and lusty men they were at the forge or in a revival meeting. One of them has
passed on to his reward; the other still watches and prays over one of the
largest congregations in the city. Two of those old Hamilton boys occupied
local pulpits last Sunday. One of them graduated from the Spectator office, and
the other from Wanzer’s sewing machine factory. They were young when they quit
the workshop, but now both of them have frosty heads, but hearts as young and
loving for their fellowmen as when setting type or assembling a sewing machine.
Both of them now hold commanding positions in the Wesleyan church, and if the
bishops would only die or grow old we might someday hope to see the Rev. T.
Albert Moore and Rev. Dr. Hincks presiding in concert over the general
conference and making all the smaller lights stand from under the sound of the
gavel. Not only have the Hamilton workshops sent young men into Protestant
pulpits, but the Catholic church has been blessed with earnest young men who
have devoted their lives to the work of the Master. There is one venerable
minister of Centenary church who learned the printer’s art in England away back
in the first half of last century who laid down the stick and rule more than
fifty years ago and entered the Methodist ministry in the old country. He is
now on the superannuated list, but the good brother can today tell the simple
story of the cross with all the earnestness and vigor of his younger days. The
workshops of Hamilton seem to have gone out of the pulpit business in these
degenerate days, but probably it is because the churches have gone out of the
revival business, so there is nothing to stir the boys to the call of duty.
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Speaking of Dr.
Hincks and the Wanzer sewing machine factory brings to mind the days when
Hamilton was the headquarters for the sewing machine business in Canada, and
gave employment to an army of skilled workmen to manufacture machines that were
equal to the best in the market. R. M. Wanzer came to Hamilton in the fall of
1859. He had been a Yankee schoolmaster and a jack-of-all-trades, but had some
ideas that he thought worthwhile to put in practice. One of these was the
sewing machine. He had heard of the fate of the first sewing machine introduced
to Hamilton. The Lawson brothers kept a clothing store on the corner of King
and James streets, at Treble’s present stand, and thinking they could help
business and make a little more money for themselves as well as for their
tailors, they bought a couple of machines in the United States and hired an
expert to come over to teach their men how to run them. The tailors would have
none of them, but went out on strike. They said the machines would ruin the tailor
trade, and their families would starve for bread. The Lawsons tried persuasion,
but it was useless. Finally, the men triumphed and the machines were laid aside
for a time. It took quite a while to overcome the men’s prejudice, but, by
degrees, they learned that they could make even more money on a suit by running
up the seams on a machine; and at last the machines were restored to the
workroom, and from that day the tailors adopted it into the family of Sartorus.
Well, Mr. Wanzer heard this little bit of history, but being a man who never
turned his back when once he turned his hand to the plow, he rented the stone
building on the corner of James and Vine and began the manufacture of machine.
It took a week to turn out the first machine, that being the excellent of the
factory. In the next three weeks, he finished four more, and then loading them
in a wagon, he started out himself to peddle them around the country. He had to
explain to the farmers’ wives the usefulness of the machine, but like the
tailors in the Lawsons’ clothing store, they were hard to be convinced. The
mothers had never used such folderol, and the old way of sewing by hand was
good enough for them. It took Mr. Wanzer a week to sell his four machines; but
he got the ball rolling, and by the time he had four more ready for the market
he found it easier to persuade the farmers’ wives into buying them on the
installment plan. This was the beginning of one of Hamilton’s infant
industries, and if capitalists had only been wise, the sewing machine industry
in Hamilton might have been the leading one today, furnishing work to thousands
of men. From the small factory on James street to the large factory on the
corner of King and Catharine streets where the Dominion Power company’s
handsome terminal station now stands, was a necessary change to accommodate the
growing business. The Wanzer machine had a large sale in Great Britain, South
America, the West Indies, Germany and the continent. At the Vienna exposition
in 1873, the Japanese commissioners became interested in the Canadian novelty,
and in time, thousands of machines were shipped to Japan.
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From the small
beginning of one machine a week, the trade grew in Hamilton to not less than
two thousand a week, with six or seven factories in full operation. One by one
the factories faded away, and it was but a few years till the original Wanzer
was the only one left – and in time that closed its doors forever. The last
Wanzer factory, down on Barton street, was a three story building covering
nearly one block. As the sewing machine began to fade out, Mr. Wanzer turned
his attention to the manufacture of a patent coal oil lamp, which did not prove
to be a successful seller. At one time, Mr. Wanzer was among the wealthiest men
in Hamilton, and occupied as his home a handsome house in the center of the
square now occupied by the collegiate institute. No one seems to be able to
account for the decline of the sewing machine trade in Hamilton; but like other
enterprises that might have been of great value as manufacturing industries, it
was allowed to die out. Hamilton capitalists prefer to send their money away to
invest in foreign enterprises.
