Ihave always had an eye for beautiful machines. Early sewingmachines were often considered the most beautiful of all the machinesman had made up to that point. Only early guns and clocksrivaled sewing machines for beauty.

I was an upholsterer and had seen many oldmachines, but never really thought of owning one just for theheck of it. But this one wasdifferent. First however, I came home and did some research on it. As I soonlearned, the company had quite a history which only added tomy interest in owning it. The following day I bought it. Turnsout that my machine is museum quality. There are very few left inthis condition and I have yet to see one as good as mine.

HERE'S THE WV CONNECTION

ON THE DIVIDING LINE between Augusta and Rockbridge counties Virginialies Walnut Grove, home of Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor ofthe reaper. McCormick's invention assured him of lasting fame andrecognition, but in a nearby village lived another inventor whoseaccomplishments were overshadowed by his competitors and whose work islittle remembered outside his native Rockbridge county.

James Edward Allen Gibbs invented a sewing machine and founded a company tomarket it which is still in existence today. He is the only inventoroutside of the New England states to produce a sewing machine. YetElias Howe and Isaac Singer are the names usually associated with thehistory of the early sewing machine and few have ever heard of JamesEdward Allen Gibbs.

From 1845 until 1856 when he patented his sewingmachine, Gibbs worked at various occupations and in several differentlocations. For awhile he rented a building and operated a carding mill( Before wool can be spun into yarn for knitting or weaving into cloth,it first must be brushed, or carded ) in Lexington Virginia, butfinding himself debt ridden, he left there in the early 1850s and wentto Huntersville in Pocahontas County, now in West Virginia.(Huntersville still exists and is only 6 miles East of Marlington)Gibbs became a partner in another carding business, but sold hisinterest when that business, too, proved to be unsuccessful.

After leaving the carding business, Gibbs engagedin a variety of activities. He joined a surveying team in RandolphCounty, also in present-day West Virginia. On a surveying expeditionhe suffered a serious injury when, while cutting down a small pinetree, his ax slipped, cutting through his right knee cap. Hiscompanions took him to the home of Alexander Logan at MingoFlat (the town is still there half way between Snowshoe andValley Head WV) where for six months the Logan family, and especiallyWilliam Logan, nursed him through to his recovery.

(Afterthe Civil War, when fortune had favored Gibbs and taken everything fromWilliam Logan, Gibbs aided Logan in establishing a store at Midway,Virginia.) The knee injury, however, preventedGibbs from resuming his career as a surveyor and he became a carpenterand a millwright. In the winter of 1851-52, he built a grist andsawmill for Colonel Samuel Given in Nicholas County.

Whileengaged in this project, he met Colonel Given's daughter, Catherine.The dark-haired young man with the big nose and sharp blue eyes couldnot have been called handsome, but he had a strong personality, and asocial nature that Catherine must have found charming for they weremarried on August 25, 1852.

Refusing his father-in-law's offer of 500 acres ofland and the equipment to start a farm, Gibbs returned with his wife toPocahontas County where he continued to work as a carpenter.

Elias Howe, William O. Grover, William E. Baker,Isaac Singer and others, patented sewing machines in the early 1850sand revolutionized the clothing industry. In 1855, Gibbs saw a woodcutof a Grover and Baker sewing machine in a newspaper advertisement. Itwas the first image of these new contraptions that he had seen andthere was little to show him how it worked.

All that was shownin the woodcut was the top half of the machine. Nothing indicated thatmore than one thread was used to form the stitch or indeed how thestitches were made. Gibbs decided that only one thread was used andsince his curiosity was aroused, he formed in his mind a method forproducing a single thread stitch. He later described the experience,saying:

'AsI was then living in a very out-of-the-way place, far from railroadsand public conveyances of all kinds, modern improvements seldom reachedour locality, and not being likely to have my curiosity satisfiedotherwise, I set to work to see what I could learn from the woodcut,which was not accompanied by any description.

Gibbs'scuriosity had been satisfied and he did not immediately pursue thematter because he did not realize the significance of his invention.However, in January 1856, when he was visiting his father in RockbridgeCounty, he happened to enter a tailor's shop and there saw a Singersewing machine. Although Gibbs was impressed by the machine, he thoughtthat it was 'entirely too heavy, complicated, and cumbersome, and theprice exorbitant'. He remembered his own simpler invention and decidedto work seriously on a less-expensive sewing machine.

JamesE. A. Gibbs was hampered in his attempt to perfect his sewing machinebecause he had to support his growing family and could only work on theinvention at night and during inclement weather. In addition, he lackedproper tools and sufficient materials.

After months ofeffort, Gibbs succeeded in making, with his pocket knife, a crudewooden model. He made the needles for the machine himself and,according to his daughter, used the flexible root of mountain ivy tofashion the revolving looper which was the key to his invention. ByApril 1856, it was almost ready and Gibbs reportedly sold a halfinterest to John H. Ruckman, local owner of a sawmill, in order to payto have the machine patented.

Gibbs could whittleand invent, but he realized that he could not market his machine alone.With his letters of patent in his pocket, he went to Philadelphia.

'Iwas in Philadelphia in 1857', he later wrote, 'selling the first of myfirst two inventions in the office of Emery, Houghton and Company, whenJames Willcox came in. He remarked that he was a dealer in new notionsand inventions, and he asked me to come to his little shop in MasonicHall and build a model of my machine'.

Gibbsworked with Willcox's son Charles to build a patent model and on June2, 1857, he was awarded patent number 17,427 on his machine. As aresult of the successful patenting of the machine, Willcox and Gibbssoon formed a partnership. In 1858, Willcox engaged the firm of J. R.Brown and Sharpe of Providence, Rhode Island, to produce the sewingmachines and the first ones were manufactured in November 1858. Tomarket their machine, Willcox and Gibbs opened an office at 658Broadway in New York City the following year.

Notonly had Gibbs successfully designed a simpler machine than the Singermodel he had seen in Rockbridge County in January 1856, but his newsewing machine was also much less expensive. The Willcox and Gibbsmachine, sold on a simple iron-frame stand, cost $50 at the end of the1850s compared to a cost of $100 for the machines produced by Wheelerand Wilson, Grover and Baker, and Singer.

GETTINGTHE first Willcox and Gibbs machine from drawing board to the shopcounter was an adventure beset with more engineering problems thanmost. Willcox, who was in charge of production, approachedtheProvidence, Rhode Island, company of Brown and Sharpe who were at thattime makers of clocks, watches and measuring instruments, and asked ifit would be interested in producing the new sewing machine. The projectwas turned over to one very young man, Henry LeLand, who later woulddesign and build the Cadillic and Lincoln automobiles.

Workbegan in March 1858 when the first drawings were made and soon thelocal New England Bull Company was busy on the frame castings. When thefigures were finally totaled, it was found that Brown and Sharpe hadspent 10 times its original budget just on the tooling for the machines.

Butin October 1858 it all came together. Sharpe wrote to Willcox sayingthat the first 50 machines were on the final assembly benches and thatthe firm was now able to produce at the rate of 5000 per year.Fortunately, for all concerned, the machine was an instant success, andthe small tool room quickly became a factory, continuing to make theW&G machines well into the 1970s. Brown and Sharpe continued with its instrumentbusiness and developed a world-famous name for selling specializedmachine tools to other sewing-machine manufacturers.

In 1860, James E A Gibbs was 30 years old and hadattained a modest degree of financial success. The Pocahontas Countycensus of that year listed his occupation as a machinist and valued hisreal estate at $2,000, while his personal estate was worth $15,647.

Immediately after the news of the firing on FortSumter, in April, 1861, he left Providence to live on the farm he hadpurchased in Pocahontas County. Matters political had a keen interestfor Gibbs. He was a Democrat, and in the state campaign of1855 he had made speeches in Pocahontas in favor of Henry A. Wise as acandidate for governor. For the Lewisburg Chronicle he wrote a parodyin ridicule of the American, or Know Nothing, party. In the presentcrisis his sympathies were with the extreme Southern program. He wenton the stump in advocacy of secession, and went to Richmond to get armsand uniforms for the first company of cavalry. Theseuniforms were sewed on two of his machines. Old guns and pistols wererepaired in his shop. He went out with the Pocahontas cavalry, but hisconstitution was never strong, and in three weeks he was sent home, illwith typhoid- pneumonia. The advance of a Federal army caused Gibbs toreturn as a refugee to his native county and neighborhood. He boughtthe farm near Raphine which became the nucleus of an extensivepossession. In Rockbridge he was assigned to the ordnance service tosuperintend the making of saltpeter. When General Hunter approached, hewas ordered out with his twenty men, and they fought in the battle ofPiedmont. ***See battle below***

Afterthe war, Gibbs decided to go to New York to discover if anythingremained of his sewing-machine business. Borrowing a broadcloth suitfrom a brother-in-law, he left Virginia in June 1865. His daughter,Ethel, recalled later that her father was followed from Jersey City to658 Broadway in New York by a Northern detective who thought he was aman named 'Gibbs from Louisiana, who had invented the famous mortarused by the Confederate Army'. When Gibbs entered his old office, thedetective evidently realized he had the wrong man. James and Charles H.Willcox greeted Gibbs with open arms and told him that they haddeposited $10,000 in the bank to his credit. The two Willcox men hadnot made it public that the credit was for a Confederate because themoney would have been confiscated.

The inventor was now, at the age of thirty-six, andfor the first time in his life, a dweller on Easy Street. In 1880, for example, Gibbs enjoyed acombined income of about $10,550 including over $9,000 in bonds andnotes. He refused to become an officer of the Willcox and Gibbs companywhen it was incorporated in New York as a stock company in 1866. Hepreferred, as did his wife, to live in the two-story brick home he hadbuilt on his farm.

ChristenedRaphine Hall, from the Greek word raphis, meaning needle, the house waslarge and comfortable and included a wing where Gibbs worked on his oldinventions as well as new ones. In 1883, he gave a right of way to theBaltimore and Ohio Railroad to build its line and the land for thestation, which he also named Raphine.

Gibbscontinued to work with his company until about 1886. During that timehe traveled widely, especially in Europe, to promote the sales of theWillcox and Gibbs sewing machines.

Amongthose who worked on Willcox and Gibbs machines at the Brown and Sharpefactory was one Henry Leland who was in charge of the sewing-machinedepartment from 1878 until 1890. Leland went on to devote his skills that he hadlearned on sewing machines to forming the prestigious Cadillac CarCompany .

HenryMartyn Leland(February16, 1843 – March 26, 1932) was a machinist,inventor, engineer and automotive entrepreneur who founded the twopremier American luxury marques,Cadillac and Lincoln. He, as a young man, was in charge of manufacture of the Gibbs sewing machine.