[podcast]http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/scimport\/files\/2011\/05\/LT1122.mp3[\/podcast]<\/p>\n
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Long ago on thi2 program, and in my book Remembered Maine, I had 20mething to 2ay about Charles F. Hathaway, the eccentric but very able shirt manufacturer who started the now nationally renowned C. F. Hathaway Company. But until today I have not been able to put on the air an account of the development of that famous company.<\/p>\n
Charles Hathaway came to Waterville in 1837. a bachelor of 21 years. JU2t what he did here we do not know, but we do know that he met Temperance Blackwell, daughter of a prominent pioneer family of Winslow, and that, engaged to her, he returned to his native town of Plymouth, Mass., to work in a shirt fa ctory that had been started there by his uncle, Benjamin Hathaway, from whom he soon took over the busine::::s.<\/p>\n
From Plymouth, in February 1840, Hathaway wrote to his fiance’ in Waterville:<\/p>\n
“Things go smoothly between me and Uncle Benjamin, but I sometimes feel an unplea2ant dread. He holds my notes for the stock, and business i:::: now dull.”<\/em><\/p>\n At some time before 1840 Charles had learned the printer’:::: trade from E. Merriam of West Brookfield, Mass., founder of the company that was to become the only official publisher of Webster’s Dictionary. Charles arranged with Temperance Blackwell for their marriage to take place in Waterville in May, 1840. He then took his bride to Plymouth. He decided to give up the shirt business and go to his wife’s town of Waterville as a printer \u2022. In 1847 he bought for $571 the press\/type, stock and good will of a printing business in Waterville, and in April, 1847. brought out the fir::::t issue of his paper, the Waterville Union.<\/p>\n The paper lasted only a few weeks, and in July Hathaway s’old it to Ephraim Maxham for $475. nearly a hundred dollars less than he had paid only three months earlier.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Hathaway had come to the decision that his true vocation was not printing, but making. shirts. He approached a young man, Jonah Tiilson, whom he had employed in the Plymo1;lth factory, and the two arranged, as partners, to start a .shirt factory.in Watertown.\u00b7, Mass \u2022\u2022 and he and Temperance moved to that town.<\/p>\n On March 31. 1853. Hathaway entered in hiE diary these words”<\/p>\n “Sold all my property in the firm of Hathaway and Tillson\u00b7in Watertown to Jonah Tillson for $900. Agreed to go into company in Waterville with my brother George. I will put up $4,000; he will put up $2,000 and have one-third of the profits.”<\/em><\/p>\n Apparently George was an absentee partner, for w.e had no record of his ever living in Waterville. While waiting for a factory to be built, Hathaway started making shirts in the house he had rented on Appleton Street, and on May 18, 1853, he completed a deal with Samuel Appleton to purchase the house on an acre of land on Appleton Street. That became the site of the Hathaway shirt fa ctory for more than a hundred years.<\/p>\n Hathaway built the factory under his own supervise on, making no contract with a builder. His diary tells us: “Engaged J. <\/strong>P. Blent to build shirt factory, I to pay him what I think right for his services. Mr. Piper, the mason, is to ha ve two dollars a day.”<\/em><\/p>\n So 1853 is the year when the Hathaway Shirt factory began operation. In that first year Hathaway paid his ironers, who got those stiff-bosomed shirts ready for market three dollars a week for a year while they learned the trade, then $3.25 a week for doing seven shirts a day; then he.raised the wage for his best workers, who did sixteen shirts a day, to $5.50 a week. That highest wage was what a woman received for ironing and making ready for shipment 96 shirts during a 60 hour week of six days of ten hours each. Because most of Hathaway’s employees were ironers – the cutters of the shirts being a few men and the seweJ:”S a few women – for many years the Hathaway factory wa s locally ca lIed the “laundry”.<\/p>\n As ]a te as 1879 Hathaway’s fully laundered shirts sold at prices ranging from $17 t.o $21 a dozen, according to quality. O:f course they were all the stiff-bosomed dress shirts that took attached collars and cuffs. . There is a 1radi.tion that. Hathaway took shirts to Boston by stage coach and there sold them to retailers; but that is\u00b7 not likely, because the railroad had reached Waterville in 1849, four years before he started his factory here .\u2022<\/p>\n During the. Civil War Hathaway’s business was substantially increased when . he received severa 1 large orders\u00b7 for shirts for the Union. Army. In the 1860’s Hathaway employeq Clarence Leighton as a salesman. Leighton had to pay his own traveling expenses, and what is more, had to pay for wrapping and boxing. Then to’ cap the climax to the deal that was all in favor of Hathaway, Leighton had to be responsible for payment for all the shirts he sold.. Fortunately Clarence Leighton was a super-salesman, selling all the shirts Hathaway could make.<\/p>\n Charles and Jemperance Hathaway had no children. After his .death in 1893 (she had pre….,deceased him) his business, residence and all other real estate was left to the Baptist Home Mission Society. They sold the shirt factory, its stock and good will to Col \u2022. Leighton. So in 1893, forty years after the factory had started operation in Waterville, it passed out of the hands of the Hathaway. family.<\/p>\n Under Leighton the business prospered far more than it had ever done under its founder. When he di ed in 1915, his son, E. K. Leighton took over, and he was the hea-d of the Hathaway Company whom many of our’ older citizens still living knew and respe?ted .as a . leading citizen. Under Leighton the frills and ruffles that marked the earlier shirts disappeared. Frank Smith became production manager, and the business grew . until in the 1920’s the output was 700 dozen a week. By that time Hathaway shirts were being sold in the best stores in America’s leading cities.<\/p>\n By 1915, when Ned Leighton took over, the old, wide, stiff-bosomed shirt had all bti.t disappeared.’ Much more popular was,a completely soft shirt, but it still had no attached collar, just a stiff neckband to wh~ch a separate collar was attached. The same was true of separate cuffs.<\/p>\n Prior to 1915 nearly all shirts were white, save for very cheap work shirts that were black and still colorless. By the early 1920’s, after the F~rst World War, shirts were being made in a variety of colors. Shirts with attached collars began to appear. Some shirt makers went out of business, failing to keep up with the changes; but Leighton and Smith, seeing the handwriting on the wall, kept up with the times, and the Hathaway factory prospered. All the time, the tend ency was to ma ke shirts more comfortable. Qua li ty and comfort became the Hathaway goal, and the company continued its long tradition of production by skilled craftsmen.<\/p>\n In 1932 Charles McCarthy and Ellerton Jette purchased ,the C. F. Hathaway Company. Jette had been with the men’s furnishing division of the Brown-Durre.11 Co. of Boston, being with them from 1917 to 1924, when he joined the Buffalo Shirt Co. as their New England representative. McCarthy had been with Simon, Hatch and Whittier of Boston, and in 1928 had replaced Jette as representative of the Buffalo Company, when that company sent Jette to New York to open an office there, sell to incoming buyers, and help with the styling and buying material for the Buffalo shirts. Their main reason for buying Hathaway was that it was the company that made the best shirts of all of the Buffalo competition.<\/p>\n The set-up of Hathaway executives in 1932 was Ellerton Jette,Chairman of the Board and President; Cha rles McCarthy, v~ce-president; Harry Bickford,. Treasurer; Frank Smith, general maIl9ger, and Ashley Logan, production manager. It was a bold venture for those two men to take over the Hathaway Company just as the Great Depression wa s approaching its worst point. Between 19,29 and 1932 Hathaway sales dropped from $600,000 to $125,000 a year. But even before the depression was over, Hathaway business had increased so much that it justified the addition of a new wing, expanding the factory space by 50 percent.<\/p>\n By 1936 it was apparent that Hathaway was fast becoming the nation’s most important producer of quality shirts,. The company opened a New York office in an attractive old brick building in the Murray Hill section on East 40th Street. It was furnished with handsome antiques, and the Jettes lived on the top floor, with the offices on the first and second floors.<\/p>\n When World War II broke out, Hathaway was an established international company selling in every state of the Union and buying quality fabric not only in the United States, but from the leading shirting mills of Europe. Many of the fabrics were made especially for Hathaway by designs created by Mr. Jette.<\/p>\n Hathaway was the first to make the French-front shirt, the first with square-cornered cuffs, the one-piece sleeve and the low slope collars. During the war the company filled large orders for shirts, not only for soldiers and sailors, but also for WAAC’s and WAVE’s.<\/p>\n In 1945 Hathaway opened its second Waterville plant. By that time the Company was employing 700 people and was making 1,200,000 shirts a year. Then came the Lady Hathaway shirt, the first made for women by any maker of men’s shirts.<\/p>\n In 1950 a factory with 100,000 square feet of floor space was opened in Lowell, Mass., raising the Company’s total production to 3,500 dozen a day. On September 21, 1951, there appeared in the New Yorker magazine the first of Hathaway’s famous ads showing the man with an eye patch. The model was -Baron George Wrangel., nobleman of a White Russian family who had fled from Russia in the Bolshevik revolution.<\/p>\n When Ned Leighton died in 1952, Hathaway was operating in seven different locations in Waterville, causing complication and expense. So the company acquired No. 2 mill of the closed Lockwood. Company, with its quarter of a million feet of floor space, That gave Hathaway the most efficient and most modern shirt factory in the nation.<\/p>\n When Charles McCarthy died in 1957, Hathaway had expanded allover the U. s. and into Canada.<\/p>\n Mr. Jette resigned as President and became Chairman of the Board in 1958. The new president was V. J. <\/strong>McDermott.<\/p>\n In 1960 all the common stock was sold to A. <\/strong>N. Sonnabend of Boston, who a few months later sold to Warner Brothers of Bridgeport, Conn. In 1962 Leonard Saulter became president. In 1965 the company acquired Peerless Robes and Sportswear, also Wellington-Walker Ltd. of Canada.<\/p>\n In 1975 Hathaway had plants in Waterville, Dover-Foxcroft and Calais in Maine; in Lowell,. Mass. and Prescott, Ontario. Sales offices were in Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.<\/p>\n Hathaway goes to the ends of the earth to obtain the best fabrics. They come from the British Isle, from allover continental Europe, from Egypt, India and Japan.<\/p>\n This has been only a brie~ sketchy account of the great, internationally known company that was started by Charles Hathaway in Waterville in his popularly called “laundry” 125 years ago.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1122, Broadcast on April 17, 1977<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35314],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}