Dick,
Thank you for asking.
The majority of research time was spent on the maker, his life, business, and clients, although there was a lot of time time put into the varies companies he manufactured for.
For the time period he was in business, he had some very prominent clients for that era in time, which spanned from around 1870 until Dec of 1915, which included the four oil companies, many of the Trap manufactures from the northeast, Creek Chubb, Heddon, Peters, UMC, Mason Duck decoys, Coca-Cola, Abbey and Imbrie, The Seaboard Airline Railway, and others. His boy went to work with him in the late 1880s, and the business flourished through the 1890s and the first decade and a half of the 1900s. The Father died in 1908 and the boy Dec. 27th 1915. On March 27th 1916 the business was sold and incorporated. I was fortunate enough for the History Archivist for the county of New York to send me copies of the original Incorporation papers when it was incorporated in march of 1916. History is just as important as the field of antiquities that we favor collecting. Many disregard the history of the hobby or specific field we collect and when we do that, we just have meaningless stuff.
