John C. Hermance was one of the many inventors in the 1840s who attempted to perfect his own version of the large-capacity cooking stove that had been developing since at least the mid-1830s. He went head-to-head in the market and the courts with what turned out to be the dominant answer to the design questions so many makers had been addressing, Darius Buck's 1839 patent. This post will give him and his stove more space than they could have otherwise, in my blog posts on Buck and the large-oven stove and on New York Capital District stove inventors. Who was John C. Hermance? There is not much to work with. Little biographical or genealogical information about him seems to be available online, apart from his birth (1805) and death (1858), and the fact that he was married but apparently childless, and widowed in 1849. This is strange, given his distinctive surname. Many other Hermances were also involved in the Hudson Valley's stove industry both before and after John's time. Garret Hermance or Heermance (the spelling varied) of Poughkeepsie patented a peculiar circular cook stove in 1838, and operated the Variety Stove Store in Albany by the early 1840s. A Jacob Hermance worked as a salesman for John's stoves in the mid-1840s, and a U.C. Hermance served as his local agent in Peekskill at the same time. Other Hermances continued the family connection after John's death. Robert M. Hermance, originally a Saratoga County farmer from Stillwater, but later a founder and machinist, was the most important, with four patents 1858-1872 (one of them reissued). Most of them were for the must-have stove accessory at the time, the hot-water reservoir, and three of them were taken out after he had moved to Troy, 16 miles south. Charles W. from Schuylersville, a dozen miles further upriver from Stillwater, added a couple more patents in 1869-70, one of them also for stove reservoirs, and for which Robert served as a witness. And Levi from Lansingburg (North Troy) contributed his own reservoir improvements (three patents, one reissued to strengthen its value, in 1870-1871). But what (if any) were the linkages among these three cooperating Hermances from the generation after John, or between them and John himself, or from John to Garret, Jacob, or U.C.? I do not know, yet, but it can hardly have been mere coincidence.
Biographical and genealogical data may be in short supply, but John Hermance's life has left more traces in other public records. His movements can be followed, though not very closely: in Rochester in 1838, already a stove salesman, and Schenectady by 1841-2; to Albany between the late 1840s and 1852, trading as a stove wholesaler; and finally to Malta, Saratoga County, 30 miles north (but just 9 from Stillwater), at the time of his death or at least burial. His business also crops up repeatedly in the enormous New York State historical newspapers collection, chiefly in the form of advertisements enabling us to see how and where he promoted and sold his stoves, and how he had them made. He also produced one publication, of which a single copy seems to survive -- the 1848 circular whose front cover is reproduced, not very sharply, above. But of the stoves sold to his many thousands of satisfied customers not a single remaining example has come to light.
Hermance's was a one-man, one-product business. At a time when the leading American stove wholesalers were integrating backwards into the manufacture of their products, and forwards into selling them to trade and retail customers, and also developing the wide product lines necessary to satisfy the market's diverse needs, Hermance had just one model of cooking stove to sell. He never owned a foundry, instead contracting the work out to independent manufacturers in local markets along the Hudson - Mohawk transportation corridor within an easy day's travel of the Capital District, or licencing a major integrated firm (Warnick & Leibrandt, Philadelphia) to make and sell them in more remote markets. Instead he kept focused on the business he knew -- wholesaling -- and, crucially, on defending the value of the single patent on which his livelihood depended.
Hermance's 1844 patent was neither extended nor reissued, and expired in 1858, the year of his death. Lack of evidence of patent management like this is usually an indication of a patent's lack of any particular significance, but in this case that would be misleading. A different sort of evidence is provided by the number of officially reported court cases in which it was involved. Most of the many patents that were litigated did not result in any such report. They may have left some trace in local newspapers, but usually the only records they leave behind are moldering quietly in the archives, if they survive at all. But Hermance's patent was involved in at least six trials before federal judges between 1845 and 1849, three of them sufficiently important for the points of law they helped establish to be reported officially. He ran up against the determined and well-resourced opposition of the owners of the Buck patent, and eventually he lost. But this did not finish his business, which carried on for at least three more years.
What I will do here is to assemble some of the principal sources from which his life and work can be reconstructed and to comment on them as I go. There is not really enough to be worth trying to cast it into a coherent analytical narrative -- there are too many gaps and silences -- but there is plenty for any interested reader to get his or her teeth into, and form some sense of how one entrepreneur navigated his way through the risks and possibilities of the emerging stove business in the 1840s.
