John C. Hermance's "Dispatch" Cooking Stove, c. 1844-1852

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. 

(1) The Patent

Cooking Stove, No. 3628

Schenectady
June 13, 1844
Witnesses Thomas P. Jones & William Bishop

This was a rival of Jonathan Hathaway's, Darius Buck's, P.P. Stewart's, and other large-oven stoves.  It was a full, detailed, very professional piece of work -- understandable as Hermance's agent was Thomas P. Jones himself, former editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute and director of the U.S. Patent Office.  There is even enough detail in the drawings to enable one to understand how his stove's constituent plates fitted together.



Hermance's stove had two ovens A and B, like Hathaway's, rather than a single large one like Stewart's or Buck's, and also a detachable roasting or baking reflector oven sitting on the hearth.  It had four boiler holes, with the covers made as concentric cast rings so that they could easily be adapted to utensils of different diameters.  The center plate between the two front boiler holes was also removable, so that with all three taken out there would be room for a griddle straight over the fire.  These were not new features.  Hermance, like other inventors and designers, was simply building other makers' good (unpatented) ideas into his stove to suit growing customer expectations.  

His explanatory text makes him sound like an ingenious, practical manufacturer, learning from a few years' experience (he dated his own entry into the stove trade as a manufacturer to 1840-1841, but he had been a salesman for a few years before then) -- e.g. "To prevent the warping or cracking of the oven-plates and of the boiler-hole covers, I form angular grooves in them, making the depression on one side equal to the projection on the other. These grooves and projections ... have been found effectual in producing the desired end."  How he acquired this sort of experience is impossible to know, given that he was never a foundry owner.  But he evidently had access to the technical knowledge required to design an improvement on the stoves with which he planned to compete, perhaps in cooperation with one of Schenectady's foundries, probably Pilling, Condee & Co. who were still manufacturing for him in 1848.

Hermance's key design feature was the hot air chamber he placed between his ovens and the way it vented into the flues.  He was pursuing the same objectives as other inventors, but in his own distinctive way, building on but also (he hoped) evading the obstacle presented by the Buck patent.  He knew Buck, had used his stove for four years, and had examined it carefully.  He had known Jonathan Hathaway, the other (and earlier) key innovator behind the large-oven stove, for even longer -- Hathaway had suggested to Hermance that they should go into partnership together in 1838.  Instead he served as a sales agent for both of them and their products, until he decided to strike out on his own.  So he was ideally placed to design a new stove that drew on features from both of theirs.  His strategy seems to have worked, at least with his customers -- four years later, he boasted of "hundreds [of testimonials] in our possession" from "Thousands of delighted purchasers."  

[This account draws on depositions by Hathaway and Hermance in yet another patent case involving the Buck stove in 1854-55, years after Darius's death -- both in Box 7, Folder 7, Marcus Filley Papers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.] 

(2) Hermance's Own Circular (front cover illustrated at the head of this blog post; 25 May 1848; 12 pages. Illustrated. 9 cm).

[Unfortunately I read this in 2006, before I adopted the habit of using a digital camera for bulk copying in archives, and only photographed the front cover. I transcribed most of the text, but not all -- e.g. the lists of names in the Testimonials section, which I would now understand as some of the best evidence for the geographical extent of Hermance's market.]

CIRCULAR

[p. 3] The attention of manufacturers, dealers and purchasers of Cooking Stoves, is solicited to the examination of the following:

The production of a successful Cooking Stove has, for a number of years past, engaged the attention of manufacturers and dealers in the article, to the fullest extent, and stimulated to action the inventive powers of mechanical ingenuity, and induced numerous men of genius and scientific mechanics, to devote their time to the accomplishment of the important object.

The result has been seen and realised by the public, in the appearance of an endless catalogue of Cooking Stoves, varying as widely in form and principle, as in their adaptation to the wants of the country, and consequent want of success upon introduction; while the few improvements considered valuable, obtained in the result, have been subjects of universal imitation by others and by their sameness in construction and apparent principle and merit, productive of a fatal competition; and the success of the various Stoves (in introduction) more dependent upon the popularity and efforts of the various manufacturers and dealers, than any real advantage over others.

[p. 4] Hermance started out selling Buck, Hathaway and other large oven Cooking Stoves, "the pioneers in the change since taken place in the market in the manufacture of larger and more perfect ovens, and a more durable construction than was realized in the premium and other Cooking Stoves in general use.  The advantage of large oven, then and still most effective and popular, was in the shape secured, as then supposed, by [BUCK’s] patent, and consequently, in efforts to obtain this object, other various forms were adopted, none of which were the large and convenient shape, or operated upon as sure a principle to effect the equal distribution of heat.  To these attempts at imitation and evasion of patent, may be attributed the introduction of fuel saving and other important advantages not contained in the above named stoves. 

The combination and perfection of the above shaped large oven, with the addition of a smaller oven, for purposes requiring different degrees of heat, with the more compact form and advantage of fuel saving and adaptation to use, with wood or coal, together with the other improvements in the more recent style of stoves, is more than realized in the combination of the whole, most simply effected, in the construction of the Cooking Stove known as the Dispatch, and now offered to the public in a new arrangement of beautiful paterns (sic), with the fullest confidence of possessing greatly superior advantages over other Cooking Stoves in the market, in their manufacture, sale, or use ...  [There were] Thousands of delighted purchasers [and testimonials] ... the most liberal and exclusive privileges are offered in its manufacture, and dealers will be supplied from such arrangements, and those now made, upon the most advantageous terms... 

[p. 5] DESCRIPTION -- "a simple combination of hot air chambers, arranged under and in rear of the fire-box, thereby preventing the too direct application of heat to the front of the ovens, the heat also serving in its passage to heat the tops of the oven forming the hot air flue ... most evenly and perfectly" [and indirectly the lower oven, with an] equal distribution of heat ...

In the above valuable combination and arrangement of Hot Air Chambers, is embodied the whole secret of our success and merit of the Dispatch Cooking Stove. … [patent 13 June 1844] In imitation of the above highly popular arrangement, many awkward and complicated Cooking Stoves have made their appearance for experiment, with those unfortunately in their manufacture, the public who may be induced to purchase them.  Their history is well known.  Manufacturers, dealers and purchasers should be on their guard, as Stoves, to perform well with one oven, require principle in their construction; and its application, if not absence in these double oven imitations will readily appear, from their host of dampers and complications in its stead.  A few double oven Cooking Stoves having acquired some notoriety [p. 6] must not be taken as a sample of the Dispatch in any particular ...  even if they wish but one oven, ours is more perfect... Fuel saving is proverbial with the Dispatch."

[Recent modifications: "points in summer arrangement" and larger fire box for hard coal -- the "summer arrangement" was a small firebox under the front hearth, with two boiler holes over it, so that limited cooking could be done in the summer without having to use much fuel or overheat the kitchen.]

[p. 7] "We publish the following result of the trial testing the validity of the patent claimed upon the Buck Stove, obtained in a suit instituted by Buck and Wright; and in its progress influenced directly by the combined efforts of the vast moneyed monopoly recently engaged in its manufacture and sale.  Others in the trade, also alarmed at the success evidently awaiting our unprejudiced introduction of an article sure to draw upon their trade to a great extent, were more indirectly our opponents.  It will be seen how far this unjust attempt availed them in the event.  We annihilated the assailing patent on the one hand, and are in the field as anticipated to compete with one another, by offering to the public an article in Cooking Stoves beyond comparison with the above named Stove in capacity for business and excellence of performance or economy in fuel.  The facts are all well substantiated; and we claim in the Dispatch to have attained a higher point in the scale of adaptation to the wants of the public, than any Stove in the entire catalogue now offered in the market.  We would here also add, that the reports of the granting of a new trial are not only false, but must not be circulated at all, even from hearsay, to my injury.  I even doubt the wish of another trial.  If this course shall come in contact with the interest of those in the manufacture of the Dispatch Cooking Stove, we would advise the sale of the Buck Stove, at a reduced price, if customers upon an examination of facts would purchase it; but if such reports shall come more directly in contact with our interest, the circulators will be dealt with as our judgement and interest shall dictate.  This course is not desirable.

[p. 8] from the Ontario Repository --

US Circuit Court at Canandaigua, June 1847. BUCK and WRIGHT vs. JOHN C. HERMANCE. Action to try the validity of the patent for Buck's Cooking Stove. -- This important and interesting case, which occupied the Court through four days of the last week, was brought to a close on Saturday afternoon, by a verdict

for the defendant.

... Hermance denied this [infringement], and insisted that the Buck stove had no originality about it, and that Buck was not the inventor of what he patented and claimed as his own, but that he pirated it from others -- chiefly from the Hathaway stove.  This, of course, opened all questions touching the validity of the Buck patent, and it was thoroughly sifted for several days by the eminent counsel engaged.

[Two previous trials at Albany, hung juries .. District Judge gives injunction vs. Hermance after the second trial "to put a stop to his making the Dispatch stoves."]

Counsel for plaintiffs: R.L. Joice of Albany, Jared Wilson, Esq., and Governor Seward.  For the Defendants -- Mark H. Sibley and Samuel Stevens, Esq.

TESTIMONIALS: "We add for perusal the following, and do not publish for want of space, hundreds in our possession."

-- from manufacturers/dealers: Schenectady ... New Brunswick ... Glensfalls (sic), pp. 8-10

[p. 10] "Have not thousands in the production of Cooking Stoves, failed in their efforts from ignorance of the wants of the public, notwithstanding the important influences used in their introduction?

Was not the introduction of large ovens made necessary in the popular trade, from the appearance of Stoves with similar shaped ovens to the one now used in the [p. 11] Dispatch...

[but DO THEY WORK?  Unequal heat distribution]

[p. 11] "Those desiring to engage in the manufacture or sale of the above Stove, can have the exclusive trade secured them, of a Stove, popular and unlike others in appearance and performance, and furnished with patterns, at a small expense, and at a reasonable premium for the privilege."

[p. 12] DIRECTIONS FOR USE

[Requires a well-fitted pipe and clean flues] "To bake, the damper should be turned up, and the oven acquire a hissing heat, at the lower edge of the Stove, on the side;" -- comparatively simple.

---

(3) The Legal Record

Hermance's circular in the summer of 1848 was rather premature and overconfident in reporting the U.S. Circuit Court's Canandaigua judgement in June 1847 as if it was the end of his legal woes.  His opponents had deep pockets and valuable intellectual property to defend, and could afford to go several more rounds.  These produced conclusions that were sufficiently important that they entered the public record of federal cases, which is why we can know about them so easily. 

It probably helped that Buck and his allies had the best patent lawyer in the United States at their service -- the most successful, most persuasive, and best connected, William Henry Seward, former Governor of the State of the New York.  Seward turned his hand to the lucrative business of patent law while he was filling a gap in his political career and rebuilding his fortunes thereby.  He was well acquainted with the judges in all of these cases [See note A at the end of this section.]  

Note the phrase "Buck and his allies" -- these cases did not just pit one stove inventor who had become a moderately successful stove maker in St. Louis, Missouri, and his partner Nathaniel Wright, against another, much smaller one from the Capital District.  Buck had assigned a share in his patent to the partners in a large firm of Albany stove wholesalers who had the time, experience, and resources to invest in establishing and protecting it at law, and employing it to squeeze other stove makers into paying them handsomely for the right to use it in making the large-oven stoves that the market increasingly demanded.  These were "the combined efforts of the vast moneyed monopoly recently engaged in its manufacture and sale" Hermance referred to in his circular, making use of the language of Jacksonian Democracy to represent what his opponents called theft, and one of the judges in his final case called piracy, as a noble cause.

Hermance was probably very well acquainted with these men, and they with him: he had, as noted above, been a salesman for Buck before turning into a rival; and the Albany men, Shibboleth and William McCoy and Stephen Clark, were his business rivals and near-neighbours less than half a mile away at the southern end of Broadway. Clark even lived on the next block to Hermance's store. There were only nine other stove manufacturers and wholesalers in Albany besides their two firms. If they were not exactly friends with one another, they were certainly not strangers. [See note B.]

Buck et al. vs. Cobb and Hermance, December 1846

This case involved the Hermance stove but not John C. himself, at least not formally.  It came after his first two trials in Albany in October 1845 and 1846 which had resulted in hung juries, to the trial judge's evident surprise.  In the process Buck and his partners had already run up costs and fees amounting to $1,650 -- about a million dollars, in 2019 equivalent terms.  While waiting for a third trial, which happened at Canandaigua the following year, they sought an injunction against William Cobb, who made Hermance stoves at his Albany foundry, and Jacob Hermance (relationship to John unknown but presumably close), who sold them in other parts of the country (John Hermance reserved the Albany trade for himself).  

The injunction route was attractive because it avoided jury trial and only needed to persuade a judge that the plaintiffs had a strong enough case that they deserved equitable relief until it could be heard again.  Buck had already won such an injunction against other alleged patent infringers in the U.S. Circuit Court for Ohio the previous July.  

He and his partners won this one too, Judge Conkling accepting all of their key arguments after hearing the parties and their lawyers in his chambers at Auburn over two days -- that Buck was the original inventor of the improvements contained in his 1839 patent; that his stove was wholly different in principle and construction from the earlier Hoxie and Hathaway stoves; and that the Hermance stove violated it.  In other words, all of the points where they had failed to persuade a jury twice already, and would go on to fail a third time at Canandaigua in 1847, were accepted  as facts, and they were given the injunction they requested to stop Cobb's manufacture  and Jacob Hermance's sales.

The judge's grounds for his opinion are interesting in themselves, and explain much of the difference between his and his colleagues' and the juries' very different readings of the case.  It seems obvious that he shared his colleague, friend, fellow Union College alumnus, and neighbour William Seward's Whig opinion of the need to defend private rights in intellectual property to further the national interest in economic growth:

[T]he complainants had endeavored in good faith to obtain the verdict of a jury in their favor, on a trial at law against the defendants, and had done all in their power at a great expenditure of money and loss of time, to effect that object; that meantime they had lost opportunities of selling out rights in the patent, for no one would buy while the patent was in litigation; that half of the lifetime of the patent was already gone, and the defendants were undoubted infringers, and that under those circumstances, and with the strong disposition manifested of recent years by the courts of the United States to regard patents and patentees more and more with a favoring eye, and to do all in their power to secure to inventors the rewards of their genius against the incursions of pirates (emphasis added), the patent itself must be held to be prima facie evidence of all the complainants claimed under it, and the burden of overthrowing it must rest upon the defendants. 

[Circuit Court of the United States, for the Northern District of New York.  In Equity. Darius Buck, Nathaniel Wright, Stephen Clark, Shibboleth McCoy and William McCoy v, William Cobb and Jacob Hermance. In The Law Reporter, April 1847, pp. 545-7] 

The Canadaigua Trial, 1847

I have not found any report of it yet except Hermance's summary in his Circular, but his success in persuading the jury probably depended in good measure on his luck and persistence in finding a surviving example of Christopher Hoxie's stove, made in the 1820s under his 1815 patent.  This anticipated key features of Jonathan Hathaway's, Darius Buck's, and even Hermance's own, i.e. he had secured convincing evidence that none of them was original.  Unfortunately by the time of the fourth trial it had been "without my consent or knowledge broken up and destroyed," considerably weakening his case. [Source: Hermance Deposition.]

Buck et al. vs. Hermance, June 1848

This was a decision on a narrow but significant point of law.  Buck's lawyers had called as one of their witnesses at the Canandaigua trial, whose scope had been limited to Hermance's infringement of their exclusive rights to the use of their patent within Albany county, a stove merchant, Jackson, who was the rights-holder in several other counties, and had also sought an injunction against Hermance in a separate suit himself.  Hermance's objection to Jackson's testimony was not on the basis of his obvious prejudice but his lack of competency in a suit confined to a single county where he had no interest.  This technical objection was upheld by the trial judge, appealing against which gave Buck's lawyers an opportunity to go back to court against Hermance and move for a new trial.  This time they won, nullified the effect of his much broader earlier victory on the facts, and gained the retrial that they wanted.

["Darius Buck & others vs. John C. Hermance" in Samuel Blatchford, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Second Circuit (Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1852), Vol. 1, pp. 322-5.] 

Buck et al. vs. Hermance, June 1849

Darius Buck and others vs. John C. Hermance (1 Blatch. 398), in the U.S. court for the Northern District of New York in June 1849, was the most thorough and decisive trial of the facts.  There was expert testimony from Charles M. Keller, a mechanical engineer and "Solicitor of Patents" who, like Hermance's agent Thomas Jones, was formerly a senior staff member in the Patent Office itself -- he had been Chief Examiner for years before going into private practice.  He even had glass doors fitted in the side of a Hermance stove, so that the circulation of flue gases inside it could be checked against Hermance's claims on its behalf and also against one of Buck's. [Testimony of Charles M. Keller in Marcus L. Filley Papers, New York State Library, Box 13, Folder 22.]  

Hermance still insisted, against the evidence, that there was a vital difference between the ways in which his stove's bottom flues heated the front of the large lower oven and the design and operation of Buck's stove, which meant that his was not an infringement.  Judge Nelson opined that this difference of opinion between the defendant and the plaintiffs was "not at all surprising," because Buck's explanation for the layout and function of this crucial part of his stove was "exceedingly obscure and difficult to comprehend."  Hermance further argued as he had at Canadaigua, but this time without the persuasive evidence of the original Hoxie stove, that in any case Buck's patent was invalid because it claimed too much, including features already well known and contained in stoves made and sold for the past thirty years, examples of some of which were again produced in court.  

But he lost quite decisively, the judge ruling that defects in Buck's patent, his overclaiming, and even the admitted fact of the lack of originality in most of the key features, were all immaterial.  Buck's was a new and useful combination of existing design elements with some originality -- the hot-air chamber at the front of the stove -- and, following his direction, the jury upheld Buck's case and awarded him $200 (c. $100,000) -- the profit he had lost on the hundred stoves Hermance admitted to have made and sold himself, which was surely a drastic undercount. 

[William Hubbell Fisher, Reports of Cases Relating to Letters Patent for Inventions Determined in the Supreme and Circuit Courts of the United States (Cincinnati: Robert Clark & Co., 1873), Vol. 1, pp. 251-60.]

So where did that decisive defeat leave poor John Hermance?  There is no need for any sympathy.  Within a few months Hermance settled with Buck, the McCoys, and Clark.  They dropped their claims against him for costs and damages, while he agreed to stop violating one particular part of the Buck patent, and in return was given $350 (c. $180,000) and the right to collect up to $2,000 (c. $1 million) in damages for its infringement by other stove makers in a territory assigned to him.  

Why had they proved so magnanimous in their hour of victory after four years of battles in court?  Hermance threatened to seek another trial, and it was better to buy him out and give him a minor interest in the Buck patent himself rather than to run the risk of yet another courtroom battle.  So Hermance was free to return to making money by selling his Despatch stoves, with the added benefit of being able to join the Buck's patent owners in squeezing money out of other stove makers they could threaten to prosecute for infringements.  After a few stressful years, Hermance was a definite winner. 

[Articles of agreement between Darius Buck and Stephen Clark of the first part, and John C. Hermance of the second part, 1 Sept. 1849 in Box 13, Folder 22, Marcus Filley Papers, New York State Library; Hermance deposition.]

Notes:

A. William Seward: Frederick Seward, Autobiography of William H. Seward, from 1801 to 1834, with a Memoir of his Life, and Selections from his Letters from 1831 to 1846 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1877), Vol. 1, pp. 670-71; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford U.P., 1967), p. 98. There does not seem to be any trace of the stove cases in Seward's law-practice records at the University of Rochester, but there are examples of his courtroom eloquence in two other Albany patent cases, James G. Wilson v. Louis Rousseau and Charles Easton, 1845 in Blatchford, Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Second Circuit, Vol. 1, esp. pp. 4 through 74 [planing machines], and Many v. Treadwell, 1849 [railroad car wheels], excerpted as “Invention” in George E. Baker, ed., The Works of William H. Seward (New York: Redfield, 1853), Vol. 1, pp. 516-22. The best account of Seward's legal career, including his patent work, is in Robert T. Swaine's classic The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors, 1819-1947 (New York: Privately Printed, 1946), Vol. 1, Chapter 3.

B. Buck's Partners: Cuyler Reynolds, ed., Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical and Family Memoirs (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911), Vol. 2, pp. 895-6, for Shibboleth McCoy's career -- he acquired an interest in an Albany stove foundry in 1837 and ended up as sole proprietor.  The biography says that he bought the Buck patents in 1849, i.e. after the legal campaign to defend them had succeeded, but it's obvious from Buck et al. vs. Cobb and Hermance that he and his partners were already interested in them and financing Buck's litigation over the previous three years.  It would be necessary to examine the US Patent and Trademarks Office's manuscript records on the Buck patent and the Assignment Books to see if there was a detailed account there of when exactly McCoy and his partners first bought their shares of the patent, and how successful they were in licensing their rights to other makers.

(4) Advertisements: 

 

Herkimer Freeman, 13 June 1845, p. 2 -- in the prosperous Mohawk Valley town of c. 4,000 people, Little Falls, about 55 miles west of Schenectady.  Note that Hermance must have been making and selling his stoves for a considerable time before he succeeded in getting his patent on them -- this ad was placed a month before the patent issue date.

Garret G. Hermance's ads -- evidently an agent for Jordan Mott, New York stove maker. First is from the Albany Gazette, July 1842; second from the Albany Evening Atlas, 30 Jan. 1847, p. 1.

Another of John C. Hermance's "Ne Plus Ultra" ads -- similar claims to those in Herkimer County in 1844-5, but this time it's Putnam and Westchester County, 1846, about 120 miles down the Hudson from Albany.  Note (1) the reference to the opposition Hermance's stoves meet in the market, (2) the guarantees of superiority over named rivals, (3) the usual long testimonial list -- standard marketing practice, and (4) the information about where to see and buy.  Hermance did not make his own stoves -- he contracted the work out to other foundries, not having one of his own, or assigned (sold) the right to make and sell to other stove makers.  In this case, it looks as if his local agent was a relative -- U.C. Hermance, a Peekskill tinner -- and stoves for this section of the lower Hudson valley were made at a riverside foundry. 

Albany Daily Argus 22 December 1849, p. 1 --
ad by Hermance's partner, with whom he remained in business between 1848 and 1852.

Albany Evening Atlas 25 Oct. 1851 --
note that Hermance had acquired another dealer and his stove was still winning prizes though already seven years old.