Hardware Billheads

Hardware includes a great variety of articles. These, in their manufacture and sale, fall naturally into certain groups, any one of which frequently constitutes an interest in itself. Domestic hardware includes agate, tin, and iron utensils and other household furnishings. Builders' hardware explains itself in a long line of bolts, locks, knobs, and trimmings, in addition to building staples, while tools, agricultural implements, machinists' supplies, cutlery, and saddlers' hardware are common trade distinctions.

The early hardware industry imported goods, and for the most part of English make, the mother country continuing to be the principal source of supply throughout the colonial period. With independence came the beginnings of hardware manufacturing, which if small were at any rate prompt and significant. Soon the War of 1812, emphasizing the separation from England, and throwing the people on their own resources, gave a great impetus to all manufacturing interests. But American hardware in a differential and distinctive sense dates from about 1840, when the struggling American manufacturer began to get a foothold. Gradually the superiority and more attractive appearance of his goods were recognized and the foreign article supplanted.

The burden of the distribution of these manufactured goods rested on the hardware jobber, a middle man, peculiar to American business methods, who carried for the convenience of the smaller merchant a stock which is the accumulation of many factories. Other countries handled their products direct from factory to retail shop; but the great distances which separate the local dealer from the industrial centers have made the hardware jobber a necessity in America.
The locations of these jobbers become known as centers of distribution. The centers of a hardware distribution in the United States show a firm westward tendency. In the days of imported hardware the seaport cities were the distributing points which forwarded the hardware to the whole country, but, with the natural spread of population and the improved facilities in transportation, the centers of distribution have moved steadily westward and are now represented in the middle West.

Certain localities supplied their own specialized needs; California made the canners' tools which prepare for market the products of her orchards and fruit farms. The Northwest made for its use its own grain tracts reaping and harvesting machines. Pennsylvania converted much of her own iron and steel into tools and heavy hardware and became a very important factor in hardware production. (Read more about the American Hardware industry)

On the Blanchard billhead below, note the "Importer of" - at this time, a lot of hardware was being imported fron Great Britain as manufacturing in the US had not come into its own.

By 1854, this beautiful and richly decorated billhead advertisies both foreign and domestic goods including stoves, iron, cutlery, carpenter tools, rakes, forks, etc.

In the 1860 Kline billhead we have the start of the jobber / distributor / dealer of hardware.

The Lloyd billhead below goes further to designate itself has a wholesale hardware house, as well as importers and dealers.

Nice 1888 example of the eleborate store front of the Pritzlaff Company.