Cool Chart: Piles of Details about 1901 Ypsilanti Industries

(Click chart for larger image). Here is something really extraordinary. It a chart from the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics showing the results of their 1901 inspection of (all?) 25 of Ypsilanti's then-existing industries.

To me the most interesting tidbit of many is the listing for the Hay & Todd Manufacturing Co., a/k/a Ypsi's famous underwear factory, once located at the southwest corner of Forest and the river, with its own giant dam.

You can see that Hay & Todd was by far the city's biggest employer of women--over half of 1901 Ypsi industries employed no women at all. 175 of Hay & Todd's 200 employees were women, earning $1 a day. There were 10 office men earning double their salary, and 5 foremen earning $2 a day as well. The factory ran year-round and was the only factory in Ypsi powered exclusively by water power.

The factory with the shortest workday was Adam Schane's cigar factory, at only 5 hours. It's also the only industry powered by "hand" power. A low $1 daily wage for an average employee correlates with an industry's # of female employees--the higher the # of women, the lower the average wage. Only 1 industry is powered by electricity: the Ann Arbor Printing Co. Most are powered by steam and/or hydro.

We can see lots of familiar names here: the Scharf Tag, Label & Box Co. had as president and the Dress Stay Co. had as founder H. P. Glover, who also employed as domestic Bertha Wiederhoft. We have seen pictures of the Deubel mills at Cross Street and south of the Michigan Ave. bridge. We've also seen the Scoville lumber yard on Frog Island, the Ainsworth mill, and of course the McCullough foundry, now being run by Elmer B., William L.'s younger brother, who was 38 years old in 1901.

DD also spots the Ypsilanti Manufacturing Company, which made sad irons. These were the non-electric clothes-pressing irons of the 19th century. Some were solid metal, some were a metal frame with plaster inside, and some even had a compartment for hot coals inside. One 19th-century meaning of "sad" was "heavy," and these irons were that.

DD is lucky to own a YMO sad iron storage rack (scan at right is a bit blurry since it has a rim lifting it off the scanner plate). This is a little tray for the sad iron that lifts it off a surface by about a centimeter, so that the heated iron in use can be put aside without burning a surface. I love the ornate logo, which reminds me of the design of the new bike racks around town. Can you see the Y, the M, and the "Co." intertwined?

In years past both the washing (usually on Mondays) and the ironing (usually on Tuesdays) took ALL DAY. Can you imagine ironing all day? Constantly putting the iron back on the stove to reheat and holding it with a potholder so as not to get burned? One inventor, a Ms. Potts, designed a sad iron with a detachable wooden handle--but ironing was still an arduous undertaking. Before we veer too far off topic, here's a fascinating article on the evolution of household technology and a pic of Ms. Pott's revolutionary sad iron.

Enjoy the chart and do tell us what other tidbits you notice and/or what we can infer from all this information.