Bartlett-Hayward Company was an American metalworking company with large foundry, fabrication, and construction business lines, located in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in the 1830s, it was independent until 1925 and since 1927 was owned by Koppers, of which it remained a division long afterward.
The company engaged initially in the production of Latrobe stoves, but by the end of the nineteenth century, its Pigtown complex was the largest iron foundry in the United States, with a diverse output including cast-iron architecture, steam heating equipment, machine parts, railroad engines and piston rings.
During the peak of cast-iron architecture in the nineteenth century, the company was well known for its ornate building façades, which were shipped nationally. Among their notable projects were their contributions to the Sun Iron Building (1851) in Baltimore and the Harper Brothers Building (1854) in New York City, together credited as among the first major iron-front buildings in the United States.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bartlett-Hayward expanded to become the country's largest producer of gas holders, sending ironworkers far and wide to erect them, mostly for municipal and industrial gasworks.
During World War I, the company made munitions, ship propellers, and other materiel for the United States and its allies. It made millions of artillery shells and the artillery fuzes for them (9.6 million shells in World War I). It designed new fuze models and designed improved processes for making those shells.
The company was acquired by McClintic-Marshall Construction Company in 1925, then sold to Koppers Company in 1927. It was absorbed as a directly owned division of Koppers in 1936.
During World War II, it did not resume artillery shell production (which was handled by other companies) but instead built carriages for antiaircraft artillery (the M3 carriage for the 37 mm gun M1 and the carriage for the 40 mm Bofors gun), naval aircraft catapults, aircraft propellers, and other materiel.
The West Baltimore facility remained open as the home of the Koppers division until the firm left the city about 1980.
Name Bartlett-Hayward is the most common name for the company; however, the firm used several names during its existence: Hayward and Friend, 1837–1840, stovemakers Hayward and Company, 1840–1848, stovemakers Hayward, Bartlett and Company, 1848–1866, stovefounders, plumbers, architectural iron works, locomotive boilers, steam and hot water works Bartlett, Robbins and Company, 1866–1878, founders, stoves, architectural iron works, heating apparatus Bartlett, Hayward and Company, 1878–1909, founders and engineers The Bartlett-Hayward Company, 1909–1936, founders, machinists, and engineers Koppers Company, Bartlett-Hayward Division, 1936- engineers, manufacturers and contractors.
History Foundation
Bartlett-Hayward's origins began in 1832, when George M. Hayward moved from New Hampshire and established himself in the stove business in Baltimore. Five years later, in 1837, his brother Jonas Hutchinson Hayward joined him in the city to share in the business. The brothers partnered with Alfred F. Friend establishing a firm at the corner of Light and Mercer Streets under the name Hayward & Friend.
In 1838, George Hayward returned to New Hampshire and left the firm (along with Friend). Two years later, in 1840, Jonas Hayward reformed it with the addition of his elder brother Nehemiah Hayward and a new partner, Samuel Blanchard, under the name Hayward & Company. At this point, the company, lacking a foundry of its own, received its iron from Harford County, around Jarrettsville, Maryland. In 1846 Hayward and Company purchased the Latrobe Stove Foundries and pioneered in the national marketing of the "Latrobe" or "Baltimore" stove. According to a 1917 estimate, the company ultimately produced over 300,000 of them.
Separately, David Lewis Bartlett, another manufacturer from New England, moved to Baltimore around 1844, and established a stove foundry, first on President Street and later (in 1849) on Leadenhall Street. Shortly after Hayward & Company's merger with the Latrobe Foundry, Bartlett also joined the partnership. Consequently, the firm became known as Hayward, Bartlett and Company. The firm was by this time completely owned by the Bartletts and Haywards, Samuel Blanchard having withdrawn in 1842.
Expansion to iron architecture
In 1850, New York architect James Bogardus was hired by Baltimore Sun founder A.S. Abell to build a new headquarters for the newspaper, using the then-novel technique of cast-iron fronts. While Bogardus preferred to use other, New York-based foundries with whom he had prior relationships for the actual exterior ironwork, Hayward & Bartlett was commissioned to cast the building's steam heating and plumbing systems. Within a few years however, the company was well known for producing architectural fronts of its own. One of its most notable early works came in 1854 when the company built the cast-iron façade of Harper & Bros. Building in New York, considered a "masterpiece of the style."
In 1851, Hayward & Bartlett increased its production space, constructing a large, four-story warehouse in the cast-iron style for which they were becoming known, at Light and Mercer streets and adjacent to their existing offices. By 1852, Hayward & Bartlett obtained a large piece of property at the corner of Pratt and Scott Streets near the Mount Clare Shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which put the company in a strategic position to supply the new railroad. At this site they built a huge new plant including warehouses, workshops and foundries. At this expanded site, two large cast-iron Newfoundland dogs were built and placed at the entrance. Named "Sailor" and "Canton," these two dogs became famous symbols of the company, and would be displayed until the company's final closure more than a century later.
In 1853, the company took a third partner, Horace W. Robbins, a New Englander (like all of the previous partners) who had been operating in Baltimore since the late 1840s. The next year, the company spun off its retail stove business to another company, Collins & Co., deciding to focus solely on the foundry and ironworking business proper. One of the company's most unique works at this time was the elaborate 1853 heating system for the Thomas Winans mansion "Alexandroffsky", which utilized 20,000 square feet of heating coils under the floors of twenty buildings.
As cast-iron-front warehouses became increasingly popular by the mid-1850s, the company cast many such fronts (especially in Downtown Baltimore), including a contract via James Bogardus for ten warehouses in New York in 1856. Hayward & Bartlett also supplied cast-iron fixtures for affluent homes near Mount Vernon and along Charles Street. The company created the doors, window frames and columns of the tower for the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C. in 1858. It was also commissioned to produce the iron work for the B&O Railroad's Camden Station.
Even as iron buildings continued to be lucrative, Hayward & Bartlett diversified its production, such as when the company began producing iron lighthouses, two of which were exported to Texas in 1858. The company also began contesting and winning national government contracts, such as for the iron work in the Alexandria Custom House and Post Office in 1856, and the Charleston Custom House in 1857. The company's work in heating systems continued, with a contract to outfit the Maryland State House in 1859. Hayward & Bartlett's experience with monumental iron works grew, as it cast what were reported as some of the largest girders in the world as part of the construction of the Peabody Institute in 1860. Demonstrating their continuing prosperity, a single report in The Sun from September of the same year described how the company had just built two large new factories at their Pratt & Scott street location, and were simultaneously completing five warehouses fronts for Petersburg, Virginia, two fronts bound for Washington, D.C., and "several massive iron doors" for a county in Georgia.
Civil War munitions and locomotives
When the American Civil War broke out, the company provided round shrapnel for the Union Army. However, the company downplayed its participation in supplying one side over the other, owing to the delicate position of Baltimore between North and South (a tension which had recently exploded in the Baltimore riot of 1861), as well as the company's commercial entanglements with Southern governments, such as for the construction of the South Carolina State House, which Hayward & Bartlett had secured contract for in 1848, and would resume the construction of after the war's conclusion.
At the outset of the war, Ross Winans, the owner of the Winans Locomotives Works was arrested and imprisoned for attempting to provide support to the Confederacy. With its owner imprisoned for the duration of the war, in 1863 the Winans yards were leased by Hayward, Bartlett & Co., who began producing railroad engines there under the name "Baltimore Locomotive Works." With these extra workshops, the company's footprint in west Baltimore was increased about another four acres. In the course of its ownership of the yard, Hayward & Bartlett completed three Winans locomotives already under construction, in addition to building or reconstructing an additional 25 engines. The company continued to operate the locomotive yards until 1867. The three Winans engines are notable as the last camelback locomotives to be put into service by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Aside from the B&O, engines produced by the Baltimore Locomotive Works in this period saw service on other lines including the Cumberland & Pennsylvania Railroad and the Western Maryland Railroad. After 1867, when Bartlett, Robbins & Co. left the locomotive business, the Winans shops were razed and the area sold for other purposes.
At the death of Jonas H. Hayward in 1866, the company changed its name to Bartlett, Robbins & Co., with David L. Bartlett assuming the role of senior partner and Howard W. Robbins the junior. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the company produced iron-front buildings in the rebuilding South, such as the large Stearns Iron-Front Building in Richmond, Virginia. In the late 1860s, Bartlett & Robbins produced the iron dome of Baltimore City Hall. The company also built iron fronts and shutters for numerous Baltimore industrial buildings, a portico for the Baltimore Basilica and an iron balcony for Barnum's Hotel in Baltimore. The company contributed interior metalwork for the Washington Monument. It also supplied much of the metalwork for the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C.
Post–Civil War gas industry
By the 1870s, Bartlett & Robbins was the largest iron foundry in the United States, employing between 500 and 1000 people at any given time. The company at this time produced the elaborate cast-iron interior and railings of the George Peabody Library in Mount Vernon. In 1871, the company supplied the cast-iron exterior for the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware. It also supplied the architectural ironwork of the United States Capitol. Many of the company's cast-iron building façades were designed by English architect George H. Johnson (who also designed listed landmarks including the Haughwout Building in New York City), such as the extant structure at 322 W Baltimore St.