Thaddeus Fairbanks: the St. Johnsbury inventor whose scale built a town
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thaddeus Fairbanks was born in Brimfield, Mass., in 1796, and his family moved to St. Johnsbury in 1815. He and his brother Erastus started an iron foundry, making plows and stoves.
The family also processed hemp, and weighing loads of it was a constant problem. The scales of the day required hanging heavy loads from a beam. Thaddeus designed a platform scale that used a system of levers so a wagon could be driven onto it and weighed accurately. He patented it in 1831.
E. & T. Fairbanks
The scale transformed the business. E. & T. Fairbanks & Co. became one of the largest scale manufacturers in the world, selling everything from small counter scales to huge railroad scales. St. Johnsbury grew into a company town, with factories, worker housing and a rail connection. Erastus served two terms as governor of Vermont, and Thaddeus kept inventing, eventually holding dozens of patents.
What the fortune built
The Fairbanks family put their money into the town. Thaddeus helped found St. Johnsbury Academy in 1842, which still operates as a private school serving local students. His nephew Horace built the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, a library and art gallery that opened in 1871 and holds Albert Bierstadt’s huge painting “The Domes of the Yosemite.” Another nephew, Franklin, founded the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.
Thaddeus died in 1886. The scale company was later sold and moved its headquarters out of state, though scale manufacturing continued in St. Johnsbury for many years.
The Athenaeum, the academy and the museum still give the Northeast Kingdom town cultural institutions few places its size have.
,_portrait.jpg){kind=link}