Welcome! 

Register :: Login
Manufacturers Index - Emery Brothers
History
Last Modified: Nov 10 2010 10:11AM by Jeff_Joslin
If you have information to add to this entry, please contact the Site Historian.

This agricultural machinery manufacturer began as Emery & Co., operating the Albany Agricultural Works on Broadway. Their business failed in the fall of 1853. The works remained open, being jointly operated by the Emery brothers and Richard H. Pease, who made payments until he had purchased the business, the payments being completed in February 1855. Pease renamed the Works to the Excelsior Agricultural Equipment Works. The Emery brothers then left that business and opened a new one on State Street, operating the new Albany Agricultural Works as Emery Brothers.


Ads from the June 1855 issue of "The Cultivator". Apparently the Pease-Emery business relationship was not completely amicable.

The subsequent history is uncertain but they lasted for at least a few years. They made sawmills, drag saws, and shingle machines. Patent records suggest that they may have also made a sliding-arbor tablesaw and a planer.

Information Sources

  • From Transactions of the New-York State Agricultural Society for the Year 1850, writing of the 1849 Fair:
    H. L. Emery, Albany, best portable saw-mill, (Emery's); same, best corn sheller, horse power, (Smith's)". Also, "A Cylinder Dynamometer, (new,) for testing the draught of plows, machines, &c. This instrument is constructed upon principles mechanically and philosophically correct—the displacement of a fluid through a small orifice from one chamber of a cylinder to another, in which both time of action and force applied by known results, determine the resistance. This machine, when perfected, will approximate nearer to giving the true resistance of the great varieties of the plow than any other yet introduced, and is far more reliable than the vacillating, unsteady spring instruments hitherto used. It will be useful in determining the traction of wheel carriages, cars, boats, and in all cases where friction and the resistance of moving bodies are required. H. L. Emery, Albany, Silver medal.
  • Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Agriculture of the Sate of Ohio for the year 1853, on the list of premiums awarded at the Fourth Ohio State Fair, Dayton, September 1853: "H. S. Emery & CO., Albany, NY. Horse-power saw mill and saw: Silver Medal"
  • The September 1850 issue of The Cultivator has a pair of ads from Emery & Co., 369 and 371 Broadway, Albany, for agricultural equipment. The previous month's issue has an illustrated article on their horse power and feed mill. We have found ads from them as late as December 1851.
  • The June 1852 issue of Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review has this ad:
    Albany Agricultural Works, Emery & Co., Manufacturers of horse powers and threshers, farming implements and machinery, and dealers, wholesale and retail, in field, garden, and flower seed, Nos. 369 and 371 Broadway, Albany, N. Y.
  • 16-page catalog reported by Google Books: Annual circular of Emery Brothers: sole proprietors of the Albany Agricultural Works, 1856. The address was "corners of Hamilton, Liberty and Union streets".
  • From the November 1856 issue of The Cultivator, in a report on that falls New York State Fair:
    Emery Brothers as usual made an extensive display of their well made agricultural machinery. Among the objects shown by them, was a collection of plows, their dynamometer, which served so valuable a purpose at the Syracuse trial of implements last year, their good and simple sugar-cane mill, a simple and efficient shingle jointing machine, a clover mill, a corn and cob crusher, a horse-fork, corn-sheller, portable grist mill, horse-power churn, portable cider mill, and last and not least, a set of railway horse-powers, thrashers and separators.
  • From the January 1858 issue of The Cultivator, a lengthy text ad that mentions, among other products, a "drag cross-cut saw-mill", shingle machine, sawmills, dog powers, and horse powers.
  • The Annual Report of the New York State Agricultural Society, 1861 lists the results of the 1860 State Fair, including "Best portable cider mill, Emery Bros., Albany S. M." ("S. M." means "Silver Medal".)
  • 32-page catalog reported by Google Books: Illuminated catalogue of Emery Brothers sole proprietors of the Albany Agricultural Works, 1861. The address was "nos. 62 and 64 State St., Albany, N.Y."