Joseph Addison Vance was a trained carpenter in Winston, NC, when in 1884 he established a foundry and machine shop and started the J. A. Vance Co. The company specialized in sawmill and related machinery as well as being a general machine shop used by the community for building and repairing machinery of all kinds.

In 1892 the J. A. Vance Company hired engineer and machinist Cyrus Briggs to their shop as an inventor.  While at the Vance shops, among many other projects, Briggs worked on building one of the first automated cigarette-making machines and in 1898 he perfected this machine which was capable of making 300,000 cigarettes a day.  With the importance of tobacco and the manufacturing of cigarettes to the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina at that time, this was a significant invention of great importance to the local economy.  There is no doubt that this side note in the companies history brought much capital to the small business which was used to further their main production of sawmill and woodworking machinery.

Workers outside the J. A. Vance Machine Works, c. 1900. Photo from the collection of the Wachovia Historical Society; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museums & Gardens

Joseph's son, Charles Fogle Vance, began work at the company in 1915 and in 1930 became president of the company until his retirement in 1965 when the company was sold to the Union Tool Company in Warsaw, IN.  Thin evidence suggests that Vance remained in business after 1965, still operating under the J. A. Vance name through at least 1969, and probably for some time after. There is some evidence that Vance was still selling parts for old machines up through the early 1980s. They made sawmills, planers, matchers and other large woodworking machines. In their latter years of being in business, they also manufactured hardware for furniture.

Information Sources

• Ad in 1955-56 Hitchcock's Wood Workers Digest Directory.
• A patent search revealed only one patent assigned to this maker: a 1968 patent for a dining-table expansion mechanism.
• A biography of Joseph A. Vance appears in Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1892.
• The 1890 issue of Branson's North Carolina Business Directory lists J. A. Vance as a manufacturer of planers, saw-mills, and wood-working machinery.
• A card catalog reference to a 1911 catalog held at Smithsonian Libraries indicates that the company was selling the following items in that year:  sawmills, power receders, single and double surfacers and matchers, hand and gang edgers, circular re-saws and mill saws, tractor saws, cut-off saws, saw dust conveyors, rubber belts, corn mills, log beam mills, set works, feed works, balancing wheels.