A Bit of Junk with a Story

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I bought this dumb thing online even though the pencil part is misisng and the mechanism is all jammed up, paying too much money in the process because it’s sterling silver.  The sole reason for the purchase was the hallmark on the extension:

I’ve seen it a few times over the years . . . although it isn’t all that clear on this example, it’s the letter F, in what looks like a shield or a heart, skewered by a skeleton key.

I can’t see a hallmark containing the letter F without my mind immediately associating it with Leroy Fairchild.  Then there was also Fairchild & Johnson, started by Leroy’s son Harry and Ephraim S. Johnson’s son, which became Fairchild & Co. in 1905 . . . .   David Nishimura recently penned a very nice article for The Pennant, titled "Leroy W. Fairchild: The Little-Known History of a Well-Known Company," which appeared in my last issue as editor at the end of 2016.  David documented several marks used by the company . . . but not the F skewered by a key.

There’s an Online Encyclopedia of Silver Marks, Hallmarks and Makers Marks at www.925-1000.com, which does include the mark, and attributes it to Fairchild & Co., “successors to Fairchild & Johnson," and provides dates of 1919 to 1922, but there wasn’t a source quoted in the Online Encyclopedia.  My new book, American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, doesn’t include the mark, which means it wasn’t registered as a United States Trademark . . . for writing instruments, anyway.  At the end of the book, I included excerpts from several editions of the 1922 edition of a publication from the Jewelers’ Circular Publishing Company, titled Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades.  Alas . . . the only marks found in that edition were those documented in Nishimura’s article:

But wait a minute, I thought . . . I didn’t find the mark documented anywhere else but in a catalog of general silver marks, not writing instrument-specific marks.  And although I only included the writing instrument-specific sections of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, it’s not like I don’t have the rest of that book to check . . .  And there it was:

There’s our mark, in use by “L.W. Fairchild & Co. (out of business).”

The exact wording in the 1922 edition is significant: Fairchild & Co., the successor to Fairchild & Johnson (that’s Harry Fairchild, Leroy’s son), is reported as using the name “Leroy W. Fairchild,” while L.W. Fairchild & Co. is reported as being “out of business.”

Nishimura reports in his article that Leroy W. Fairchild retired in 1890 upon his wife’s death, and Leroy W. Fairchild & Co. was subsequently reincorporated by his other sons in Newark, New Jersey.  After at least two reorganizations, spinning off part of the business in 1894 and reincorporation in New York in 1895, the failure of the business was reported in the press on September 12, 1896 – or rather, the apparent takeover by Leroy C. Fairchild, another of Leroy W’s sons, which had been competing with Leroy W. Fairchild for several years.

Harry set up Fairchild & Johnson, a wholly unrelated enterprise, in 1898, and it was renamed Fairchild & Co. in 1905.

Nishimura is silent about whether the name “L.W. Fairchild & Co.” was continued after 1896.  Since I also have the 1904 edition of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, I checked that as well, and I think the question is fairly well answered:

The key mark was already long dead by 1904.

My best guess is that the F within a shield, skewered by a skeleton key, was used between 1890 and 1896 on products made by Leroy W. Fairchild & Co.