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When Steve Hunter organized the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, the harness maker put his savings, twelve hundred dollars, into the stock of the company. One day, during the time when the factory was building, he heard that Steve had paid twelve hundred dollars for a new lathe that had just arrived by freight and had been set on the floor of the uncompleted building.
I always said that boy was a fool." The merchants and townspeople, their ardor a little dampened by the adverse decision of the men who knew plant-setting, went off by themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks' drugstore, but did not listen to the talk of Judge Hanby. "If the machine works, the town'll wake up," some one declared.
If any one was crooked and when they saw a failure coming went and got out from under at the expense of some one else, it wasn't Steve and me. The books of the company will show we were game. It wasn't our fault the plant-setting machine wouldn't work." In the back room of the bank, John Clark and young Gordon Hart cursed Steve and Tom, who, they declared, had sold them out.
All he got out of it was the fact that the machine he had been trying to make was of great and mysterious importance to the civilization into which he had come to live and of which he wanted so keenly to be a part. There seemed to him something almost sacred in that fact. A new determination to complete and perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him.
When that times comes we five will have to save ourselves and the future of the town. The machinery we have bought, is, you see, iron and wood working machinery, the very latest kind. It can be used to make some other thing. If the plant-setting machine is a failure we'll simply buy up the plant at a low price and make something else.
"Make the plant-setting machine a success. Bring light into the dark places. O Lord, help Hugh McVey, thy servant, to build successfully the plant-setting machine." When Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, was eighteen years old she graduated from the town high school.
What then could be done with the lathe, with the machine bought with his money? One evening after dark and without saying anything to his wife, he went down along Turner's Pike to the old factory at Pickleville where Hugh with the half-wit Allie Mulberry, and the two mechanics from the city, were striving to correct the faults in the plant-setting machine.
When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had been whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship, floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying in the window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of the new specimen of his handiwork.
To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting machine and the work it was intended to do. "It's the most perfect thing of its kind I've ever seen," he said with the air of one who has spent his life as an expert examiner of machinery. Then, to the amazement of every one, he produced sheets covered with figures estimating the cost of manufacturing the machine.
It ain't right. That's what I say and all your smart talk ain't a-going to change me." It was in the year 1892 that Steve Hunter organized the first industrial enterprise that came to Bidwell. It was called the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, and in the end it turned out to be a failure. A large factory was built on the river bank facing the New York Central tracks.
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