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William A. Ludden

The pencils of William A. Ludden
By Jonathan Veley
 

William A. Ludden, The Red Legged Devil... Or Is It Devils?

by Jonathan Veley

 

 

The following article was originally published at The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog (www.leadheadpencils.blogspot.com) as a two-part series, on December 3 and 4, 2015.  Reproduced with permission.

 

There’s a saying around here – I’m not sure whether it’s just an Ohio thing – that when you went a little farther or worked a little harder than necessary, you “went the long way around the barn” to get where you were trying to go.

That’s what it felt like this time, but in retrospect, that long trip was the only way to get there.  It started with a couple of online auctions which brought these two to my doorstep over the last few months:

lud1

The top example is a typical “magic” pencil, so named for that class of pencils which, when the rear is pulled, the tip extends in the opposite direction – as if, in the Victorian way of thinking – by magic.  The lower one, however, does something very different.  It appears to be a retractable dip pen, with that slider ring, but when the ring is pulled back, it’s actually a ring-operated magic pencil, and a gold filled plug extends out the rear.

Lud2

What attracted me to the magic pencil was a name on the side I wasn’t familiar with: Ludden & Taylor.

lud3

The only reference I was able to find to Ludden & Taylor was an indication that the partnership had dissolved as of March 1879, to be replaced by the firm of Ludden & Dow, formed by William A. Ludden and Ezra A. Dow and located at the same place – 192 Broadway. 

lud6

 

Ludden & Dow lasted a little longer than its predecessor.  This 1881 edition of “The Rural New-Yorker” illustrated magic pencils, a figural cannon pencil, and dip pens for sale by the firm:

lud7

and the 1884 edition of American Agriculturalist continued to list Ludden & Dow on its list of “Trustworthy Houses.” 

The other pencil I’ve pictured, however, is marked neither Ludden & Taylor or Ludden & Dow:

lud5

I’ve seen that WL-ish hallmark before, but unless you are thinking “WAL” when you are looking at it, you might not notice that there is a crossbar in the W and that’s the leg of an L on the right leg.  I was stumped when I started researching this one, and the only thing that had me pointing in Ludden’s direction was the similar pattern on the Ludden & Taylor.   

The patent date, however, still had me a little stymied: April 17, 1874 didn’t fall on a Tuesday, so it couldn’t be a reference to an American patent.  Maybe it’s a misprint, I thought, but I couldn’t find a date with transposed digits that matches this description.  Maybe it’s the application date rather than the date it was issued?  Maybe, I thought, and if so, maybe I’ll find it and maybe I won’t – depending on whether a patent was ever actually issued on that application.   

With no other hypothesis to go on, I focused my research on Ludden, and I found a few tantalizing clues.   While I was discussing this on Facebook, I commented that I thought it might have been patent 169,012, applied for on August 6, 1875 and issued October 9, 1875:

lud8 

This is a slider-operated magic pencil, with a rear plug that extends out, just like mine.  But the dates are all wrong.  There’s another patent Ludden received which also looks promising, even though all the dates are just as wrong: patent number 151,230, applied for on February 19, 1874 and issued on May 26, 1874:

lud9

If I had any other leads, I never would have figured out where April 17, 1874 came from . . . but I didn’t.  It was a typographical error, all right, and here’s where it came from:

lud10

This is how Ludden’s patent 151,230 appeared as it was published in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, in order right after patent number 151,229.  See it?

lud11

The application for patent number 151,229, the patent issued just before Ludden’s, was filed (by a guy from my home town of Newark, Ohio, by the way) . . . on April 17, 1874.   

That’s the story of the Ludden pencil – but it’s nowhere near as interesting as the story behind the man William A. Ludden, about whom I found out quite a bit more along the way . . . or should I say, the men.  The first references I could find to Ludden occur in the Brooklyn press, in numerous announcements like this one, all published in 1848:

lud15

Sometime prior to 1858, when this report of the Exhibition of American Manufactures was published, Ludden had become partners with Jonathan Warren, trading under the name of “Warren & Ludden”:

lud15a

 The partnership was continuing to trade as Warren & Ludden when the Civil War broke out - the Boston Banner of Light featured an advertisement on August 17, 1861 for a “New Patent Combination Pen, which slides upon a wood pencil”:

 lud15b

The reference is to Jonathan Warren’s patent number 29,426, issued on July 31, 1860, which includes “a socket to receive the stick.”

lud15c

Then history appears to take a strange turn.  One William A. Ludden, of Brooklyn, serves in the 14th Regiment of the New York Militia at the outbreak of the Civil War.  The New York 14th, which dressed in distinctive baggy red trousers, got an equally colorful nickname name from none other than Confederate General Stonewall Jackson at the First Battle of Bull Run in April 1861, who upon seeing the 14th New York trying once again to take Henry House Hill, supposedly said, “Hold on boys!  Here come those red legged devils again!” 

The nickname “Red Legged Devils” stuck, and Ludden survived Bull Run.  But in November, 1861, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that he was missing in action after a skirmish (note his name is misspelled ‘Judden”):

lud14

Fortunately for Ludden, in the early months of the War the North and South exchanged prisoners rather than holding them captive; two years later, and Ludden would have been confined in horrific conditions as a prisoner of the Confederacy, in places like the notorious Andersonville prison.  However, in February, 1862, Ludden was released from Richmond and was back in Brooklyn:

lud13

The very month the red-legged devil was home, a William A. Ludden formed a new partnership with William C. Vosburgh, notice of which was published in the February, 1862 issue of American Agriculturalist:

lud16

They took out patent number 35,355 for a pencil with an eraser on an application they filed in April 1862:

lud12

Patent number 35,355 was reissued in 1869; but in that same year William A. Ludden applied for and received patent number 92,853, with no trace of Vosburgh and no assignment to the partnership:

lud17

That may be because his association with Vosburgh had long since dissolved, as an 1865 business directory lists a “Vanvalkenburg & Ludden” under “Gold Pens” at 179 Broadway, and no other listing for Ludden in the directory (thanks to Daniel Kirchheimer, who found this one):

lud19

It would appear that between 1869 and 1878, Ludden was in business for himself, until his short-lived partnership of Ludden & Taylor, which was over by March, 1879 and replaced by Ludden & Dow, which continued at least by reputation through at least 1884.  

All of this seemed to fall into place until I read Ludden’s obituary:

lud1

There’s William A. Ludden, “a veteran of the civil war and a pioneer manufacturer of gold pens,” but this ran in the New York Tribune on February 21, 1920.  For a man who went into the pen business in 1848 and served in the Civil War, that’s one epic lifetime!   

One clue in the obituary unlocks the story behind Ludden – or should I say the Luddens.  According to William’s obituary, he was only seventy seven years old when he passed - that means he was born in 1843, and only five years old when William A. Ludden’s advertisements first ran in 1848. 

The mystery was resolved by a biographical sketch of William A. Ludden, which appeared in Volume III of A History of Long Island From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time by Peter Ross, published in 1902. 

lud18

It’s easy to see from this history how the lives of father and son were conflated in the younger Ludden’s obituary.  Senior, born in 1818, and junior, born in 1843, shared the same name.  Both had military ties: while senior founded a home guard at the outbreak of the Civil War, junior pulled on his red pants and embarked on a successful military career as a “Red Legged Devil.”  Junior worked for Senior and “was associated with him in business through an extended period.” 

I haven’t found a definitive date when senior passed away, although one source on ancestry.com indicated it was “after 1880.”  This is consistent with the Ludden & Dow advertisements from 1881; was the last reference to Ludden & Dow as a “Trustworthy House” in 1884 post mortem?

Or maybe the question should be: which Ludden, father or son?


Text and images © 2015 Jonathan Veley


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