St. Johnsbury: The Town That Weighed the World

Saint Johnsbury sits at the confluence of three rivers in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, farther from any city than most New Englanders realize, and its prosperity came from a single invention that changed how commerce worked across the industrializing world.

In eighteen thirty, a local mechanic and builder named Thaddeus Fairbanks was trying to solve a frustrating problem. The hemp-growing operation he ran with his brother Erastus required weighing large quantities of raw material, and the standard beam-and-fulcrum scales of the era were inaccurate and awkward to use. Fairbanks experimented with a new arrangement: a flat platform resting on a system of levers, with the counterbalance underneath rather than on a beam above. The levers distributed the load in a way that made weighing large and irregular objects both accurate and simple. You just put the thing on the platform and read the result.

He patented the scale in eighteen thirty-two and began manufacturing at a factory along the Passumpsic River. The platform scale turned out to be indispensable, for railroads, for warehouses, for cotton gins, for commodity trading, for any operation that needed to move large quantities of goods accurately and efficiently. By the time of the Civil War, the Fairbanks scale had become so standard that competitors were forced to call their products Fairbanks-type scales to indicate quality.

The fortune the invention generated stayed largely in Saint Johnsbury. The Fairbanks family gave the town an Athenaeum, a public library and art gallery opened in eighteen seventy-one, designed in French Second Empire style and filled with nineteenth-century American paintings, including Albert Bierstadt's enormous canvas The Domes of the Yosemite, which has hung there continuously since eighteen seventy-one. They built a museum of natural history and funded public parks. Up to forty Fairbanks company buildings lined the Sleepers River.

The factory is still here, still making scales under the Fairbanks name. The Athenaeum is still open, and the Bierstadt still hangs in the same room where it was installed a hundred and fifty years ago.