Streetwise Professor

In the Chicago area for last night’s Smoking Popes concert.  It was well worth the trip.  My daughter deemed it (per Facebook)  “Greatest.  Concert.  EVER.”  It was very good.  The Popes are an excellent pop-punk band.  Very good entertainers.  Very good musicians.  The show was in a typical college bar, but they are not the typical college bar band.  Being just a bar setting, it was very intimate–we were about 6-10 feet from the stage.  Really had a great time.

Today we conceded to the lousy weather, and visited the I.L. Ellwood House in De Kalb (where the concert was).  It was a treat.  The house itself is a marvelous Gilded Age mansion, built in 1879 and extensively remodeled in 1899.  It is well worth a visit.  I’ve been there many times over the years; I spent a lot of time in Sycamore (the De Kalb County seat) at my grandparents’ house.  My grandparents volunteered at the house from when it first was opened to the public, so I went there from time to time.  In the decades since, the house has been restored, room-by-room, and is quite magnificent.  It is Victorian, but tastefully so.  The woodwork is truly spectacular–the product of German and Scandinavian craftsmen who immigrated to the area in the post-Civil War era.

Ellwood made his fortune in barbed wire, of all things.  In the last quarter of the 19th century, De Kalb was the barbed wire capital of the world.  It was known as the “Barb City” and its high school teams are called “The Barbs.”

There is a barbed wire museum at Ellwood House.  It may sound cheesy, but it is truly fascinating.  It depicts a remarkable episode in the history of American property rights, real and intellectual.

We take it for granted, but in its day, barbed wire was a very big thing.  It was an extremely important invention, because it made it possible to fence the ranges and contain livestock.  Railways found it a godsend, because it made it possible to protect rights of way cheaply.

Because of its importance, barbed wire was the subject of intense patent litigation.  It was probably the most important patent litigation of the 19th century, with the possible exception of that involving the cotton gin.  One De Kalb magnate, Ellwood’s eventual partner Joseph Glidden, won this protracted intellectual property fight based on his double strand patent.  Another De Kalb magnate, the rather eccentric and combative Jacob Haish, lost out to Glidden on the “bottom patent” (the most basic one), but made his fortune on other patented variations of barbed wire.

Not only did barbed wire figure importantly in the development of American intellectual property law, it also played a decisive role in the iconic battles between ranchers, cattle grazers, and farmers over the establishment of property rights over the grasslands and water sources in the Plains, and especially in Texas.  Barbed wire made it possible to enclose the rangeland, sparking battles between free range grazers and those who enclosed and demarcated property with fences.

The “wire that fenced the West” reduced the cost of privatizing prairie lands, and thereby decisively shaped the economic evolution of the area.  The American West would have been a very different place without barbed wire.

Barbed wire also played a role in the trusts of the 19th century.  Glidden sold out his interest to a company called  Washburn and Moen Manufacturing Company, which together with Ellwood (who had earlier bought a half-interest in Glidden’s patent) dominated the business.  Former Glidden-Ellwood salesman “Bet-a-million” Gates, who had gone into competition with his former employers, bought them out, along with several other competitors, and formed the  American Steel and Wire Company.  ASW monopolized the business, and was eventually absorbed into US Steel.

A prosaic thing, yes.  But barbed wire helped shape American economic history, and the evolution of property rights.  Ellwood House does a fine job of keeping that history alive.