Barbed Wire & Ahnapee's Tifft and Hay Hardware Store

Barbed wire is something few have on their things-to-research-list, although barbed wire had an impact on settlement of the west and farming in general. The upbeat Farmer and the Cowman Must be Friends from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma, puts fences into Broadway musical theater. Barbed wire has a history.

Such wire is something we see little of today. Rural America remembers it while their city slicker cousins know little about it. Wikipedia tells us one Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, applied for a patent in October 1873. His patent? Glidden developed a new kind of wiring using sharp barbs, and that wiring changed the face and the future of farming. The wire was really a cable formed by twisting two or more wires, and then twisting barbs, within a few inches of each other, around that.

Barbed wire caught on fast and by late January 1879, a bill was introduced into the Wisconsin Assembly revising statutes relating to barbed wire in fences. Ahnapee’s Tifft and Hay hardware store was on the cutting edge. Within a few years, they had the Door County market as well.

Barbed wire was far better for controlling cattle than smooth wire, log fences or hedges. Since barbed wire fences only called for fence posts, it was popular on the plains where wood was in short supply. It meant Wisconsin fences could be built more easily following the Great Fire of 1871, but the wire was expensive. Wikipedia puts its cost at $20 per hundred pounds in 1874, $10 in 1880 and dropping to $2 just before the turn of the century when technology and falling steel prices brought costs down. During the mid-1880s, said the Enterprise, ¾ of U.S. barbed wire companies formed a pool to keep prices up. That price-fixing raised charges 15% while claiming selling prices were ten cents per hundred lower than costs, however the companies had business and were making money rather than going into foreclosure.

According to the May 13, 1886 Advocate, Door County farmers had discovered the superiority of barbed wire fencing thus bringing new importance to the hardware trade, most notably to Tifft & Hay, the Ahnapee hardware store that launched a Sturgeon Bay branch. Until Tifft and Hay opened the new store, the few Sturgeon Bay merchants selling the wire charged 8 or 9 cents a pound. Tifft and Hay brought Ahnapee prices, charging two cents less, or the same price charged in their Ahnapee store. Then they lowered the price again.

When Hay ordered a half ton of wire, he felt it would last a year or, perhaps, two. By the time Hay got the invoice, he sold a few more tons. The Advocate said that the cheap prices encouraged the farmers to give away timber and buy wire.

The following year, Mr. Hay ordered more wire and needed two shipments. From February to the 1^st of May, he sold ten tons. The Advocate pointed to men throughout the county buying large quantities of the wire. Some bought as much as a ton each.

Barbed wire faced deceptive advertising in the late 1800s just as other products did during the shortages of the 2020-2022 Covid pandemic. In 1886, false advertising said prices had risen significantly, but as the Advocate pointed out, it was not the fact. Throughout the summer, Tifft & Hay advertized being the sole agents for the popular Kelly steele barbed wire and at 1885 prices.

What about Charles Tifft and John H. Hay who were partners, as well as brothers-in-law, in a hardware venture?

In 1880 the men, who had just become brothers-in-law, bought a red brick building on the northwest corner of 4^th and Steele, on Lot 6, Block 8, Eveland Plat, from George Roberts for $3,000, and then built a coal shed behind their building. By September 1881, they moved their immense stock of nails, iron, paints, oils, and shelf hardware into the section used by H.W. Bates as his drug store, and broke ground for two-story, 23’ x30’ addition for the storage of heavy hardware. Although the new building was frame, plans were for it to be brick veneered in 1882. The second story was eventually used for rental offices. Bates did not discontinue his business but moved it into the brick store owned by Stebbins and Decker on the north side of Steele between 2^nd and 3^rd Streets, now the west section of Clay-On-Steele.

Charles Tifft and John Hay quickly made inroads and an impact with the farming cmmunity. As early as February 1882, papers often mentioned them in Door County on hardware business or the numbers of Door County customers flocking to the Ahnapee store. Tifft and Hay said they were a headquarters for low cost barbed wire, and they were.

Business was good and in September 1889, Tifft & Hay moved into their newly completed building at the corner of Cedar and St. John Streets in Sturgeon Bay, now  the southwest corner of 3^rd and Kentucky. Business remained good in Ahnapee. Hay ran the Sturgeon Bay branch while Tifft managed Ahnapee’s. In 1891, Tifft and Hay’s Ahnapee branch was building cheese manufacturing systems, as was the city’s popular Leopold Meyer. That same year each company manufactured 6 or 7 outfits each, making for 12 or 14 cheese factorys’ equipment coming from Ahnapee alone. By the end of that year, the Ahnapee firm was the second city mercantile to be lit with electric lights. The company was on a roll.

Business continued, but things changed following a depressed economy when the February 8, 1894 Advocate pointed to Mr. Hay as unethical. As chairman of the fire commission, he directed a piping order to his firm, Tifft & Hay, without seeking other bids. The paper said ordinances forbade aldermen from an interest in what was furnished to the city, said Hay made 15 to 20% on the deal, and said it needed investigation. There was another issue because the company was not paid by those they carried on credit. On February 17, 1894, Door County Democrat published a letter in which Mr. Hay thanked the public for the business they brought. Hay wrote that the depression of the previous year caused business failures due to carrying so much customer credit. Hay said the company was going forward to serve customers on a different and solid basis, and would not offer credit beyond 60 days. As he pointed out, a business could not survive selling products in January and February and then waiting till fall for payment. Hay said he was correcting an incorrect system of doing business.

Just two months later, on April 19, Tifft and Hay dissolved their partnership as hardware merchants in both Ahnapee and Sturgeon Bay, Mr. Tifft assumed the assets, debts, and liabilities of the Ahnapee business while Mr. Hay assumed the same in Sturgeon Bay.

The Ahnapee building burned in 1896 and in 1900, Tifft sold the proberty to Mr. Charles. In that time, Tifft continued business, still selling farm imolements and Sherwin-Williams' paint. In April 1896 he was elected mayor of Ahnapee. He and his wife eventually went west where he died near Portland. 

John Hay died on October 25, 1898 while he was on business in Oshkosh. His obituary recounted his life saying, following his Civil War service, he joined his parents who had relocated to Manitowoc, where he found employment as a traveling man for farm machinery. Mr. Hay and his wife Susan moved to Ahnapee in 1879 where he joined his brother-in-law Charles B. Tifft in the hardware business. When the men opened the Sturgeon Bay branch in 1884, Hay moved there to manage it. The Advocate called him a man of tact and judgement who grew the business rapidly.

Barbed wire use in the two counties kept on, although sometimes brought sensational news. It was July 1907 when the Kewaunee Enterprise alerted readership that barbed wire fences served as a lightning rods and if livestock drifted toward such a fence during a storm, there were chances that the fence would be struck by lightning. Because animal bodies were such good conductors of electricity, results could be fatal. The paper went on to point out that the barbs worked like batteries to collect charges and went on to report animal losses, due to the wire, in other states. It was advised to run a wire perpendicular to the post and into the ground. Such a “lightening rod” was much cheaper than lightening running down the legs of cattle. Driving a staple over the barbed wire and the safety wire would save thousands in losses each year. The cost was insignificant compared with the value of a choice animal.

There were other losses from the barbed wire. In April 1914, three Forestville men were in a runaway accident when the horse was frightened and jumped into the ditch, tossing the buggy into a telephone pole and a barbed wire fence. The horse dragged the buggy and the men who were only able to free themselves when the buggy was completely smashed. Aside from the wire scratches, the men escaped from an accident that could have cost their lives.

During World War 1, British army scouts described the barbed wire being used by the Germans in “no man’s land.” It was reported that one night some scouts crawled to the barbed wire, about 10 yards in front of a German machine gun trench. There they tied empty jam tins to the barricade and tied small telephone wires to that before they crawled back to their own lines. When the British began pulling the wire, the tins began to clatter and the Germans started firing in the direction of the noise. The English saw it as a good joke while the Americans said, “It was good tonic for the Tommies.” Ther Germans used about $10,000 worth of ammunition and lost a night’s sleep over the noise made by about 5 shillings worth of jam containers.

Just as other metals, barbed wire was in short supply in World War ll so it was big news in June 1943 when about 20,000 tons of wire with extra long barbs made for military purposes became available. The use of military wire was allowed because of the shortage created by midwestern floods. The War Food Administration was going to release the wire maintaining fair and equitable tretment. There would be quotas according to the June 25 Enterprise. 

One hundred fifty years after its patent, barbed wire is still being used, however electric fences have replaced much of it. 

Sources: Ahnapee Record, Algoma Record, Algoma Record Herald, Commercial History of Algoma, WI, Vol. 1, Door County Advocate, Door County Democrat, familysearch.org, Kewaunee Enterprise, Wikipedia.