Anthony Harkness

Harkness was born on July 10, 1793, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. He became a machinist in Paterson, New Jersey, in his early twenties. He learned part of his trade from locomotive builder Thomas Rogers, became skilled at his profession and buy 1818, he had been promoted to a manager's position at a cotton factory. The financial panic of 1819 caused him to migrate westward to Cincinnati to find better employment opportunities as a trained mechanic but the city had also hit by recession and he was unable to find work as a mechanic. Harkness then left the city and tried farming but failed to make a good income.[1]

A. Harkness & Sons Foundry circa 1848 is 2-story with smoke stack and 3-story building in foreground on Front Street, east of Lawrence Street.

Little Miami (built 1853) train in Xenia, Ohio, 1865

In 1820, when he was twenty-seven years old, Harkness went back to Cincinnati and established a machine shop and copper foundry on the northeast corner of Broadway Street and Pearl Street. In 1827, he partnered in the enterprise with James Goodloe, another mechanic, and they manufactured steam engines for many uses, being one of the first such shops in the city. About a year later, Harkness retired from that partnership and accumulated a large fortune of $4,000 (equivalent to $93,127 in 2019). He borrowed another $2,000 and in mid-1828, with this $6,000 total (equivalent to $139,691 in 2019), he built a new shop on the north side of Front Street, just east of Lawrence Street.[2][3] There, he built machinery and steam engines for riverboats and sugar mills.[4]

The two-story machine shop with a smokestack on Front Street was the nucleus for the later three-story Harkness factory complex that within a few years occupied an entire city block at the northeast corner of Front Street between Lawrence and Pike streets in Cincinnati.[5] Harkness' factory manufactured equipment and engines for sugar mills.[6] The Bank of the United States loaned him the money he needed to produce a large order of sugar mills and manufacture the engines that ran them.[2]

With the profits from his factory, Harkness developed other enterprises, including the Hamilton Foundry that made machinery for river steamboats from 1829 to 1840.[2][7][8] Another of Harkness's new enterprises was the Franklin Cotton Mills, in which he partnered with Jacob Strader and Samuel Fosdick.[8][9] Strader was already associated with the Little Miami Railroad company and knew there was a shortage of locomotives. He brought this to Harkness' attention and suggested Harkness' shop, which was well equipped, build steam engines for locomotives.[10] Harkness partnered with designer Alexander Bonner Latta and in 1846, went into railroad locomotive manufacturing, becoming the pioneer manufacturer of locomotives in the city.

Harkness built engines for the Little Miami railroad company's two locomotives at a loss. He replaced Latta with the master mechanic of the railroad company, William Van Loan. The time taken to manufacture locomotives was then reduced from between six and nine months to months to three weeks, making them profitable. Harkness built seven locomotives for the Little Miami Railroad, the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, and the Mad River and Lake Eric Railroad companies in 1847. In 1848, he bought the machine shops of Yeatman and Shield, expanding his machine shop on Front Street across the entire city block from Lawrence Street to Pike Street. He then built locomotives on speculation and had them available for potential railroad customers.[11] By 1848, Harkness had built fifteen locomotives for various railroad companies at a total cost of $110,000 (equivalent to $3,250,500 in 2019).[12] He built a total of thirty locomotives for the Little Miami Railroad company by 1856 for use in Cincinnati.[6] He is considered the founder of the Cincinnati locomotive industry.[2][6]

Harkness locomotive engine at the first Glendale (Ohio) train depot in 1918

In 1852, Harkness had a cancer on his nose that at first was determined incurable, even after several treatment attempts. A Dr. Newton was called in to attempt a cure and accomplished it with his "special medicine".[13] Harkness retired in 1853 as a wealthy person, having amassed half a million dollars (equivalent to $15,366,000 in 2019).[14] He died of cancer on May 10, 1858, at the age of 65, in Cincinnati.[15]

Harkness married Mary Hoagland on February 17, 1817.[16] He had a son, William, who committed suicide in 1853,[17] and a daughter, Jane, who died in 1880 at the age of 54.[18]

Around 1853, Harkness founded the upscale community Glendale, Ohio.[19]

• Crayon, Joseph Percy (1902). Records of Morris County, N.J. Rockaway Publishing Company. p. 99.
• Moore, Robert (1887). Autobiographical outlines. Cincinnati, The Author.
• Wallace, John (2011). The Practical Engineer. Applewood Books. ISBN 978-1-4585-0012-0.
• White, John H. (1965). Cincinnati locomotive builders. Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 9780598369567. The founder of the Cincinnati locomotive industry, Anthony Harkness was born in Portsmouth, Rhode Island on July 10, 1793.

• Anthony Harkness at Find a Grave
• Harkness Family Tree