Diamond Match Company

The Diamond Match Company was the largest manufacturer of matches in the United States in the late nineteenth century.^[1] Jarden is the current owner of the Diamond brand.

History

The Diamond Match Company was established in around 1881. It was founded by O. C. Barber, and headquartered in Akron, Ohio. The merger was managed by William Henry "Judge" Moore, who would later have several steel firms absorbed in the creation of United States Steel, and had earlier helped merge several bakeries into National Bisquit.

The Diamond Match Company took its name from the shape of the match's head that the company produced. In 1881, Barber's match business, the Barber Match Company, united together with several other match producers to create the Diamond Match Company. Barber served as the company's first vice-president and became president in 1888. While serving as president, Barber moved the Diamond Match Company's manufacturing operations from Akron to neighboring Barberton, Ohio, a community built in the early 1890s exclusively to house some of Barber's manufacturing companies. By the early 1900s, the Diamond Match Company produced eighty-five percent of the matches in the United States. It had plants in the United States, Europe, and South America.^[1]

While Barber had helped Akron and Barberton to grow into important industrial centers, many people, especially his workers, did not have a favorable view of him or of his company. The Diamond Match Company was known to pay its workers pitiful wages. Grown men only earned $1.21 per day; women earned seventy-seven cents; and children earned sixty-six cents. All employees worked eleven-hour days.^[1]

In 1910, after employees of the Diamond Match Company became ill from phosphorus necrosis or phossy jaw (due to inhalation of phosphorus, a major ingredient of matches at the time) the company patented a non-poisonous match made using a chemical called sesquisulfide. In the first decade of the 1900s, the Diamond Match Company succeeded in producing phosphorus-free matches. Barber patented the process in the United States. President William H. Taft asked the company to release their patent to other companies, and in 1911 the company did so.^[2]

Another development of the research department of the Diamond Match Company was the manufacture of potash for commercial uses. A chemical process for extracting potash from kelp was discovered and worked out by W. A. Fairburn, a chemist long connected with the Barber interests. Owing to this discovery, the price of matches did not increase when the start of World War I shut off the old sources of potash supply.^[3]

Barber remained as president of the Diamond Match Company until 1909, when he retired from overseeing the company's day-to-day operations and became the chairman of the board of directors. Edward R. Stettinius, Sr., then became president. He had been associated with Barber since 1892 when he joined Stirling & Co. as treasurer. In 1908, he had been named treasurer at Diamond Match.^[4] Fairburn became president of the Diamond Match Company^[3] in 1915, succeeding Stettinius,^[5] who left for the banking house of J. P. Morgan and Company to organize a department to finance sales of munitions from the United States to the Allies during World War I.^[4] When Fairburn died in 1947, he was succeeded as president by his younger son, Robert Gordon Fairburn.^[5]

Over the years, Diamond Match Company diversified its products. This began after World War I under W. A. Fairburn's leadership. By 1940, only half the company's revenue derived from matches.^[5] By the mid 1980s, the company was producing matches, cotton swabs, ice cream sticks, and toothpicks. It also was engaged in the lumber industry in the American Northwest. In 1986, the company's sales topped forty million dollars. That same year Diamond Brands acquired Diamond Match Company. By the early 2000s, Diamond Brands was controlled by Alltrista Consumer Products Company. It continues to be the leading match producer in the United States, manufacturing approximately twelve billion matches every year.^[1][6][7] Jarden acquired Diamond in 2003.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} "Diamond Match Company". ohiohistorycentral.org. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=882. 
2. ^ Diamond Brand History, at diamondbrands.com
3. ^ ^{a b}  "Barber, Ohio Columbus". The Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1918. 
4. ^ ^{a b} "Stettinius, Edward Riley". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1936. 
5. ^ ^{a b c} William A. Wagnon, Jr. (1974). "Fairburn, William Armstrong". Dictionary of American Biography. Supplement Four (1946-1950). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
6. ^ Photo of Diamond Match Division of Diamond National Corp at cardcow.com
7. ^ Asset Purchase Agreement