The Ohio Tool Co. (Briefly) Paid Its Convict Workers

Logo used by Ohio Tool after its 1893 merger with the Auburn Tool Co.

I’m currently in the middle of a big research project on prison plane making, and I stumbled on the records for overwork payments the Ohio Tool Co. made to convicts at the Ohio State Penitentiary. Ohio Tool was one of the largest plane making firms of the 19th century. It used convict labor from its founding in 1851 until 1894.¹

Under the contract labor system, a company paid the state a set rate for the work convicts did in the firm’s prison workshop. In the late 1860s, Ohio Tool paid between $0.52 and $0.70 per man per day.² (To put that in perspective, carpenters in Ohio in 1867 made $2.50 a day.³) But under the overwork system, which was in place from 1857 to 1867, contractors paid convicts for any piece work they did that exceeded that day’s quota.

By law, contractors were supposed to pay the same amount for overwork as they did for contract labor. In practice, however, prices for overwork varied based on the type of work performed. The money was held by the state and disbursed either to the prisoner or their family. Convicts also used their earnings to buy books.⁴

The intent of the overwork system was to help convicts restart their lives at the conclusion of their sentence. At the time, convicts were given $5 on their release, not even enough to get home for many of them. They earned a pitiful rate for overwork, but they left prison with potentially what was then a sizable chunk of cash.

For instance, in the 1866/1867 fiscal year, 162 men and women were paid a total of $8,072 for overwork; almost 65% earned more than $10. For a few it was highly lucrative, with the top 10 earners making between $108 and $298 (or $2,268 and $6,258 in 2026 dollars).⁵

Unfortunately, the overwork records don’t include which workshop prisoners were in. And it’s unknown what jobs Ohio Tool approved for overwork. Planes were its main focus, but that’s not all convicts in its workshop made. The company’s contracts in 1868 covered the manufacture of trunk slats, wood-frame saws, skates, “carpenters’, joiners’, cabinet-makers’, wheelwrights’ and coopers’ tools; and all the tools used by mechanics working in wood,” as well as the “grinding and filing of plane irons and mechanics’ edge tools.”⁶

Some contractors liked the overwork system, including Ohio Tool’s secretary and treasurer. “I thought it had a good effect upon the men,” he remembered in 1877. Not everyone agreed. The contractor who ran the carriage-making workshop complained that convicts “were continually quarreling about prices.” “We had to keep account with almost every prisoner,” he said, “and he thought he was crowded down, or else he wanted to get a day’s work that he could do in two or three hours. He would complain if he could not, and then would want to put a big price on his over-work, so that there was a sort of contention all the way through.”⁷

Overwork, also called over-stent or over-stint, was also allowed at various times at Auburn State Prison in New York, where contract plane making also took place. But it was mostly an ad hoc system dependent on the whims of each contractor. Some contractors only let a small group of convicts in a workshop do overwork. An 1867 state report called those “discriminations” an “endless source of discontent, jealousy, heart-burning and deception. They were the occasion of no small proportion of all the punishments inflicted in the prisons.⁸

It’s perhaps no surprise that Ohio eventually repealed the law allowing overwork. Convicts returned to working six 10 hour days, and getting $5 when they were released. If you’re interested in prison plane making, back in 2022 I wrote about the conditions convicts worked under in A “Terrible Place of Torture.”

Interested in more stories about plane making companies?

• 'I want to Knock this Man out of the Market'
• What Was in Sandusky's Secret Plane Making Room?
• The Ohio Tool Co. (Briefly) Paid Its Convict Workers
• How to Run a Plane Factory in 1853 (It Was Surprisingly Complicated)
• The Last Marples Planemakers at Work

This post was originally published as part of the Everybody’s Making Planes! (2024) newsletter.