Why Did an Arsonist Keep Setting This Planemaker's Shop on Fire?

"JT Jones," stars, and "Phila" and his addresses on St. John Street are some of the most common marks on Jones's planes.

It was a rainy night, November 7, 1838, when the arsonist returned. He’d set Philadelphia planemaker John T. Jones’s workshop and mill on fire earlier that week, but it had been extinguished before any damage was done. Tonight would be different. At around 2 a.m., he made his way behind the St. John Street workshop. Eager flames rose into the night. A neighbor discovered the blaze and called out a nearby fire company. By the time the firefighters arrived, the back of the shop was seriously damaged.¹

Like many American cities in the 1830s and 1840s, Philadelphia was plagued by arsonists, or incendiaries as they were called. The largest fires accompanied the bloody, partisan riots that ripped through the city every few years. Six months before Jones was attacked, anti-abolitionists burned down Pennsylvania Hall. The next night, a mob set an orphanage for Black children on fire and then tried to fight off firefighters who arrived to stop the flames. Little is known about the dozens of small arsons targeting individuals like Jones that also occurred.

On November 10, the Public Ledger called out Jones’s arsonist in a brief article entitled “LOOK OUT.” The incendiary, who the paper didn’t name, “is marked and has probably already approximated much nearer to his deserved residence, in the penitentiary, that he is aware of.” But the arsonist wasn’t done. On the night of November 24, he broke into Jones’s “handsome new three story brick dwelling house” near his ruined workshop on St. John Street and set a fire in a closet on the third floor. There building was uninhabited, but a fireman was seriously injured when a ladder he was using to climb to the upper floors broke. The home was partially destroyed.²

In total, the arsonist tried to burn down Jones’s properties four or five times in 1838. After the fires, he took out an ad in the Ledger and offered $100 to anyone “who will be the means of arresting and bringing to justice the villain or villains who wantonly and maliciously FIRED HIS BUILDINGS.” There are no newspaper reports in the following weeks or months of the arsonist being caught or convicted. Jones continued to work as a planemaker in Philadelphia for another three decades, but he never returned to St. John Street.³

An Invention of My Own Originally

John T. Jones (1803-1871) began working as a planemaker at 217 St. John Street around 1825. (He first appears in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1826 when his 19-year-old apprentice, Thomas Mecall, ran off.) While he was never one of the city’s major makers, his planes, typically marked JT Jones ,are common enough that he likely produced thousands during his lifetime. His two-story workshop and attached mill, built in the early 1830s, were located at 175 and 177 St. John Street in between Green and Coates streets. The shop was big enough that he was able to rent out a “large and commodious” room with steam power, high ceilings, and hoisting fixtures on the second floor.⁴

In the 1830s, Philadelphia may have had more planemakers working than any other American city. On average, 21 makers, which includes both individuals and larger firms, are recorded in annual city directories, including a man who would become the city’s most famous planemaker, Israel White. White was part of a family of well-known Philadelphia planemakers. While still in his 20s, he invented a radical new plow plane with a self-regulating third arm. His patent for the plane, issued on January 9, 1834, is the first known plow plane patent. There are fewer than a dozen existing planes based on the patent; a pristine example sold at auction for more than $31,000 in 2012.

This Israel White patented plow with ivory-tipped ebony arms sold for £17,500/$31,798 in 2012. Photo: David Stanley Auctions.

But it was Jones, not White, who was the first Philadelphia planemaker to advertise a patented self-regulating plane. In April 1831, he started running ads in the Inquirer for his “improved patent Self-regulating Screw Arm Ploughs and Sash Planes.” Soon after, Pittsburgh hardware dealers Logan and Kennedy announced that they carried “Jones’ Patent Self-Regulating Sash Planes.”⁵

“Self-regulating” refers to any type of mechanism that controls the movement of a plane’s arms and fence. It was a relatively new idea in American plane making in the 1820s and 1830s. In January 1833, White began advertising his family’s “improved plows, with solid handles, and self-regulating arms.” (The ad doesn’t use the word “patent.”) Later that year, he displayed several of these planes at an exhibition held at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. In early October, another ad ran in the Inquirer, presumably paid for by White, which lauded the self-regulating planes from the exhibit.⁶

I don’t know what self-regulating features those planes had (I don’t know if there are any existing examples). But when Jones saw White’s October 1833 ad about the exhibition planes, he was indignant. He began running his own ad directly under White’s. He called White’s ad “puff,” meaning exaggerated praise. Jones wrote that he wanted to “inform the public and Mechanics in the wooden branches generally, that this little improvement was an invention of my own originally.” ⁷

He wrote that he’d applied for a patent with the U.S. Patent Office’s superintendent, Thomas P. Jones, around August 1828. Jones included a glowing recommendation for his invention, signed by 13 of the “most respectable Master House Carpenters in this city.” He had collected the signatures, he claimed, when he filed his application. According to their endorsement, Jones was “as deserving of every credit and patronage, for indefatigable exertions in making this important discovery.”

Click through to view White's and Jones's complete ads.

What was Jones’s “little improvement”? His patent application and advertisements for that invention, and his accusation that White had copied the invention, occurred before White first revealed his three-arm plow in a broadside printed on Nov. 12, 1833. So it’s clear Jones wasn’t referring to the plow. But we don’t know what Jones’s 1828 application was. The Patent Office was destroyed in a December 1836 fire. The agency was able to reconstruct some of its records thanks to the thousands of inventors who sent in copies of their patents after the fire. (Israel White did this.) ⁸

The other main source of information about the lost patents came from the Franklin Institute’s Journal, which had been publishing information about new patents, including the inventor’s name, patent title, and issue date, all the way back to 1826. Jones isn’t on any of the lists of new patents published in the Journal between 1828 and 1833, the year he made the claim about his application. The U.S. Patent Office doesn’t have a record of a Jones patent in that same time period.⁹

Supervisor Thomas P. Jones, who Jones mentioned in his ad, likely would have known about the 1828 application. Not only did he open all incoming mail and review all new applications himself, he was also the editor of the Journal. Along with printing information about new patents, he wrote his own descriptions of some of the inventions. After he stepped down as supervisor in 1829, he maintained a desk at the agency and had “virtually unlimited access” to its records. In his descriptions, he regularly compared new inventions with previous patents and was critical if one was too similar to another. His comments on White’s plow in the August 1834 issue of the Journal make no mention of prior or similar patents.¹⁰

A non-self-regulating TJ Jones sash plane. The curved "Phila" design is common on Jones's marks.

Jones was issued a patent on May 14, 1836, for an unspecified “plane.” He’s included in a list of new patents in the August 1836 volume of the Journal, one of the last lists published before the Patent Office fire. (Unfortunately, Thomas P. Jones didn’t do a write-up on it.) In 1998, Michael Humphrey, editor of The Catalog of American Wooden Planes, reported on a Jones sash plane that sheds a little light on what the patent may have entailed: “Attractive brass ferrules on the inside of the nuts slide against circular brass plates set into [the] body side. When the nuts are turned the body opens or closes - self locking.” The brass plates are stamped “PATENT.” It was found with a recent label on the heel that read “5/14/36 PAT ID.”¹¹

What if that label is wrong? Is that actually an example of an earlier patent? I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m not sure there was an earlier patent. His ad attacking White in 1833 didn’t he say he had a patent, only that he’d applied for one in 1828. At the time, the delay between when an application was filed and when the patent was issued was between two and three months. It seems improbable that his application wouldn’t have been processed in five years.¹²

Here’s a theory: His 1828 application was rejected. According to historian Ken Roberts, some types of self-regulating sash planes were already available in the 1820s. If Jones’s application was the same as another pending application, it would have been sent to arbitration. Maybe he advertised his “patented” plane while it went through that process on the assumption it was going to be approved. But it never happened. I can’t find any patents for self-regulating planes issued between 1820 and 1828, but thousands of patents lost in the fire have never been rediscovered.¹³

Unfortunately for us, Jones never described his “little improvement.” Whatever it was, and whatever happened to his application, it was Israel White and not Jones who was destined for the history books.

Beyond the Reach of Medicine

In September, 1846, another piece of puff appeared, this time in the Philadelphia Sun, and this one written by Jones himself.

In a 700-word ad that ran for four months, “The Herb Doctor” described his patient John T. Jones’s miraculous recovery from consumption, as tuberculosis was called at the time, after taking his patent medicine. The “doctor” (whose real name was John M. Weston) ran a dispensary, an early type of walk-in clinic, a few blocks from Independence Square. The ad also contained a lengthy testimonial written by Jones, describing his illness and recovery. Jones wrote he had been “attacked with bleeding of my lungs” after running. Doctors bled him repeatedly, but to no avail. It got so bad that when he tried to speak, even in a whisper, he coughed up blood. He was reduced to communicating with his hands and in writing.¹⁴

“His case seemed to be beyond the reach of medicine; I thought him to be incurable,” Weston wrote. But he finally agreed to treat Jones and sent him “Blood Purifier” and “Indian Cough Medicine.” Jones drank seven bottles. And surprise: he was “cured.” “Now he has been well for months,” the Herb Doctor wrote, “and is at work every day at the laborious business of plane making.”

The stories are too glib to be taken seriously. (You need to buy seven bottles for it to work!) The ad was one of tens of thousands published by 19th-century patent medicine makers that made ridiculous claims about the efficacy of their drugs. The only thing that can cure active tuberculosis, which had a 20% survival rate in North America in the 19th century, are antibiotics. Ironically, the herbs in Weston’s concoctions may have actually had antitussive benefits. Modern chemical analysis of a patent medicine made by a Philadelphia druggist in the 1840s and 1850s found its ingredients could have relieved congestion and coughing. It also contained dangerous levels of metals, including lead and arsenic.¹⁵

The Bache Institute

After the fires, Jones moved his plane making operations five times over the next 20 years. By 1859, he was living at 910 Spring Garden, where his occupation is listed during the next decade as “real estate,” “late builder,” and “agent” in city directories. He was still making planes. He’s listed as a planemaker in an 1859 record of Central High School students (16-year-old son Edward Everett had a 77.1 GPA), as well as in the 1870 census. Jones died from a heart condition on July 24, 1871, at the age of 68.¹⁶

John Caspar Wild's 1838 illustration of the burning of Pennsylvania Hall.

Jones lived through some of the most violent decades in Philadelphia’s history. Between the late-1820s and mid-1840s, the city endured nine major anti-Black, anti-Catholic, or anti-Irish immigrant riots that killed dozens and burned scores of churches, homes, and businesses.

It’s possible that his political stances on the upheaval wracking his city were widely known. In 1851 and 1852, he was the recording secretary of the Bache Institute, a Central High School alumni literary association that hosted lectures on politics, science, and the arts by well-known speakers. Very little is known about the group other than that they had more than a 100 members, and the lectures often addressed political issues of the time. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society belonged to the Institute. A Society member spoke on colonialism. Outspoken abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William D. Kelley lectured at the Institute, as did others with strong nativist views. Perhaps Jones was a nativist (anti-Irish immigrant, anti-Catholic) like many other mechanics of his time. Perhaps he was also an abolitionist (a duality that was not uncommon).¹⁷

Maybe those politics were a reason for the arsons. Or not. Guessing a motive is pointless, not just because it occurred nearly 190 years ago, but because arson is a crime that covers its own traces. Its objective is to conceal and erase: erase politics, homes, and people, erase what someone has made, erase what they might make in the future. Do not make me nothing, a Philadelphia victim pleaded to his unknown arsonist in 1838: “If in ought I have offended expose me before the public… Seek not to deprive me and my family of the means by which we live.” Like Jones raging against his own attacker, it was a futile prayer.¹⁸

As the sun set on November 7, 1838, Jones must have known the incendiary was out there, waiting. So he, too, was forced to wait: wait for night to fall, wait for what the shadows hid, fearing not the darkness but the light.

For more on the politics and violence in Philadelphia during Jones’s lifetime, I highly recommend Zachary M. Schrag’s The Fires of Philadelphia (Pegasus Books, 2021) and John F. Quinn’s “The Rise and Fall of Repeal: Slavery and Irish Nationalism in Antebellum Philadelphia” (Pennsylvania Magazine Of History And Biography 130 no. 1, 1999).

Interested in more stories about crime and war?

• Who Stole This Solid Ivory Plow Plane?
• Why Did an Arsonist Keep Setting This Planemaker's Shop on Fire?
• Offcuts: Plane Murders and a Brass Ribbon Plow Plane
• 'A hot fire from all sides': Planemakers in the American Revolutionary War
• The Assassination of the Duke of Planes
• The Planemaker in Internment Camp 3

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