CHARLES W. SHARTLE

Innovator in paper-making and machine shop technology

BY RICHARD O JONES

■ ONE OF Middletown’s foremost industrialists was also one of the city’s early historians.

Charles W. Shartle, an innovator in paper-making and machine shop technology, employed thousands of Middletonians beginning in 1889 with the Middletown Machine Company and later with the Shartle Brothers Machine Shop, which he sold to BlackClawson Company in 1926. BlackClawson remained one of Middletown’s largest employers until it was acquired by the Kadent Corp. in 1997 and ceased local operations in 2001.

Shartle died in 1930 in Geneva, Wisconsin, at a spa where he had been convalescing from a heart condition, but he left his family a 210-page manuscript of his memoirs, stories of his youth and business career. Middletown historian George Crout often referred to this unpublished volume in his Middletown Diary newspaper columns in the 1960s and ’70s.

Shartle was born in 1862 to the owner of a small paper mill in Oxford, Chester County, Pennsylvania. When Charles was nine, the family moved to Maryland when his father built another paper mill there. That mill burned to the ground within two years, and young Charles earned his first spending money by recovering and selling nails from the ashes.

In 1873, the family relocated again as his father got a job as the superintendent of the Tytus Paper Company in Middletown. By that time, Francis J. Tytus was “a fine old gentleman and the most important man in town” in young Charlie’s memory.

He wrote of once getting his shoes shined downtown and coming upon Mr. Tytus in the street, who remarked to the young man, “Charlie, if you had a very rare and valuable pin in your shirt, many people would question its value, but there is no mistake in that shine. It is certainly genuine.”

Charlie was also impressed by John B. Tytus, the son, who was a dozen years older. It was the younger Tytus who, inspired by watching the rolls of paper coming out of his father’s mill, invented the continuous mill for rolling steel, another revolutionary industrial development emerging from Middletown.

Charles Shartle received his early education locally, and at seventeen went to become a machinist’s apprentice at a foundry near Philadelphia with designs to become an engineer. After working for a time at the shipyards there, a 24-year-old Shartle returned to Middletown where in partnership with a local tobacconist, he opened a small machine shop, the Middletown Machine Company. There Shartle developed a small gasoline engine known as “The Woodpecker,” used primarily on farms and for powering industrial saws. It sold well. According to a 1906 book Middletown in Black and White by Harry Sims, “from the lakes to the gulf... there is scarcely any community that is not familiar with the phrase, ‘Woodpecker, Middletown, Ohio.’

In 1901, he retired from this prospering endeavor (the company continued operations until 1928) and he went into business with his brothers Daniel, Bob, and Frank in the Shartle Brothers Machine Shop on Clark Street, where he concentrated on the repair and rebuilding of paper-making machinery. They developed the revolutionary “continuous paper beater,” which would later be used by three-fourths of America’s paper-making plants.

Shartle recalled purchasing some of the earliest automobiles to be seen in Middletown. First was a Cadillac touring car that was such a novelty that the family drove it over 5,000 miles in the first two months. Then they bought a second car, a smaller sedan that had one of the latest accessories: a dome light. Shartle wrote that one of his daughters would drive around town at night while another daughter sat in the back seat, pretending to read a book. “Middletown was as much impressed with the new dome light accessory as were the daughters,” Crout noted.

Shartle had quite a large family of thirteen children, and while his claim to be the inventor of the bunk bed is spurious, he tells a funny story of how he learned to stack children.

The Shartle house on Broad Street had seven bedrooms, but no spare room, so “when company came, the only way to take in a guest was for someone to move out and double up... When sixteen-year-old Christine returned home from the Christmas holidays this year from Wellesley, she brought with her two girl cousins from Portland, Oregon, who attended school at Boston. Three other girl cousins from Hackensack, New Jersey, also decided to come to Middletown to enjoy Christmas in the Midwest. Then a niece from Versailles was invited. This, with the two Shartle girls at home, made nine girls to accommodate with beds. To meet this holiday emergency,

Mrs. Shartle decided to put up another bed in one of the boys’ rooms, and put the son on the davenport in the library.”

Things were thought settled, but then Mr. Shartle’s sister in Portland informed him that she was coming to town for a visit, but she asked him to keep it quiet to surprise her daughters. Charlie was up for it, and connived to get all of the women out of the house to go meet the young ladies in Dayton while he had some of his employees to remove the beds from a girls’ room and use four-by-four studs to build a gigantic double-decker bed that held four double mattresses.

As Crout re-told the story: “When the crowd arrived home that afternoon, one of the girls went upstairs to be faced with this gigantic bed. She came down the stairs in tears and said it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen, that the Shartles would be the talk of Middletown... Everyone else thought it a good joke. The eight girls had so much fun in the new doubledouble decker that the holidays were a success.”

The Shartle house did become the talk of the town, but in a delightful way as the enormous bed became slumber party central.

The Shartle House is now home to the Middletown Historical Society, and the name Shartle still lives as the address of thirty-six houses on Shartle Street.

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