defunct Bartlett, New Hampshire, USA-based peg supplier
The historic mill burned down in 2016.
The company continues, but focuses now almost exclusively on pegs used as media for finishing in tumbling machines.
previous production used the American shoe peg sizing
Media
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Company Video
- Paul Soares, owner
- originally for shoemaking
- later continued as a polishing medium for metals and plastics
- buy raw logs
- yellow birch, “a soft hardwood”
- cut to four-foot lengths
- cherry-picker (log truck) moved onto conveyor belt
- before 1990s
- would be brought in on rail cart pulled by rope and winch
- chainfall used to unload from rail car
- 1990s: automate the line, built raised conveyor belt leading to rollers on the way to the debarker
- timber hook to remove from debarker
- before the 1960s, debarked by hand with a draw knife
- sawed into thin slabs
- slabs sized according to type of peg
- self-propelled carriage, automatic chuck to advance the log
- fall into conveyor belts to the next room
- big circular saw
- one person can now run the whole mill
- OSHA safety measures
- disc-shaped slabs stacked up for pointing
- the specialized machinery was built at the mill for the mill
- pointing machine
- built in early 1900s by Thompson out of Lancaster, New Hampshire
- feeds discs through as if through a planer
- blades from side to side
- splitting machine
- blades up and down
- fed by hand again, one at a time
- now individual pegs
- to third floor via conveyor belts for drying
- fall into rolling plastic bins to dump into dryers
- drying
- heat from Franklin boiler on first floor
- heat exchanger a large car radiator
- blower down to second floor, through dryers
- rolling dryers
- screening
- make 21 different types of pegs
- change screens to sort out good pegs of that size
- use reject pegs to fire the boilers
- two sets of screens
- initial screens spin like drums
- final screens shake side to side
- final step before bagging
- go into white bags
- “none of this waste goes to waste”
- throw it into the boiler
- “we are totally green”
- 50 pounds per bag
- customers
- finishing plastics, glass, some metals
- mostly plastics
- for rotating finishing barrels
- Bausch and Lomb bought 2-3 million pounds of pegs a year for finishing eyeglass frames
- today: plastic clothes button making companies
- very few buy for shoes anymore, but two left
- Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts
- Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia
- 50 pounds every other year
- last surviving old peg mill in the world
- two other producers, but plants burned down, now use laser cutters and other modern methods
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AP: Historic Kearsage Peg Co. destroyed by fire after 121 years
- burned down
- not insured