300 West Broadway, Winchester, Kentucky.
Have noticed in July-August G.E.M. a Hagan
Engine owned by Andy Kruse of Park Ridge, Illinois. This brings to
mind a question – ‘How many Hagan Engines are owned by
collectors across the country?’ If everyone out there who owns
a Hagan Engine will send me information – including Model, Serial
Number and if name plate reads ‘Hagan Gas Engine and
Manufacturing Company’ or ‘Old Reliable’ or
‘L.T. & C. Hagan,’ I will make the
necessary effort to get the information down on a piece of paper
and mail it to G.E.M. so anyone interested can
have the information.
You folks might be interested to know the Old Hagan Factory
building still stands here in Winchester – Empty, deserted, lonely.
No trace remains of what the place was once used for: I have
searched the inside of the building; no papers, no sales slips, no
blueprints, no Hagan parts, no nothing. Just an old oaken cask
rotting away. A piece of timber here, a scrap of metal there –
nothing that says this was once the Hagan Gas Engine and
Manufacturing Company employing some 80 persons from 1904-17
turning our 350-400 gas engines a year: As I stood in the dank
empty quiet old building, I thought of pictures in the old Hagan
Catalogue showing these same spaces filled with equipment, metal
working machines powered by many flat belts dropping down from
overhead line shafts turned by Hagan Gas Engines housed on still
another floor. Electric lights powered by Dynamo’s run by Hagan
Engines.
But all this gone now, the equipment gone, the people gone, the
sounds of the clanking machinery gone, the pop and cough of the gas
engines gone. Only the shell of the building remains and the
quietness and perhaps the spirit of the people who labored there
remains, I wonder, peering at me through the gloom, wishing they
could tell me of their day.
There are only three people left that I know of, who worked in
the Hagan Factory in those days. They tell me of the working
conditions, the long hours, no coffee breaks, no vacations, no back
talk for employees to the management – $2.00 per day wages for top
men, and the pay wasn’t supposed to include an occasional sneak
off to the beer garden for a quick beer on company time. But that
was the way it was then – no better was asked for or expected.
But Hey! a few old Hagan Gas Engines remain in the hands of
collectors – so you people out there – fix them up good and take
them to shows so people can see a trace of what once was.
For those who are interested, I have reprints of the Hagan
Catalogue at $4.00 per copy – plus 50? postage and shipping – 60
pages total. Printed material and pictures. Very good reprints.
Printed matter concerns technical information on Hagan Engines,
sales pitch, testimonial letters to Hagan Co. complimenting their
product and new manufacturing concerns, poetry or verse praising
Hagan Engines, etc. Pictures show factory building outside and
inside, view of working area and workers, many pictures of Hagan
Engines and engines belted to various work loads, etc.
