LAFARGEVILLE -- A mental picture conjured by a chance remark began a new and novel machine and an unheralded industry. Seth Mather made the observation that flashed a vision in the mind of Frank A. Heyl. Today Mather & Heyl are prospering despite depressions and stock slumps. They have a product every highway superintendent wants: snow fences.

The Mather & Heyl factory is turning out snow fences by the yard. They make them in neat 50-foot lengths, rolled in a compact bundle such as motorists see this time of year being distributed by highway trucks. Their plant has been humming on a 5,000-foot order for the Jefferson county highway department.

Mr. Heyl is superintendent of the electric light plant. A year ago Mather was helping on a power line job. Mather owns a hemlock woods. He wanted to convert his hemlocks into silver certificates but there was no call for timber in LaFargeville, since the saw mill ceased years ago.

“If I had a machine to weave the wire for snow fences I’d get rid of my hemlock,” opined Mather.

Heyl has a mechanical bent and an inventive twist. He had noted snow fences with their strands of wire holding the slats in regular intervals. There came before his eyes a picture of a machine to weave the strands about the slats.

“That’s easy,” he said, “When we get thru here come over to the house.”

Mather did so.

That evening Heyl rigged up a model of the machine he had visioned. They worked it with matches for slats. Some changes were made before the perfected apparatus was completed, but in the main the Mather & Heyl snow fence machine is just as its inventor first pictured.

They opened their plant in the ancient grist mill built for John LaFarge more than a century ago. It is the second oldest structure in LaFargeville. Near the machine lies the mill stone brought from France by DuBoise, miller for LaFarge. It is of small pieces of stone cemented together. Upon it the late Foster Rhines, father of the milling firm of Farwell & Rhines at Watertown, learned the miller’s trade. It still is serviceable and was used recently by Mr. Heyl to grind buckwheat.

Mather began cutting his hemlocks while Heyl perfected his wire “loom.” The five strands of wire, each two wires thick, are fed from 10 bobbins. Each pair of wires runs thru a slot which twists them together for the space between slats, then leaves an opening for the slat and after it is inserted binds the slat and performs the required twists for the space separating the next slat.

Slat are cut on a saw at the plant, the entire operation being conducted there.

Mather’s hemlock holdings are dwindling. The firm favors hemlock for slat as result of strength tests tried with various woods. At present a few pine fences are being put out to test the durability of pine slats.

Note: This page of the scrapbook also included a photo of “Frank A. Heyl turning out a snow fence,” and the heading: Inventor and Snow Fence Machine.