Never Say Die: A Kentucky Colt, the Epsom Derby, and the Rise of the Modern Thoroughbred Industry

Chapter 2: The Unusual Origins of a Sewing Machine Fortune

13 Chapter 2 The Unusual Origins of a Sewing Machine Fortune Robert Sterling Clark could afford to breed and race Thoroughbreds at the world’s highest levels because of his immense inherited fortune. That fortune had its roots in the Singer Manufacturing Company, which had introduced the sewing machine to the far reaches of the globe and revolutionized international commerce during the late-nineteenth-century industrial boom that followed the American Civil War. The remarkable success of the Singer brand was due in large part to Clark’s grandfather, Edward Clark, whose vision and leadership made the company the first prosperous American multinational corporation. While it was the discipline and business acumen of Edward Clark that facilitated the astounding success of Singer Manufacturing, it was Clark’s partner, the eccentric bigamist Isaac Merritt Singer, who was responsible for the technological innovations that gave rise to the first Singer sewing machine. The partners’ circuitous path to fabulous riches could hardly be called typical, but the story of the rise of Singer Manufacturing reveals much about the economic, social, and political atmosphere in late-nineteenth-century America that produced so many millionaires. Many of these nineteenth-century industrial tycoons and captains of finance would become major players in Never Say Die 14 American horse racing and breeding and would help establish the United States—and Kentucky in particular—as the center of an increasingly globalized Thoroughbred industry by the end of the twentieth century. Isaac Singer, the youngest son of a German immigrant father and a Quaker mother, was born near Albany, New York, in 1811. Soon after Isaac’s birth, his family moved west to Oswego , a village on the shores of Lake Ontario, where Singer’s father found labor-intensive work in various capacities. Singer’s parents divorced when he was ten, at a time when the only legal cause for divorce was adultery. His mother, who appears to have been the guilty party, returned to Albany and settled in a Quaker community , while his father quickly remarried. Isaac did not get along with his new stepmother and found life in her house unbearable.1 He left home at the age of twelve and headed to Rochester, a boomtown on the Erie Canal. That engineering marvel connecting the Great Lakes to the Eastern Seaboard indelibly altered the American economy and transformed society as it ushered in a great wave of westward migration and made New York City the nation’s leading port and commercial center. All sorts of hangers-on and profiteers accompanied the thousands of laborers who worked on the canal beginning in 1817, including prostitutes , preachers, whiskey merchants, and gamblers. Eventually, the marks of modern civilization would come as well, including schools, newspapers, theaters, hotels, and churches. These trappings of modernity created a relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere in Rochester, an area that had been wilderness only a few years earlier. Singer would stay in Rochester for seven years, living with grown siblings while working in the summers and acquiring a rudimentary education in the winters. In 1830 he decided it was time to learn a trade, so he indulged an interest in mechanical things and took an apprenticeship at a local machinist’s shop. Meanwhile, he was moonlighting as an actor. Following a lo- Isaac Merritt Singer, a failed actor and the father of at least two dozen children, created the Singer sewing machine, which became a worldwide best seller and earned him and company co-owner Edward Clark a sizable fortune. Isaac Merritt Singer, oil on canvas, by Edward Harrison May (1824–1887). Never Say Die 16 cal performance by a traveling theater troupe, Singer had approached the director and asked if he could join. He impressed the director with his knowledge of Shakespeare and landed the lead role in Richard III. The local crowds were thrilled with his performance, particularly with the famous line “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”2 Singer hit the road with the troupe but found the crowds much less responsive than his hometown audience, and soon there were no more parts for him. He took contract work as a machinist in Auburn, New York, sixty miles east of Rochester, beginning a pattern of alternating between periods of itinerant labor and stints with theater companies in various capacities. At the end of the year he married a fifteen-year-old girl named Catharine Marie Haley from a small...