THE TOY STORY
Former congressman loans pieces made by his family to museum
Charlie Dent’s collection never would have been exiled to the Island of Misfit Toys.
The detailed and colorful castiron vehicles, forged by his family’s storied Dent Hardware Co. in the early 20th century, were the “it” toys decades before Furbies, Tickle Me Elmo or even Cabbage Patch Kids.
Today they are wildly valuable to collectors.
Dent’s toys — handed down by his father — were clearly loved. Marks on the childhood treasures signal they weren’t locked in a box. One ox pulling a cart is missing its horns. The yoke is undone, and its driver is missing.
“Let’s not forget that, back in the day,” Dent said, “these were
toys.”
Toys, the 58-year-old former congressman explained as he picked up a Model T, are meant to be played with.
Dent is sharing his toys with the public by loaning them to the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem until the end of January.
The 24-piece cast-iron exhibit includes three from Dent’s collection: the oxen cart, the Ford Model T and a horsedrawn steam pumper fire engine.
Other pieces come from Stevie Weart, whose collection features a Toonerville Trolley, a Los Angeles Dirigible and a Mack Truck lugging a tree. She also loaned the exhibit a pair of cap pistols and a mini Hoover vacuum.
Henry H. Dent, the former lawmaker’s great-grandfather, was among the founders of the hardware company. Emigrating from England as a child in 1866, Dent went to school in New Jersey and later was a bookkeeper and superintendent at Allentown Hardware Co. In 1894, he teamed up with Henry P. Newhard, Charles Kaiser, C.W. Wackernagel and George H. Brightbill to launch Dent Hardware in the Fullerton section of Whitehall Township.
Within a decade, the company produced 50,000 sets of refrigeration hardware each month — 90 percent of the nation’s output, according to the nominating papers that put the factory on the National Historic Register. Its products reached an international market, the documents show.
The company specialized in trimmings for refrigerators, hinges, parts for bicycle engines and hardware for cold-storage plants.
“The season fluctuated for these parts,” said Andria Zaia, the museum’s curator of collections. “The orders weren’t coming in all the time and instead of being faced with layoffs, they were looking to do other things to sell.”
Enter the cast-iron toy. During the off season, workers would layer pig iron and coke in a cupola furnace and blast it with air. The coke would burn, melting the iron so it could be poured into sand molds, said Mike Piersa, museum specialist and historian.
The metal cooled and the toy parts were removed from the molds, put in a tumbler to clean and smooth them, intricately painted and, on some, applied with metal plating. The Dent factory produced its first castiron toys in 1898.
Dent Hardware was among a half-dozen cast-iron toymakers between the Lehigh Valley and Lancaster in the early 20th century, said David Bausch, an Allentown collector who has some Dent toys in his trove of vintage automobile memorabilia.
Other toymakers included Jones & Bixler of Freemansburg, Shimer & Son in Freemansburg, Conestoga Cannon Co. in Bethlehem, Hubley Manufacturing Co. in Lancaster and the Grey Iron Co. in Mount Joy, Lancaster County.
Among the reasons the industry thrived locally, he said, was the rich iron industry that sprung up around the necessary natural resources, and the talent the industry attracted to the area. (Conestoga’s roots trace to 1903, when a Lehigh University professor received a patent for a carbide cannon.)
— Charlie Dent, great-grandson of Dent Hardware founder
Cast-iron toys marked a transition in the notion of play time and childhood, Zaia said. Idle time for children had been limited. They were assigned chores and perhaps had a doll or two. But the mass production of toys, she said, changed that.
The cast-iron toys, some so small they could fit in a child’s palm, eventually were sold in dime stores, according to “Cast Iron Automotive Toys” by Myra Yellin and Eric Outwater and Stevie and Bill Weart.
The domestic production of the toys took off during World War I when the blockade of Germany cut off “the great stream of toys from the land of the Kaiser,” according to a 1916 Morning Call article.
The article dubbed Dent Hardware as the “Santa Claus of the Lehigh Valley.” Newspaper articles recount that, in fact, Santa once visited a first-grade classroom at the former Franklin School and every child got a toy.
Richard Dent, the excongressman’s uncle, and his seven siblings would get a cast-iron toy or two for Christmas.
As the cost of tooling the toy-making machinery grew, Dent Hardware wound down that part of its business, making its last cast in 1937 and focusing instead on more productive parts of its business, according to the museum.
But, by that time, the allure of heavy toy trucks and trains was giving way to plastic toys and those with bright, flashy lights.
In a 1996 interview with The Morning Call, Richard Dent recounted asking his father whether there were any horsedrawn fire engines left in 1946.
His father said they had been destroyed because of the critical need for iron during the war. Richard Dent was searching the nooks and crannies at the Third Street factory until he came upon a locked room. He hammered it opened, turned on an old-fashioned bulb and found a mountain of toys wrapped in newspaper from 1902-3. They were sample runs with the tags still attached, sitting undisturbed perhaps for decades.
“My father broke into tears,” Richard Dent, who died in 2010, recalled in the newspaper interview. “He couldn’t believe it.”
The Dent family sold its part of the business in 1957 to their partners Miles and Henry Newhard — three years before Charlie Dent was born. The family launched Dent Manufacturing, a Northampton business that was sold in 1985.
The original business, Dent Hardware, closed in 1973, but its legacy lives on in the toys cherished by the company’s descendants and collectors alike.
Charlie Dent remembered his father, who worked at Bethlehem Steel, displaying his family heirlooms on a shelf.
Dent preferred playing with plastic action figures such as G.I. Joe, but confessed he took the cast-iron toys off the shelf a few times.
Dent’s children, too, have taken the Dent toys for a spin or two. In fact, he recalled, one of his sons was responsible for the ox driver’s fate.
“Kids will be kids,” Dent said.
“Let’s not forget that, back in the day, these were toys.”