THE SLAYMAKER BUILDING

Home to Slaymaker Heritage Law and
former home of the Slaymaker Lock Company

Story of the Slaymaker Lock Company

The Slaymaker Lock Company was founded in 1888 by Samuel C. Slaymaker Esquire’s great-grandfather, Samuel Redsecker Slaymaker.

Born in 1866, Samuel R. Slaymaker attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster and then became a civil engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad.  In this capacity, he designed a large stone railroad bridge spanning the Conestoga River at the east end of Lancaster City that is still used as part of the main New York to Chicago line today.  In his work with the Pennsylvania railroad, he became familiar with railroad switch and signal locks.  During this period, most such padlocks were individually made by skilled locksmiths and were frequently quite expensive.  After studying early production-line manufacturing techniques, S.R. Slaymaker developed the idea of mass-producing high-quality but relatively inexpensive padlocks on a production-line.

The original Slaymaker Lock manufacturing plant was located on North Water Street in Lancaster City.   Mr. Slaymaker went into partnership with John Barry, and the firm was originally known as Slaymaker-Barry.   Some of the first orders received by the new plant were from the U.S. Government which ordered thousands of locks for use on mailboxes, revenue seals and other equipment.  Shortly thereafter, several railroads began to use inexpensively priced Slaymaker locks on switch stands, signal boxes and other railroad apparatus.

Slaymaker also produced padlocks for household and farm use.  Many of these locks, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were elaborately decorated with ornate patterns or with images; one lock was embellished with a spider, another with an image of Napoleon.  Because these mass-produced locks were so inexpensive, they were available to many people who had not previously been able to afford locks individually crafted by locksmiths.  Padlocks, which had been something of a luxury in the past, soon became a part of everyday life.

In 1914, believing that a broad European was imminent, S.R. Slaymaker decided to increase his production of locks and to store surplus locks in warehouses.  With the outbreak of war, the Slaymaker Lock Company was consequently able to fill the void left when European lock manufacturers were suddenly forced to switch to production of war material.  The resulting mass exportation of Slaymaker locks to Europe proved to be a great windfall for the company.

Following World War I, having outgrown its manufacturing facility on Water Street, the Slaymaker Lock Company re-located to a new, greatly expanded manufacturing facility and adjacent office building located at 117 S. West End Avenue in Lancaster.  After acquiring John Barry’s interest in the company, S.R. Slaymaker went into partnership with Walter Fraim, and the firm was briefly known as Fraim-Slaymaker.  By 1930, S.R. Slaymaker’s son, Samuel C. Slaymaker II, succeeded his father as the C.E.O. of the company.  By this period the company had expanded its production line to include a wide variety of general and specialty locks including higher-end brass padlocks, bicycle locks, luggage locks, pet locks and so forth and had grown to employ several hundred workers.  Although the company suffered some  financial reverses during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the relatively inexpensive nature of most Slaymaker locks helped to sustain the company’s market share during these lean years and employee layoffs were kept to a minimum.

With America’s entry into World War II in 1941, much of the work at Slaymaker’s West End Avenue plant was shifted to war production.  The company was particularly involved in the production of rifle-grenades.  In 1945, the Slaymaker Lock Company was awarded the Army-Navy “E” award for high achievement in the production of war material.  Later that same year, a white star was added to the company’s award banner for continued excellence.

During the post-war years, with a complete program of research, design, engineering and marketing, the Slaymaker lock company became one of the world’s largest producers of padlocks and chain-door guards.  Slaymaker continued to be an innovator in the development of new products, including such items as a combination lock that used letters instead of numbers so that it could be opened using an easy to remember “password” instead of a string of random numbers.  By the early 1970’s, the Slaymaker Lock Company had also become the largest supplier in the world of “carded padlocks”, which are padlocks laminated over a color printed “blister card” that can easily be hung for display on heavy wire store racks.  Prior to the use of now common blister cards, most padlocks were purchased from the store contained in small cardboard boxes.  Slaymaker was an innovator in this marketing display innovation.

In order to sustain its continuing growth, the Slaymaker Lock Company constructed a new distribution center on Centerville Road in Lancaster.  This site was also ultimately intended by Slaymaker’s new leadership (President Fred A. Williams and Vice-President S.R. Slaymaker II) to provide a new manufacturing facility to eventually replace the increasingly outdated plant on West End Avenue.

Attracted by Slaymaker’s steady growth, American Home Products Corporation made an offer to purchase the Company from the Slaymaker family, consisting mostly of the children and heirs of the Company’s founder, S.R. Slaymaker.  Although S.R. Slaymaker II expressed serious reservations about selling, pressure from family members who had not been actively involved in the company but who perceived the sale as an opportunity to “cash-out” pushed the sale to fruition.  Consequently, in 1975, the Slaymaker Lock Company became part of the Ecko Housewares Division of American Home Products.          

For the most part, Slaymaker’s merger with the Ecko Housewares Division was not a fortuitous one. In the interest of “streamlining operations” and “reducing redundancies”, Ecko attempted to largely run the company out of its Chicago Headquarters.  Since all management had previously been located on-site in Lancaster, this new arrangement tended to result in a distancing and miscommunication between management and labor that had not previously existed.  Also, in another effort to streamline operations, Ecko fired all of Slaymaker’s long-standing sales representatives throughout the country and replaced them with Ecko reps.  This resulted in the loss of several major wholesale and retail distributors that had carried Slaymaker lines for years. Layoffs were soon to follow, and a long, slow decline had begun.

It is ironic that perhaps the ultimate cause of the demise of the Slaymaker Lock Company was also the underlying cause of its initial success: the inexpensive cost of its mass-market padlocks.  By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the American market was being flooded with extremely inexpensive padlocks from Asia.  Obviously, the profit margin on a mass-market padlock that does not retail for more than a few dollars is extremely narrow, and it was thus increasingly difficult for American lock manufacturers to compete against Asian imports that could be produced with extremely low labor costs and without any need for expensive compliance with federal OSHA safety regulations.  With the U.S. Government in an increasingly anti-protectionist, “free-trade” mode, American lock-manufacturers had little choice but to begin to shift their own manufacturing operations to Asia.  Under Ecko, the Slaymaker lock company was no exception.  By the early 1980’s, Slaymaker was selling padlocks that stated on their cards: “made to exacting Slaymaker specifications in Hong Kong.  Inspected, tested and packed by Slaymaker Lock Company, Lancaster PA.”

By the mid-1980’s, the Ecko division of American Home Products sold a greatly diminished Slaymaker Lock Company to a group of local investors who tried to expand the line into home security products.  By 1986, the Slaymaker Lock Company went out of business and the doors were closed on the Lancaster plant.

In recent years, Slaymaker Padlocks (and a related line of Slaymaker hardware products) have been manufactured in China by Oxford Products, of South Plainfield New Jersey.  They still bear the slogan, “Symbol of Security Since 1888.”

By the early 1990’s, a group of Lancaster investors purchased the factory and adjacent office building and converted both to office space in a successful adaptive re-use project.  Today, the old Slaymaker Lock factory is home to a wide variety of professional service businesses, including Slaymaker Heritage Law.  Sam and Laura Slaymaker thus represent the fourth generation of the Slaymaker family to work in this building.
This successful conversion of the Slaymaker Building from a key site in Pennsylvania’s industrial history into a vibrant center of today’s diverse service economy effectively embodies the credo of Slaymaker Heritage Law: “Preserving our Heritage While Planning for Our Future.”          

 Sources consulted:
History of the Slaymaker Family by Clyde L. Groff and Samuel R. Slaymaker, II (Lancaster, PA: Lancaster Press, Inc., 1969);
Captives Mansion by S.R. Slaymaker, II
(New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1973).