The Company

The J.H. Manny Company was founded in 1852 in Illinois. That same year Mr. Manny won a contest with his reaper at Geneva, N.Y., soundly beating a machine made by Cyrus McCormick.

On March 4, 1854, John Manny formed a partnership with his future father-in-law Wait Talcott and his brother Sylvester Talcott. They commenced the manufacture of the John H. Manny Combined Reaper and Mower.

Cyrus McCormick sued Manny in 1855 for patent infringement. When the suit finally came to trial, Manny's defense attorneys included Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. (Stanton later became Lincoln's Secretary of War.) The soon-to-be-famous lawyers successfully defended Manny against McCormick's allegations. Manny died of consumption just two weeks later.

Before his death, Manny took on several partners including Ralph Emerson, cousin to the famous poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and relocated the business to Rockford, Ill.

The company eventually became known as Emerson & Co., and from 1876 to 1895 it was known as the Emerson & Talcott Company. It was then renamed the Emerson Manufacturing Company, and in 1909 it became the Emerson-Brantingham Company with Charles Brantingham as president and Ralph Emerson as chairman of the board.

Emerson-Brantingham was in a strong financial position in 1912, when the firm began a strong push for acquisitions that included two steam engine and thresher companies,

Emerson-Brantingham ended their acquisition fever by buying the Osborne line of harvesting machines from IHC (International Harvester) in 1918.

The 1921 depression hit all farm equipment companies hard, and was a severe blow to E-B. After struggling through the mid-1920s, E-B ceased manufacture of its farm equipment line sometime in 1926 and, in 1938, the business was sold to the J.I. Case Threshing Machine company.