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Walter Stafford is well known in Little Falls, Herkimer County, New York, as one of the successful manufacturers of the city and throughout the knitting industry in this country and elsewhere as the maker of highly complicated and delicate machinery for knitting. Born in Ilion, on April 4, 1864, he comes of English and German parentage. His father, Benjamin Stafford, Jr., was born in Stockport, England, and brought to the country as an infant by his parents. He was a machinist by trade and a veteran of the Civil war, having served in the Twenty-sixth Regiment, New York Volunteers. He passed away in Ilion in 1905. Benjamin Stafford, Sr., was also a native of Stockport and after coming to America he settled in Vanhornesville, New York, where he conducted a cotton mill. Mr. Stafford's mother was Henrietta Wolfe before her marriage, a native of Dresden, Germany. Her father, Frederick Wolfe, was once an attendant at the court of King John II of Saxony. His wife and children came to America before he did and after the Revolution of 1848 he followed them, settling for a time in Jerseyfield Patent. Later they moved to Michigan, where they all died except one daughter, Mrs. Mary Lane of Coleman, Michigan.
Walter Stafford attended the grammar schools of Ilion and the high school there until he was about sixteen years old, when he put aside his textbooks to go to work in the machine shop of Eliphalet, Remington & Sons of Ilion, where he was employed for five years as an apprentice machinist. After two years of experience as a master machinist in various places in Rome, Oneida County, New York; Troy, Rensselaer County, New York; Cleveland, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he came to Little Falls in 1887 and became associated with the Pike Knitting Machine Company. He left this firm at the end of three months to form a partnership with Wyman Eaton, under the firm name of Eaton & Stafford, for the purpose of conducting a jobbing shop for the repairing of machinery. He bought out Mr. Eaton's interests at the end of the third year of this enterprise and continued the business alone for another three-year period. During this time he began to make knitting machinery, which proved to be a very successful innovation in his business, so that now his firm manufactures it on a large scale for the textile trade all over the world. Another change in the personnel of the firm occurred when Mr. Stafford sold a half interest in the concern to Horace G. Babcock, but after doing business for a year as Stafford & Babcock, the latter's share was sold to Robert C. Holt in 1895. An account of Mr. Holt's career appears elsewhere in this volume under his own name. He is a man thoroughly trained in the knitting business from start to finish, thus he brought to the concern a knowledge of the manufacturing end of the textile industry that has been of enormous advantage in developing the part of the establishment given over to the production of knitting machinery. Stafford & Holt, as the firm is now known, has had a most successful history and does a business that reaches almost literally to the four corners of the earth, for its machines are being used in mills in Japan, China, England, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Russia and Australia. The firm has a payroll that averages about a hundred employees, many of whom are the best of skilled workers, for textile machinery is among the most complicated made.
Census:
14 Apr 1930. Listed as Walter Stafford, a widowed clerk, with sister Etta M. Sadler, married niece Elsie M. Wakeman and divorced niece Ruth I. Joslin
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1864 - 1935 (71 years)
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