THE MONITOR SADIRON OF BIG PRAIRIE
January 14, 2008The sadiron was a basic household tool in the early days. It was a heavy hand-held flatiron that was heated on a stove and then moved to the ironing board by a detachable wooden handle. The Monitor Sadiron, however, was a good improvement over the old-type sadiron. It had an attached handle and a gasoline tank built onto either the back or the front of the iron to provide continuous heat.
D.A. Lake and his son, John, were the owners of the company that made the Monitor Sadiron. They received their patent for this special iron in 1903; and it’s been said that it was the Monitor Sadiron that first put Big Prairie on the map in Holmes County. The Sadiron factory itself was quite unique in that much of the original equipment was hand built by the Lake family and the factory was powered through an overhead pulley drive line.
The Monitor Sadiron was of ingenious yet simple design. It was comprised of a shoe or ironing surface which was chromed and highly polished. The upper frame was a hollow casting into which white gasoline was injected under pressure to fuel a flame within the casting. The atomized liquid was injected through a brass casting called a generator which consisted of the casting and a needle-valve control to adjust the flow of the fuel. The fuel was supplied from a small holding tank mounted just behind or in front of the handle of the iron.
With the coming of electricity, however, the Monitor Sadiron was no longer in great demand in the U.S. The company continued for a while with a limited production of its sadirons; and as late as the 1940’s and 1950’s most of the sadirons being manufactured in Big Prairie were being sent to areas of Canada and Australia that had not yet been reached with electric power. Finally, business was so slow that the factory in Big Prairie closed. Today, however, fine examples of the Monitor Sadiron can still be seen on display today at the Monitor Bank in Big Prairie.
The pictures below show the Monitor Sadiron Co. factory and three of the Monitor sadiron models.
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