When Norman H. Fay and Walter Scott founded their machine-tool enterprise in Dexter, Maine, in 1881, they did so in a town already shaped by mills, water power, and inherited trades. Dexter was not a place defined by constant reinvention. It was a place where skills, occupations, and identities passed quietly from one generation to the next. That continuity—more than innovation alone—would define Fay & Scott for more than a century.¹

By the 1930s, the national economy was in collapse, yet life in Dexter moved at a different pace. In the presidential election of 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt swept the nation, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont, confirming broad public acceptance of the New Deal.² But in small-town New England, recovery was slow and cautious. While much of the country embraced Roosevelt’s new vision of America, working-class families in Dexter continued to follow familiar paths. Blue-collar jobs still abounded, and sons often followed fathers into the same mills, shops, and factories they had always known—including Fay & Scott.

At Fay & Scott, the physical layout of the plant mirrored its culture. The shop was divided between the machine shop and the foundry, two distinct worlds separated by a brick firewall, yet bound together by the logic of production. Workers entered through the machine shop and turned sharply into the foundry, a route remembered clearly by James “Jimmy” Wintle, who worked at Fay & Scott during the 1930s and 1940s alongside his father, Freddie Wintle.³ Castings made in the foundry crossed the firewall to be machined, finished, and assembled on the other side—iron moving steadily from raw material to precision tool.

The foundry, located on the north side of the complex, was the heart of the operation and the most demanding place to work. Along the eastern wall, parallel to Spring Street, stood the blast furnace, raised roughly five feet above the dirt-and-sand floor on long legs. It loomed ten to twelve feet high, six to eight feet in diameter, its stack piercing the ceiling and roof to vent smoke and gases skyward.⁴ Inside, forced air blasted through burning coke, driving temperatures above 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit and liquefying a mixture of pig iron, limestone, and coke that pooled in the lower portion of the furnace, known as the bosh.⁵

Molten metal was drawn off using long metal poles to open the furnace and wooden poles tipped with clay to seal it again. The metal flowed through clay-lined troughs into waiting ladles. When the time came to empty the furnace, the stack boss—most memorably Clifford “K.O.” Stevens, who followed Earl Bridges in that role—would shout a warning. Everyone moved back quickly. Distance was safety.⁶

Foundry labor was constant, dangerous, and exhausting. After a pour-off, the air filled with dust, gas, and smoke so thick that visibility dropped to a few feet. Jimmy Wintle recalled at least one fatal accident—someone too close to the open furnace—his name lost to time but the lesson never forgotten.⁷

Work inside the foundry was organized by function. Bench molders prepared smaller molds at raised benches, while floor molders shaped massive molds directly on the sand-covered floor. Molds were formed from wood patterns, filled, and left to cool before castings were sandblasted and sent through the firewall to the machine shop.⁸ A typical eight-hour day consisted of six hours of mold-making followed by two hours of pouring, the most dangerous part of the shift.

The ladles used in pouring varied in size. Large pours required ladles weighing over 1,200 pounds, while even the smaller buckets weighed 75 pounds, carried and tipped by hand. Leather gloves offered limited protection. Molten iron frequently splashed, sometimes running down boot tops, burning flesh and provoking language as colorful as it was understandable.⁹ When water hit hot metal, it exploded into sound. As Jimmy remembered, the liquid metal hissed like gunshots.¹⁰ After pouring off, some workers headed straight for the showers simply to cool down.

The foundry employed 50 to 60 men in the late 1930s and into the early 1940s. Time was rigidly regulated. A buzzer marked the beginning and end of shifts. Day work began at 7:00 a.m., with a fifteen-minute midmorning break, lunch from noon to 1:00, and quitting time at 4:00 p.m. The night crew arrived at 3:00 p.m., overlapping for the daily pour-off, and worked until midnight.¹¹ Pay was 15 cents an hour, low even by Depression standards. Foundry work was the least glamorous job in the plant, but it was steady, honest work, and men took pride in doing it well.¹²

As the Second World War approached, production intensified. Shifts stretched to twelve hours, and Fay & Scott retooled to meet wartime demands, producing castings, ordnance components, and specialized machinery that fed the national defense effort.¹³ Management occasionally delivered pep talks urging productivity and patriotism. The men listened, wiped the soot from their faces, and went back to work.

The foundry was run by foremen and characters whose names remain vivid in local memory. During the war years, Walter Burrill served as head foreman, escaping the heat at his camp on Lake Wassookeag, while others cooled off at swimming holes like the Birches or Soft Rock. The workforce was defined by nicknames and familiarity: “Tiny” Maycomber, “Pud” Howard, “KO” Stevens, “Chepic” Clukey, “Red” Sands, “Page-oh” Page, and dozens more—bench molders, floor molders, core room men, chippers, furnace crews, and night workers whose labor made the shop run.¹⁴

Over the first half of the twentieth century, Fay & Scott gradually transitioned from steam-driven line shafts to electric power, reflecting broader industrial electrification trends across New England. Individual electric motors replaced belts and pulleys, improving efficiency and safety while allowing greater flexibility in machine placement.¹⁵ Yet despite technological modernization, the nature of foundry work remained brutally physical. Electricity powered machines, but it did not cool furnaces or lighten ladles.

After the war, ownership changed hands—from Whitin Machine Works to White Consolidated Industries—and production diversified. Still, global competition and declining domestic demand for American machine tools slowly eroded the plant’s viability. Despite efforts to survive under local ownership, Fayscott closed permanently in 2003, ending more than a century of machine-tool manufacturing in Dexter.¹⁶

What remains is not just an industrial site or a corporate history, but memory: soot-covered men, roaring furnaces, buzzing shift bells, nicknames shouted across sand-covered floors. Fay & Scott was never merely a factory. It was a place where generations learned what hard work meant—and where those lessons endured long after the furnaces went cold.

Footnotes

1. John F. Sprague, “Norman H. Fay and the Fay & Scott Machine Shops,” Journal of Maine History 7 (1915): 110–130.

2. James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 94–96.

3. James Wintle, oral recollections, quoted in Fred Wintle, “The Old Foundry at Fayscott,” The Daily ME.

4. Sprague, “Norman H. Fay,” 118–120.

5. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 181–185.

6. Wintle, “Old Foundry.”

7. Ibid.

8. Tony Griffiths, “Fay & Scott Lathes,” lathes.co.uk.

9. Wintle, “Old Foundry.”

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. “Fay & Scott War Production,” Garage Journal.

14. Wintle family recollections; Dexter Historical Society materials.

15. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 259–265.

16. Town of Dexter, Comprehensive Plan (Dexter, ME, 2012), 43–44.

Bibliography

Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Patterson, James T. The New Deal and the States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Sprague, John F. “Norman H. Fay and the Fay & Scott Machine Shops.” Journal of Maine History 7 (1915): 110–130.
Town of Dexter. Comprehensive Plan. Dexter, ME, 2012.
Wintle, Fred. “The Old Foundry at Fayscott.” The Daily ME.
Griffiths, Tony. “Fay & Scott Lathes.” lathes.co.uk.
“Fay & Scott War Production.” Garage Journal.