The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Children’s hosiery · The “Pony Stockings” company
On the record
Founded: incorporated September 1898, Fort Wayne, strong. The contemporaneous Fort Wayne City Directory for 1900 (R. L. Polk & Co.) states it in the listing itself: “United Knitting Mills, Cleveland and L E & W R R. Incorporated September, 1898. Capital, $50,000.” A directory printed within two years of the event is the strongest founding evidence for a firm of this size; the incorporation record itself was not sighted. The Thieme biography agrees on 1898.
Founders / officers: organised by Frederick Thieme, Theodore’s younger brother, as a family partnership venture of Theodore F. Thieme (entry 29) (biography). The 1900 directory’s officers are carried exactly as printed: W E Mossman, Pres; F J Thieme, Vice Pres; F L Hunting, Sec and Treas. The initials are not expanded here, and whether the directory’s “F J Thieme” is the organising brother Frederick is not established on sources in hand and is not asserted.
What it did: manufactured children’s full-fashioned hosiery for Wayne Knitting Mills, sold under the trademark “Pony Stockings.” Few makers attempted full-fashioned children’s socks — they cost more than seamless ones and children wore them out fast — which was precisely the niche the firm took. The plant stood at Cleveland and the L.E.&W. Railroad, a separate site from the Wayne Knitting plant at Main and Growth, not a room in it.
Course: the Pony brand was in national advertising by October 1901 by contemporary advertisements in the New Philadelphia (Ohio) Democrat and Times of 10 October 1901 and the Portland Morning Oregonian of October 1901, both for a Wayne Knitting Shetland-pony guessing contest. A trade account quoted in Slocum & Robertson (1905), from Textile World (February 1904), dates the issuing of the children’s stockings under the new trademark to 1901. Wayne Knit’s boast that Pony was “the best advertised brand of children’s hose in America” is carried as a company boast as a claim only.
Fate: absorbed into Wayne Knitting Mills — the purchase is documented, its date is not established. The biography states that Theodore Thieme later purchased his brother’s mill and hired Frederick as superintendent of Wayne Knitting Mills; no year is given in any source in hand, and none is printed here. The Pony Stockings brand outlived the separate company — Fort Wayne accounts of the 1920s still describe Wayne Knitting turning out pony socks — so the brand’s continuation is Wayne Knitting’s course (entry 29), not evidence United survived as a separate firm. Directory work at ACPL for 1901–1915 is the owed route to a purchase date.
Find them on this page
- § 05 — business
Sources: Fort Wayne city directory, 1900 (R. L. Polk & Co.) — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/Fort-Wayne-Indiana-city-directory-1900-part-4.htm ; Immigrant Entrepreneurship, “Theodore Frederick Thieme” — https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/theodore-frederick-thieme/ ; New Philadelphia Ohio Democrat and Times, 10 Oct 1901 — https://newspaperarchive.com/new-philadelphia-ohio-democrat-and-times-oct-10-1901-p-1/ ; Morning Oregonian, October 1901 — https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83025138/1901-10-09/ed-1/seq-12/ocr.txt ; Slocum & Robertson, History of the Maumee River Basin (1905), Part 12 — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/History-of-the-Maumee-River-basin-Allen-County-Indiana-part-12.htm . Sources as cited in the profile.