The Granite State Evaporator Company was one of the only evaporator companies to come out of New Hampshire in the late 19th century. The company has its origins when Perley E. Fox purchased a tin and stove works in Marlow, NH in 1869. Fox was born in Marlow in 1833, but as a young man headed west to Illinois in 1857 where he worked as a school teacher and professor. He returned to Marlow in the early 1860s working again as a teacher and president of the Marlow Academy and as a daguerreotype artist according to the 1860 census.
He entered the tin, stove, and hardware business when he bought out the business of J.H. Fisher in Marlow.; however, it is not clear when he first began manufacturing evaporators for maple sugaring. Perley obtained a patent in 1875 (US165223) for an evaporating pan that was a series of individual pans that were linked sequentially through tubular connectors placed in an alternating formation, effectively forming a sort of baffle or zig-zag pattern of flow of sap and syrup through the pans.
Advertisements from as early as 1879 referred to Perley’s evaporator as the Granite State Evaporator. By the 1890s the illustrations for the Granite State Evaporator Company show it as large flat pan with divided compartments resting on a portable steel arch. Perley also patented his own sap spout (US283593) in 1883 that was a hookless style formed from rolled sheet metal in a tubular design.
Perley reportedly retired from the hardware and tin business in 1892 to devote his time to farming, but it wasn’t the end of his evaporator company. In fact, the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to operate and manufacture evaporators well after that time. Perley was noted as an exhibitor of his evaporator at a number of fairs and agricultural expos in the region after 1892 and his name continued to be associated as the owner of the company in the next couple of decades.
The company reached out beyond the range of New England maple sugar producers to the midwestern farm states to sell devices similar to small evaporators or finishing rigs that they called “feed cookers” and “water heaters”. These large deep flat pans sat on metal arches and were marketed as a universal tool for all your boiling needs on the farm, be they heating water and food to feed animals, or preserving foods or making jellies. The Granite State Evaporator Company employed a special salesman based out of New York City to help promote their feed cookers. By the late 1890s, Frank E. Morrison was listed as the company president and advertising agent and maintained a sales office in Temple Court on Beekman Street in New York City.
Morrison moved on to another company by the early 1900s, but the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to manufacture evaporators and advertise to maple sugar makers in New England newspapers for a few more years. When the company stopped production is not exactly clear.
In his later years, Perley represented Marlow as a member of the New Hampshire legislature in 1903 and 1904. In August 1916, a fire in Marlow destroyed a number of buildings including the evaporator factory. Newspaper accounts of the fire described the building for the Granite State Evaporator Company as owned by Perley Fox; however, it was not clear if the company was in active production. Following the fire and the destruction of the company factory, Perley Fox was listed as a locksmith at the age of 86 in the 1920 census. He died of pneumonia in 1929 in a nursing home in Westmoreland, NH.