Today's sewing machine is a "Home Companion" made by Johnson, Clark, & Co. in the late 1870's/early 1880's. The ad below was from 1877 and depicts the Home Companion machine on the lower left. The machine in the ad is an earlier version of the machine which has a little different hand wheel. During this time the company made models branded the "Favorite" and the "National". My machine is obviously a "National".
As with a lot of my sewing machine purchases, I saw this for sale on FB Marketplace almost a year ago to the day when I'm writing this post. Although the machine didn't look very nice in the ad pictures, I recognized the machine as one that was not very common so I quickly responded to the ad. The seller didn't respond right away but eventually they returned my message. The price was right so I didn't even haggle on price and we made arrangements to meet. The next morning my wife and I traveled a little over an hour north of Pittsburgh to purchase the machine. Below are pics of the machine when we returned home. As you can see the machine is very dirty and doesn't over all looks black.
In this post I'm not going to go into a long explanation on how I cleaned the machine but looking at the before pics you would have never guessed that there was so much decoration still remaining on the machine. All bright parts were cleaned as I normally do (with buffing wheel).
Although this machine was not in great condition (rusted, missing japan, covered in soot or something black) I'm really surprised how well it cleaned up. And it sews a great stitch (see video below)!!
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