Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Company overview. "Yanz & Howes" is not a modern registered corporation but a 19th-century partnership based in St. Paul, Minnesota. No founding year, employee count, revenue, ticker, or parent-company data is verifiable from public sources; the firm appears only in historical legal records. Contemporary reporting identifies it as a Minnesota firm (styled "Z. & H." in the headnotes) whose members were citizens and residents of St. Paul. There is no evidence that the entity still exists or has any successor.
Products / services / operations. The firm operated as a merchant/dealer in axle grease, advertising itself as an agent for the sale of lubricant manufactured by S. Frazer & Co. of Illinois. It was a distributor rather than a manufacturer: in its own answer it stated it purchased the axle grease it resold "in the open market in the course of trade." No other product lines are documented.
Patent-litigation posture. The single tracked case is a defensive appearance — 0 as plaintiff, 1 as defendant — in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Minnesota. Because the conduct at issue was labeling and advertising rather than the practice of a patented invention, the matter was pleaded as trade-mark infringement (with title traced through "certain assignments of letters patent and contracts"). The venue is the defendant's home district, not a plaintiff-friendly patent forum like the Eastern District of Texas; that court did not exist in the relevant era and the Eastern District of Texas did not yet have its modern patent docket.
Notable case. The Frazer Lubricator Company v. S. Frazer & Co. et al. (23 F. 305, C.C.D. Minn., April 1885, Nelson, J.) — the Illinois complainant sought to enjoin the defendants from using labels for "Superior Axle Grease, manufactured by S. Frazer & Co." alleged to imitate the "Frazer's Axle Grease" trade-mark. Only Yanz & Howes was served and appeared, denying agency and any interest in the broader dispute. The court denied the motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction, holding the controversy between the served Minnesota defendants and the Illinois complainant could proceed. The related Illinois trade-name decision, Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., upheld the complainant's exclusive right to the Frazer name in that business.
Federal trade-mark suit by The Frazer Lubricator Company against S. Frazer & Co. and Yanz & Howes over imitation of the 'Frazer's Axle Grease' label. The court denied a motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction; the narrative notes the patent referenced in the 1870 assignment was No. 28,663, not 219,455.