Plaintiff
2 cases as plaintiff.
The Frazer Lubricator Company — an Illinois corporation organized April 29, 1870, and headquartered in Chicago (principal office listed at 31 Superior Street, later 111½ Michigan Avenue), with branch offices/factories in New York and St. Louis. It succeeded the partnership Frazer, Swift & Co., formed in 1868 when inventor Samuel Frazer moved his axle-grease business from Galena, Illinois to Chicago. The company was privately held; no ticker, parent, revenue, or headcount figures are verifiable. Court records describe it only in qualitative terms ("extended" and "highly remunerative"). A later trade catalogue lists a Frazer Lubricator Co. in Jersey City, New Jersey; whether that is a successor or a separate firm could not be confirmed. No evidence of current operations was found.
Products / operations. The company manufactured and sold "Frazer's Axle Grease" (also sold as "Frazer's Lubricator" and "Frazer's Grease"), an artificial axle lubricant compounded from rosin oil, lime, sal-soda, palm oil, and water. The rosin-oil ingredient derived from Samuel Frazer's 1860 U.S. patent on rosin-oil distillation, which he assigned to the company along with his name as a trade mark. The company registered "Frazer" as a trademark for axle grease with the U.S. Patent Office on July 21, 1896 (Library of Congress trademark no. 28650).
Litigation posture. Both tracked cases show the company as sole plaintiff — an operating manufacturer asserting its assigned patent and trademark rights, not an NPE. One case was filed August 30, 1884 in the Superior Court of Cook County against Samuel Frazer and his new Galena firm, S. Frazer & Co.; it went up through the Illinois Appellate Court for the First District to the Illinois Supreme Court (Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147 (1887)). The second was a parallel federal suit in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Minnesota (23 F. 305 (1885)), targeting Galena-area agents' sales in St. Paul.
Context. The dispute centered on trademark and contract rights rather than patent infringement: Frazer had sold his patent, trade name, and goodwill in 1870 for about $17,500 and agreed not to use his name thereafter. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld an injunction barring the Galena firm from using "Frazer" while permitting it to keep selling its grease, a decision still cited on trade-name-as-trademark and covenant issues.
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Illinois trade-mark/contract suit brought by The Frazer Lubricator Company against Samuel Frazer and S. Frazer & Co. seeking to enjoin use of the Frazer name in axle-grease sales. US 219,455 is recited in the facts, but no infringement claim on it was pleaded or adjudicated.
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.