In 1885, just west of Dayton, Sam Blosser's perseverance led to his invention of the incubator, a machine that revolutionized poultry production. For his earliest incubator, he built a box lined with sawdust, heated water in a teakettle on a kitchen stove, and poured it into a tank on top of the box; because the hot water had to be replenished often to keep 100 eggs warm enough, the method was simple but labor intensive, yet he is reported to have hatched 60 out of 100 eggs. In 1911, Blosser built Virginia's first commercial hatchery, with a capacity of 35,000 birds. Beginning about 1910, the Wampler family of the Dayton area experimented with growing turkeys during a time when U.S. turkey production was slipping due to lower demand, and Charles Wampler Sr.'s daughter Ruth became one of the earliest in the U.S. to successfully grow incubated turkeys, with some incubator advice from Blosser. The Wampler family also developed the concept of growing chickens on shares, placing company-owned chicks in a farmer's chicken house while the company provided feed and the farmer provided labor, an approach that also revolutionized the poultry industry across the United States. Dayton's agricultural innovation extended beyond poultry: soon after the Civil War, Abraham B. Wenger founded Wenger's Nursery and built it into a substantial mail-order enterprise selling fruit trees, including more than 50 apple varieties as well as peach and pear trees in more limited selections; in the late 1800s, Thomas Herring and Joseph Clatterbuck of Dayton sold the thoroughbred horse St. Lorimer for $100,000, and a colt sired by St. Lorimer won a blue ribbon in the heavy jumpers contest in France; and a farm north of Dayton owned by Frank B. Showalter was considered so perfect that it was written up in the World's Fairs at Chicago in 1893, St. Louis in 1904, and Jamestown in 1907. Over more than two centuries, everyday farming in the Dayton area created a robust farm-based community of dairy, beef cattle, sheep, and hog farms, supported by mills, farm supply stores, equipment dealers, and other farm-related businesses.