Reese's Interlocking Adjustable Stencils

According to Reese's New Patent Adjustable Stencil Letters, official credit for the first "settable-unit stencils" goes to Edwin Allen, who filed his U.S. patent in 1840.  Samuel Widdows Reese was a veteran of the American Civil War, who settled in Chicago after the conflict.  His first stencil patent was filed in 1873, 

and then a second patent was applied for three years later for stencils with an S-fold on one edge to lock the stencils together.  In that same year, 1876, he opened his firm, S.W. Reese & Company, in Chicago.  Reese left the Chicago company under the management of his partner, Christian Hanson, and established a second business, Reese & Company, in Manhattan.  

Popular Gardening, 1887

The New Wonder Book Cyclopedia of World Knowledge.  Philadelphia & Toronto:  International Press, 1954.

The Chicago company became C.H. Hanson in 1866, and remains today a family-owned concern.  They still manufacture interlocking brass stencils, but no longer under the Reese name.  In 2013 they acquired the Palmgren Tool Business, a famous maker of rotary tables and drill-press vices.

Popular Science, October 1948

Popular Mechanics, February 1951