Born in Sheffield on 5 January 1805, Thomas Wigfall was  the son of John (a white smith) and Mary.  By the 1830s, Thomas was a bone haft and scale cutter in Allen Street and then Meadow Street.  A partnership in James King & Co, table and spear point knife manufacturers, 115 Scotland Street, was launched in 1845, but almost immediately dissolved.  In 1849, Wigfall alone advertised from that address.  In the Census (1851), he was a table knife manufacturer in Scotland Street, living with his wife, Harriet, and three sons.  At the start of the 1850s, Wigfall built a manufactory and grinding wheel, Atlantic Works, at 58 St Philip’s Road.  It bankrupted him with debts of about £1,500 (Sheffield Independent, 4 November 1854).  Charles Cutts and then Brookes & Crookes occupied the factory.  By 1861, Wigfall was a naturalised American, living with his wife, Harriet (d. 1889), and family in Providence, Rhode Island.  He became a cigar manufacturer and tobacconist.  He died on 29 June 1880, aged 75, and was buried at North Burial Ground, Providence.