Wisconsin Hometown Stories

In the 1880s, the lumber industry began to wind down, and Eau Claire's dream of becoming Wisconsin's second-largest city started to fade away. In the 1880s, you can already sense that the timber is not going to last forever. People start moving out of Eau Claire. And so, you get a very rapid decline in the population of Eau Claire. Between 1885 and 1890, a quarter of Eau Claire's population left. So if you think of that in today's context, you'd have 15,000 people leaving Eau Claire in a five-year period. So, I mean, that would really change the nature of the town. Despite the population drop, Eau Claire remained large enough to carry on as a regional service and retail center. And Eau Claire still had great railroad connections-- with several lines, and as many as 75 freight and passenger trains a day passing through town. But it wasn't enough to stop the economic decline. City leadership begins to realize that they are going to have to diversify. And that means Eau Claire has to become more of an industrial manufacturing city. People don't think of anything other than that. Then we slowly reinvent ourselves, and we reinvent ourselves with small companies, generally. The rebirth began

with the companies that Eau Claire already had

Like the McDonough Manufacturing Company, which continued to make equipment for sawmills. The Drummond Meat-Packing Company, originally started to supply the lumber camps, continued to expand, processing the livestock brought in by nearby farmers. The Phoenix Manufacturing Company, located near the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers, also made the equipment needed for sawmills, from the band saws to the steam engines and all the machinery and parts in between. Phoenix met great success building their own version of the Lombard Log Hauler, now noted as the first commercial vehicle to run on continuous tracks. Powered by a steam engine, and fitted with sleigh runners, the hauler was a kind of giant snowmobile, powerful enough to pull long loads of the remaining logs out of the forest. The taxpayers of Eau Claire subsidized some of the new industries, like the Eau Claire Pulp and Paper Mill, and a linen factory on the Eau Claire River. Various other companies start to develop that use wood as a product. There's a number of box factories, which, prior to the cardboard age, is the way you ship things. Northwestern Steel & Iron Works began by making cement mixers, and the gasoline engines to power them. They expanded into making steel molds for casting concrete pipes. Ironworks that you cast concrete in, but they also cast concrete block, cinder block, and so, they made the forms to do that. They actually cast blocks to build their own new factory, and then built it with blocks they cast. They would make the form that you would then cast a funeral planter in. You know, so all of these sort of eccentric things. What do you do after the lumber industry collapses? Well, you do something inventive, and you hope that it survives. And maybe it branches out and makes other companies that then do become a big part of the economy. Northwestern Steel & Iron Works branched off from concrete machinery into making pressure cookers and canners. They got a boost when the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared pressure canning the only safe way to preserve non-acidic foods. And the coming of World War I made preserving food a patriotic duty. By the time you get to World War I, the National Pressure Cooker Company is producing 80% of all pressure cookers sold in the world. In the 1930s, the company designed a small pressure cooker with a twist-lock lid, sealed by a rubber gasket. Much easier to open and close, it was called "Presto," and was the first stovetop pressure cooker convenient enough for everyday use. A part of the diversification of the city dealt with getting into industries that are often not seen as industry. The expansion of Sacred Heart Hospital, and the construction of Luther Hospital, signaled the start of a new age in medicine. The other industry that's very important is the industry of higher education. The future UW-Eau Claire opened its doors in 1916, the last site chosen by the state for a teachers college, then called a Normal School. As in the case of most of these Normal Schools, the students were almost entirely women training to become teachers in one-room schools. But it got Eau Claire's foot in the door of higher education. And as the automobile began to replace horses on America's streets, a new industry began in Eau Claire. The Gillette Safety Tire Company chose to locate in the city, after a chance visit by one of the company officers. And he met with the Civic Association in Eau Claire, and they impressed him enough with the fact that Eau Claire had ample and cheap electricity. They had a good and reliable workforce, and there was no other tire industry within the area. All I can say was just a good chance, good fortune on Eau Claire's part that it landed here. Raymond Gillette, a former sawmill manager from Michigan, formed the company to make a new, blowout-resistant tire. His brother, Herbert, who was more inventive than Raymond Gillette, came up with an inner liner for the tire, and they developed it into the Gillette Safety Tire. In 1917, company officers and local leaders looked on, as the plant manager ceremonially built the first tire. That got Eau Claire going because they had a different tire. Marketed with an old lumberjack expression-- "a bear for wear"-- Gillette's tires lasted longer than other tires. Which was important because in the early years, if you got 500 miles on a tire, that was starting to push the maximum. The working conditions in the early Eau Claire tire plant and all of the tire industry, for that matter, was dirty. It was hard. It was unsafe. There was a lot of asbestos and dust and chemicals that nobody knew anything about. Sometimes, in the hot weather, if it was 90 degrees outside, it would be 110, 115 in some parts of the plant. There were people that were carried out and laid outside until they recovered and then would have to go back to work. It took many years for that to get better, but it, it eventually did. As Gillette began to merge with the U.S. Rubber Company, it won a contract to produce Riverside brand tires for retailer Montgomery Ward, followed by another to produce Atlas tires for the Standard Oil Company. They also began to supply up to a third of the tires put on General Motors' new cars. The company also became the country's biggest producer of bicycle tires. They used to advertise by comics, showing how their tires were so much better than everybody else's. During World War II, U.S. Rubber sold the plant to the U.S. government, which converted it to make 30-caliber ammunition. When the government sold the plant back, U.S. Rubber began a massive re-conversion and expansion project. And after christening the new plant, the company declared it to be "the most modern tire plant in the world." Now doubled in size, Eau Claire's tire plant was ready for a post-war boom in tire sales that would last for decades.