Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 55, number 2, winter, 1971-1972

              A GROWTH INDUSTRY:
THE WISCONSIN ALUMINUM COOKWARE INDUSTRY, 1893-1920
By James M. Rock
T N 1920 the Wisconsin aluminum cookware -'• industry captured over 50 per cent of the total national market, after selling less than 5 per cent in 1910.^ During the twenty-seven years after the first Wisconsin man got the idea of producing aluminum goods at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, five successful Wisconsin companies—Aluminum Sign Company (now Leyse Aluminum Com¬ pany) , Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company (now Mirro Aluminum Company), Aluminum Specialty Company, West Bend Aluminum Company (now West Bend Com¬ pany, a division of Dart Industries, Inc.), and Kewaskum Aluminum Company (now reorganized as Regal Ware, Inc.)—began and prospered. Considered objectively, a new industry producing a product which has many substitutes, is more expensive, and is made from a literally unknown metal;  founded in
Author's Note: I am grateful to the men of the Wisconsin aluminum cookware industry for their help and encouragement. A special thanks goes to Hubert R. Wentorf, the sole remaining pioneer of this industry.
^ The Wisconsin companies lost the majority share of the market in the midst of the Great Depression and did not regain it until sometime after the Sec¬ ond World War. James M. Rock, The Wisconsin Aluminum Cookware Industry Prior to World War 11 (Metal Cookware Manufacturers Association, Chica¬ go, 1967), 227.
geographic isolation from its major raw ma¬ terial and its major markets; and with only unskilled labor to draw upon, might reason¬ ably be expected to fail. Yet in a rectangular strip eighty miles long by fifteen miles wide in eastern Wisconsin, with all these potential disadvantages present, it succeeded.
By the late nineteenth century this area along the west-central shore of Lake Michi¬ gan, between Milwaukee and Green Bay, had been denuded of the giant white pines which had supported the lumbering industry. Two Rivers, for example, which became the birth¬ place of the aluminum utensils industry in Wisconsin, sprang up in 1836 following ru¬ mors of a gold strike near Kewaunee, and then continued to exist because of the ex¬ cellent fishing and dense forests nearby. Al¬ though other companies were started (brew¬ eries, grist and flour mills, a lime kiln and brickyard), the primary companies existed as part of the lumber industry (saw mills, shipyards, tanneries, a chair factory, a pail and tub factory, and a sash, door, and blind factory.^   When  lumbering  declined,  a  new
^ The historical information was primarily taken from: Two Rivers High School Class, Local History of Two Rivers (Two Rivers, Wisconsin, 1897) ; Mark Rhea Byers, Biography of J. E. Hamilton (privately published, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, 1932) ; Mirro Aluminum Company, Mixing Bowl (January, 1948) ; and The Milwaukee Journal, April 2, 1967.
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