Old Shoe Factory in Madison WI

Badger State Shoe Company, Madison Wisconsin

Date added: January 31, 2024 Categories:

Industrial development in Madison occurred in rapid spurts in the 1880s through World War I due to technological innovations in manufacturing, the increase in regional marketing, the improvement, and extension of rail service for the distribution of products, and to an influx of inexpensive immigrant labor. In the late nineteenth century, the growth and expansion of local plants from wagon and smithing shops into large factories employing hundreds of people and serving regional and international markets became a widespread phenomenon in developing communities across the nation.

The Badger State Shoe Company was incorporated in Milwaukee in 1893, a reorganization of the former Atkins, West and Company. Albert Atkins and Henry L. Atkins were directors of the corporation. The company plant was in a building at 55-59 4^th Street and later on St. Paul Avenue at 12^th St. In the winter of 1900-1901, the company relocated to South Madison, in a new brick building at 1335 Gilson (then Maple) Street on a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad spur. The move to Madison may have been to take advantage of lower labor and plant operating costs.

In 1903, the stock of the company was more than doubled and John G. Ogden was made president of the company, William H. Atkins became secretary and Albert Atkins, a director. (Ogden likely bought into the company at this time.) All three had moved to Madison from Milwaukee where they had been in partnership in the 1870s and the 1880s in the Atkins, Ogden & Company, boot and shoe company. Following several years of difficulties in hiring due to the limited accessibility of the plant, an east Madison branch was opened on Wilson Street. In the winter of 1909-1910 plans were announced to consolidate these branches and another in Milwaukee (location unknown) into a new building. Construction commenced soon thereafter on the six-story brick factory on North Blount Street. It was completed and outfitted for $60,000 and in operation by spring, employing an estimated 250 people. Production increased to 2,000 pairs per day of "womens', misses' and children's" shoes, a ten-fold increase over the South Madison plant output ten years earlier. The product was sold to the Chicago wholesale firm of Heiz and Schwab which shipped them throughout the world. With the advent of World War I, boot and shoe sales soared. In 1917, during that period of success, the business was sold to industrialist Edward C. Wolfram of Watertown. Wolfram also owned a shoe company that manufactured women's shoes in Watertown, and others in Waterloo and Lake Mills. Wolfram died in 1927 whereupon his family operated the business until 1930 at which time his several businesses were liquidated.

The Badger State Shoe Company rode the economic crests and swales of the period. In the 1920s, following high profits during World War I, the leather tanning and shoe industries lost considerable trade due to the growing use of synthetics over leather and increased leather and shoe imports. Many companies for which business was becoming marginal, were dealt a death knell with the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression. In 1930 the production at the Badger State Shoe Company was halted and liquidation proceeded.

A few years later, the building was leased then sold to Crescent Electric, a wholesale electrical supply company based in Dubuque, Iowa. The building was converted to warehouse use. Most recently, it was sold to Rowley-Schlimgen, an office supplies company.

The architect of this building was Ferdinand Kronenberg. Kronenberg, a German who was born around 1877, was a prolific and skilled architect in Madison. He apprenticed with Madison architect J. O. Gordon, and for a brief time, partnered with J. T. W. Jennings, the university architect. During his career in Madison he is known to have designed at least 50 houses and small commercial buildings. He also designed some larger structures in Madison including the St. James Catholic Church, the Interurban Barns (demolished), the Gill-Joyce Funeral Home, the Emerson School, the FFF Laundry Company complex, and the Cardinal Hotel. This building is his only known factory design and is therefore of interest in the history of Kronenberg's career in Madison. The fact that this building shows a fine sense of proportion, something seen very well on his Cardinal Hotel building, and a high quality of design speaks well to Kronenberg's ability as an architect. The Badger State Shoe Company is a fine example of Kronenberg's work.

According to Wisconsin's Cultural Resource Management Plan, Wisconsin's eastern lakeshore was a center of the tanning industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of the main industries that used tanned leather was shoemaking.

During the mid to late nineteenth century, most towns had small shoemaking shops meeting the needs of the local populace. Milwaukee, though, because of its access to the tanning mills, was a leader in small shoe factory production in the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, demand fostered the construction of bigger factories that replaced skilled artisans with unskilled laborers working at machines. The proximity to large tanning mills fostered the shoemaking industry in Wisconsin and by the end of World War I, Wisconsin was one of the top 10 shoe producing states in the country.

In Madison, the construction of this plant was not only important because it housed a factory of an important state-wide industry, but because it was part of an industrial boom that had finally took off, a boom that many community leaders had hoped for during the entire nineteenth century. Madison had, of course, been founded on the premise that it would be the state capital. After achieving this status, though, the economic base of the community was involved primarily in maintaining the capital and in providing services to legislators. Leonard J. Farwell, businessman and governor, almost singlehandedly fostered an economic boom in Madison between 1847 and 1856. However, this boom was primarily commercial and service-oriented, although Farwell was responsible for building the Madison Mills between 1850-51, a grist and sawmilling complex. But, during the pioneer era when most other communities were building up around mills, Madison was surprisingly non-industrial.

After the Civil War, industry in Madison consisted of a few mills and an iron foundry, and some community leaders felt that if Madison was to ever become a significant community, it would have to do something about attracting large industries to the community. But by this time there were two problems. There was a growing group of state government and university workers who did not want the city to become industrial, and little had ever been done to harness the water power of the lakes or develop other power sources. There was some hope, though, in the development of the Mendota Agricultural Works and the Carmin & Billings Plow Works. Community boosters tried to build on these factories to make Madison a center of agricultural implement manufacturing. Unfortunately the depression of 1873 nullified this effort and hurt existing manufacturers.

Again in the 1880s, a call to bring large industries to Madison was sounded by city leaders, but only three large industries developed in the city, and their development was related more to their founders' initiative, rather than what community leaders did. The Fuller and Johnson Manufacturing Company, ironically, an agricultural implement company, was Madison's first big industry by the late 1880s.

An offshoot of Fuller and Johnson was the Gisholt company, a manufacturer of machine tools. Incorporated in 1889, it became largely successful at the turn of the century. The third large industry in the community was Northern Electric Manufacturing Company, established in 1895.

But these successes were still not enough for the industry boosters, who continued to conflict with the government-university people who liked Madison the way it was, not soiled by industrial pollution. And Madison had disadvantages like high freight rates, business conservatism, and a shortage of skilled labor. But, after 1900, all of these problems seemed to lessen as existing industries grew and new industries finally came to the city. Booster clubs like the Forty Thousand Club, the Commercial Club, and the Madison Club helped change attitudes in the community toward industry as well. Between 1910 and 1920 manufacturing finally became the largest sector of Madison's economy as factory output grew by 274% and factory workers increased by 233%. And, new industries like Scanlan and Morris, Mason-Kipp (Madison-Kipp), the French Battery Company (Ray-O-Vac), and the Oscar Mayer Company, showed promise for Madison's industrial future.

The boom was short-lived as industry declined during the Great Depression. And, while the university and state government have grown rapidly since World War II, along with the service industry, manufacturing has not grown as rapidly, at least not enough to overshadow the service sector of the community. And, today, while industry is an important concern of community leaders, most people have accepted the fact that Madison is, was, and probably always will be primarily a center of learning, laws, and commerce.

Building Description

The Badger State Shoe Company is a six-story Chicago brick factory building that sits at the intersection of North Blount and East Dayton Streets. The building was built in 1910 on Madison's east side marshlands adjoining the newly completed City Market. Blount Street, at that time, had been built of cinder-fill as were many streets that crossed the marshes northeast of the city's Capitol Hill. The location offered easy access to the freight depots of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, only four blocks to the southeast.

The site adjoins a largely residential neighborhood that still has remnants of the former commercial and industrial activity that intermixed with houses there. Across Blount Street are homes and a former grocery was once owned by leaders of Madison's Black community. On the opposite corner stands the old city barn, recently renovated as an office and apartments. Across Dayton on Blount stands the home and barn of a commercial drayman. Adjoining the shoe factory on Dayton stands a complex of buildings of the former FFF Laundry. On adjoining property on Market Place are flats and storefronts, a garage, and a former National Guard Armory.

The shoe factory building sits on the southwestern two-thirds of the lot with a trucking service area and parking lot adjoining the loading dock on the northeastern end of the lot. Originally, materials were handled along the southeastern side of the building where service doors were located at the basement level.

The office entrance was on the front of the building on Blount Street. The door opened to a landing and led half a flight of stairs up to the office. The service doors to the basement level were eliminated but the steel door at the base of the elevator remains. The loading dock doors included a wide round-arched door (perhaps original) alongside other doors but it has been rebuilt as two doors. A recent concrete, steel, and fiberglass covered awning shelters the dock. A ground-level employee entrance remains, adjoining the loading dock.

The overall plan of the building measures 50 feet in width by 150 feet in length. The exterior walls are uniformly fenestrated and the building is symmetrically proportioned. Additions to the simple massive block of the building include the present loading dock on the northeast side (originally added at an unknown date, rebuilt in 1956 and again in 1979), the iron fire escapes on the southeast and northeast sides (original), an elevator tower (c.1947) and a one-story addition for a boiler room on the southeast side (date unknown).

The Badger State Shoe Company, built in 1910 for $40,000, was a model of modernism in a production plant. The six-story building featured an automatic sprinkling system, was well ventilated and lit by more than 225 windows. The Chicago brick building has walls two feet thick at the ground level. It measures 50 feet wide, 150 feet long and rises over 70 feet above the former marshlands east of Capitol Hill. In general, it met current standards for industrial efficiency as described in literature of the period. German-born Madison architect Ferdinand Kronenberg incorporated classical details and proportions into the massive structure using a classical metal cornice and corbelled brick piers, arches, and belt courses.

The original windows specified by the architect were double-hung with fifteen-light sashes. The overall dimensions of the segmental-arch brick masonry openings are five feet wide by seven feet high. The piers between window openings measure three feet, three inches wide. Broader spacing between windows and the outside corners is ten feet, seven inches, creating the appearance of massive corner piers. The windows were removed and bricked shut in 1960.

Ornamentation of the exterior was restricted to the use of corbelled brick bands demarcating the top sixth-floor window sill line and the third-floor window sill line. This feature in combination with a slight easing or recessing of the wall below windows beneath these brick bands, created the appearance of brick piers between windows supporting a three-tiered brick beam superstructure. The slight differentiation in window heights (and ceiling heights) on the top and bottom levels enhances this structural effect. In the sixth floor and the basement, the ceiling heights are 11 feet, whereas the rest are 12' 3". The basement is also several feet below street level.

A denticulated galvanized-iron cornice crowns the building. A cornice that crowned the chimney was removed when the chimney was rebuilt in 1960. The roofline is broken by the top of an old elevator shaft (no longer in use), a chimney, stair tower and present elevator shaft (added 1947). Not visible are skylights (now covered over) which lit the sixth floor.

The inner structure is built of wood: 8 x 10 and 10 x 12-inch beams are supported by 10-inch square wood posts, creating an open floor plan. Floors are built of two-inch thick pine planks with factory maple finish flooring. The latter has been partially removed, and that which remains is largely damaged and deteriorated.

No historic interior details remain. The offices were remodeled, obliterating the original materials and finishes. However, the vast majority of the space was used for manufacturing, and therefore was unfinished.

Of the exterior alterations, the window removal is the most significant in its visible effect on the architectural integrity of the building. Even so, the way in which the window openings were filled in still illustrates the original fenestration on the building. And, current plans for the adaptive reuse of the building by its owner-developer indicates these windows will be restored to their original appearance. The replacement of front and rear doors, the boiler room addition, the elevator tower addition, the chimney reconstruction, and the loading dock replacement are all minor alterations and do not detract significantly from the general appearance of the building.