from Poisoning Paradise: An Environmental History of Madison
By Maria C. Powell, PhD
Eastside Madison industries and communities thrive on agriculture surrounding city
My dad’s great grandfather on his mother’s side came from Germany in the 1860s and eventually purchased a large parcel of land near Cottage Grove, just a few miles east of Madison. He spent years clearing and working the land, married and had several children, and in time the farm became one of the most successful farms in the area. The farm was passed down to my dad’s grandfather. My dad’s mother, born at the farm around 1908, grew up there and her parents continued to live there after she married my grandfather and moved to downtown Madison to raise her family in the same house he grew up in on W. Wilson.[1] My dad recalled visiting his grandparents at the farm as a kid in the 1930s and 40s, and how many tasks were still done “by hand” (pumping up drinking water) or with animals—e.g., using horses for plowing.
But by the first half of the 1900s, even with some tasks still being done without electricity or fuel, my great grandparents’ farm was already likely benefiting from advances in industrial manufacturing, including those happening just a few miles away on Madison’s eastside.
After the Madison Compromise blessed industrial growth on Madison’s eastside, industries boomed there. Kipp was founded by wealthy Chicago industrialists who saw profits to be made in Wisconsin’s growing agricultural sector and industries that support it—primarily oiling components for tractors, trains and other heavy equipment.[2]
Kipp and other eastside industries’ growth were also great for Madison’s economy and for attracting workers to live on the eastside. By 1915, manufacturing was the single largest sector in the Madison economy and the number of factory workers increased by 283 percent. The city’s population went up 50% between 1910 and 1920.[i],[3] A 1923 Capital Times article called Madison’s industrial east side, where many workers lived, “A City within a City,” saying it changed “from a forest primeval” to “a community where 6,000 families are living…growth that is rarely equaled in the history of any settlement in the adjacent territory.”[ii]
Kipp grew very fast and played a central role in shaping not only how Madison’s east side grew and developed, but also its political and cultural dynamics. The company’s powerful owners, and their wealthy, politically influential families, were also critical actors in city, state, and even national politics throughout the 1900s and well into the 2000s.
Eastern speculators profit by creating Kipp neighborhood
Madison Kipp is located on the east side of Madison, less than a mile north of Lake Monona and a few hundred feet from Starkweather Creek, which flows into the lake near where one of the last battles of the Blackhawk War was fought.
In 1837, a 191-acre area south of where the Kipp factory was later built was purchased by Simeon Mills, a wealthy merchant from Ohio. Mills built a large stone home there in 1863, and but left much of the area wooded, so it was referred to as “Mills Woods.” In 1884, a State Journal article described this area as “a stately grove of towering forest trees, principally rock maple, elm, hickory, white oak and basswood, many of which have stood, no doubt, for centuries…a grand natural, forest… just asnature developed it, no woodman’s axe having had access to it…”[iii]
The J. W. Hudson family, also from the eastern U.S., bought the Mills Woods area in the later 1800s and eventually subdivided it, calling it Hudson Park.[iv] Reverend J.S. Miller from Philadelphia purchased the land in 1892 and further subdivided it into the Elmside subdivision, in cooperation with James Corry of the Fair Oaks Land Company, which sold lots adjacent to Miller’s subdivision.
These savvy developers knew that to convince people to buy their lots—in an area that was at that time considered way out in the country—they would need to provide transportation and employment for home buyers. Several railroad lines already served the area, converging right where the Mason-Kipp factory eventually located. Miller persuaded the streetcar company to extend its line out to his planned subdivision—and part of the Miller farm became the Madison Railways car barns adjacent to the railway crossroads.[4]
During this period, some “fugitive” Ho-Chunk people were likely still living throughout this area, although they were eventually pushed further south to the Wiinequah area by these encroaching residential developments. One of the last remaining Ho-Chunk mounds in the city is in Hudson Park along Lake Monona, just south of Kipp’s current location (as discussed in a previous section).
Well-Oiled Machinery Needed for Agriculture, Progress
The rapid growth of agriculture in the fertile soils of south central Wisconsin at the turn of the century attracted enterprising businessmen who saw much money to be made in industries that produced agricultural machinery and locomotive engines. To work efficiently and quickly, all this machinery needed to be well-lubricated, which was especially challenging in cold climates where the oil became too sluggish in the winter to adequately lubricate the machines.
In 1898, a man named Mason founded the Mason Lubricator Company in Madison to manufacture lubricators that were purportedly superior in the cold.[v] Around the same time, two Madison men, Albert A Stelting and Burton J. Larkin, who sold farm machinery for the J.I. Case Harvesting Company in Racine, decided to start their own business making oiling devices for farm machinery. They had learned about Mason’s newly patented automatic oil injector, and after negotiating for Mason’s patent rights, in 1901 filed incorporation papers for the Mason Lubricator Company.
Apparently, however, Mason’s lubricator didn’t work quite as well as it was supposed to in cold weather, and when a man named W.H. Putnam discovered a lubricator that worked better, Stelting took interest. This superior lubricator was designed by Oliver Kipp, who founded the O.G. Kipp Company in Rochelle, Illinois.[vi] Impressed with Kipp’s lubricator, Stelting purchased several very valuable lubricator patents held by the O.G. Kipp Company, and in 1902, the Mason and Kipp companies were merged to form the Mason-Kipp Manufacturing Company.[vii] Oliver Kipp was convinced to come to Madison to be factory shop superintendent and also a Mason-Kipp corporate officer,[viii] and Putnam was named treasurer.[ix] Company stockholders—which included future owner Thomas A. Coleman—made Stelting general manager of the new enterprise.[5]
Kipp gets help from Forty Thousand Club
Following the merger, Mason-Kipp controlled several of the most promising new lubricator patents. Though Stelting already had a small factory on the east side, after the merger the company wanted a larger factory and turned to the city of Madison for assistance.[x] In 1902, just one day after the new merged company was incorporated, Mason-Kipp asked “for a bonus from the city of Madison to be subscribed by citizen shareholders.” The company promised the city it would employ “many men” to produce lubricators, ore pumps, and engine governors for agricultural and other machinery.[xi] When the city didn’t quickly agree to this, Stelting threatened that the company would move either to Minneapolis, Minnesota or Peoria, Illinois—and again promised handsome dividends to citizens who bought stock in the company. A Mason-Kipp factory, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, was also being established in Winnipeg Canada “to take charge of the firm’s enormous trade in the northwest.”[xii]
Mason-Kipp’s threat to leave Madison unless subsidized was effective, with help from the Forty Thousand Club, which convinced wealthy citizens to buy $10,000 worth of Mason-Kipp stock.[6],[xiii] Mason-Kipp also received a “snug bonus and a free site” from the Fair Oaks Land Company.[xiv] The new factory, on Waubesa Street, developed at breakneck speed, as reflected by a September 3, 1903 Wisconsin State Journal headline, “Mason Kipp New Shops at Once; New Factory at Fair Oaks to Be Rushed, Finished in Thirty Days; Capacity Tripled, Madison Nearly Lost this Promising Industry.” The factory would be “rushed to completion after a fashion that will startle slow-going Madisonians,” would employ 25 men, and would include “provisions for future enlargement.” All of this manufacturing would require water, and plans were made immediately with city officials to drill a “deep well.”[7]
Factory worker neighborhood grows fast
Mason-Kipp grew rapidly and so did the neighborhood around it. In 1902, after granting Kipp free land, the Fair Oaks Land Company began aggressively advertising adjacent residential lots.[xv] In line with the “Madison Compromise,” these lots were specifically targeted to factory workers and working class families who could afford small, inexpensive lots and needed factory jobs to help pay for them. One ad, in September of 1903, claimed that “Fair Oaks is to Become Madison’s Great Manufacturing Center…now that the city has entered upon the policy of inviting and encouraging industries to locate here instead of fighting to keep them out.”[8]
The Village of Fair Oaks was incorporated in 1906.[xvi] Fair Oaks Land Company advertisements that year bragged of “pure water,” “lowest taxes,” “best school facilities,” and “best streetcar service.” Residents in the Fair Oaks neighborhood advocated for a “municipal lighting plant,” and village leaders had “made overtures” to Madison Gas and Electric, but to no avail, so Mason-Kipp offered to supply lights to the village.
In 1907 Fair Oaks Company offered to build homes for people on installment plans–on “high, dry lots” for $5 down, $5 a month, and promised that property values would double in value in three years. The Village of Fair Oaks became part of Madison in 1913, and that year a Wisconsin State Journal article about the neighborhood stated, “Fair Oaks has a fine future as a resident factory district.”[xvii] By this point a good number of factory workers already lived in the area around Kipp. Comradery and community spirit developed among neighbors who also worked together; in 1913, a Kipp picnic was attended by 2,000 neighborhood residents.
Coleman Family Takes the Helm
In 1914, Thomas A. Coleman and his son Thomas E. bought Mason-Kipp. By that point, the Coleman family already had a nearly twenty-year history in Madison and had already been financially invested in Kipp for some time. The family first moved to Madison from Chicago in 1895 when Thomas E. was two years old, after the elder Coleman was transferred to Madison by the McCormick farm implement company (based in Chicago). In 1902, J.P. Morgan merged the McCormick Company, the Deering Harvester Company, and three smaller agricultural companies to form International Harvester. Thomas A. continued to work for the company as branch manager after the merger.
In their early years in Madison, the Colemans lived in the Fourth Ward, close to the capitol and near other wealthy “movers-and-shakers” of the city.[9] The elder Coleman interacted within elite Madison circles with other well-off businessmen, including Albert Stelting, the original owner of Mason-Kipp, for years before he purchased the factory.[10] During this time, he purchased “controlling interests” in Kipp,[xviii] and in 1908 he became president of the company’s Board of Directors.[xix] He was already an elite political player in the city, state, and nation, as well as in the corporate world. In 1908, he was presented to President Roosevelt by Wisconsin Congressman Nelson, when they were in Washington D. C. together.[xx] He was elected Director of the Bank of Wisconsin in 1909.[xxi]
In 1910, the year Thomas E. graduated from Madison’s Central High School, his father was transferred back to Chicago to work in the main International Harvester office and the family again moved to Chicago. Thomas E. began studies at University of Chicago, but returned to Madison to work at Kipp in the summers. After graduating from college in 1914, following the Coleman purchase of the company, he worked as a coast-to-coast travelling salesman for Kipp, and in 1918 he became vice-president and general manager.
World War I: Kipp profits greatly from war contracts, busts unions
The Colemans bought Mason-Kipp at the beginning of World War I. According to newspaper accounts, 1914 was very successful year for the company. An October 1914 article in the Wisconsin State Journal titled “Kipp Lubricator Company One of Largest in World” bragged that “War and war time conditions haven’t been given a chance to roost in a shop which right now is employing as many men as former years at this period.” The company was catering mainly to companies around the world making locomotives and other engines.[11],[xxii]
By 1917, Kipp had doubled its capacity, controlled 60% of the machine lubricators made in the U.S., and two-thirds of gas and steam tractors in U.S were “Kipp Equipt.” Some of the largest tractor manufacturers, including J. I. Case and International Harvester used only Kipp equipment.[xxiii] Also, by the end of 1917, Kipp was making lubricators for all engines purchased by U.S. government that required lubricators, and employed 250-260 people, including 35 women.
Kipp dealt with significant labor unrest during and just after the war, including violent strikes on the east side in which Kipp and other “war industry” workers marched through the neighborhood and to the capitol demanding better working conditions and wages. Though most strikes were peaceful, some were violent, including one in the Kipp neighborhood in which striking workers threw rocks at Kipp officials who were driving scabs to work.
Kipp leaders successfully fought union efforts, employing typical union busting tactics. The unrest didn’t affect their bottom line. By the end of 1919 and into 1920, plans for large additions to the factory were being made.[xxiv] On October 9, 1920, the Wisconsin State Journal (State Journal) reported that “Within a month the Madison-Kipp Corporation will occupy its new $100,000, two-story shop and would eventually have room to employ 700 men when the planned three floors would be built on the two that had already been added.[12][xxv] The story noted that Kipp manufactured four times as many oilers at that time than “any other plant in the business” and was the largest lubricator company in the world. Kipp had “good foreign trade,” producing lubricators for tractors, submarines, tanks for excavating, mining, power and ship machinery, and “Oil-Kipps,” the factory’s new oiling devices.[xxvi]
In 1923, T.E. Coleman obtained a patent for his locomotive lubricator, and by the end of that year Kipp’s “special lubricator” was being used by about 20 railroads in the United States. Kipp’s “Oil Kipps” and force feed lubricators were being used by “most of the big oil engines built in America as well as on tractors, marine and all types of steam engines.”
The Coleman family’s personal wealth, not surprisingly, also grew during the war. In 1919, Thomas E. built an expensive new home in Lakewood (now called Maple Bluff), alongside new homes of the wealthy industrialists Carl and Hobart Johnson, who owned Gisholt.[xxvii] In 1920 Thomas A. purchased the landmark Brown home on Gorham.[xxviii]
Kipp helps create east side’s festival spirit and “progressive” image
In what was likely an effort to build goodwill among workers and neighbors after the contentious years of east side factory worker unrest, the Colemans and other wealthy industrialists of Madison’s east side began to sponsor many arts, sports, and community events. In the early 1920s, the “East Side Business Men’s Association” was formed by the Colemans and other east side business owners. The “fundamental policy” of the association was “support of all community projects….plans for improvement of the East Side from every possible standpoint will be the club’s chief activity.”[xxix]
In the fall of 1923, the first “East Side Businessmen Association’s Fall Festival” was held—a free “two day extravaganza” of dancing, music, and food.[xxx] “Like the splendor of the sun suddenly appearing over the horizon, Madison’s East Side will burst into gala-day attire for the East Side Business Men’s Association harvest festival…and as gaiety and good feeling flourish in sunshine, so will the occasion be marked by an atmosphere of brightness, good cheer, and enjoyment,” the Wisconsin State Journal wrote about the event. The paper predicted the festival would “go down in the city’s records as an attainment significant of the East Side’s community spirit.”[13]
In early 1924, Thomas A. and Thomas E. Coleman were elected president and vice president of the east side’s Security State Bank. The secretary of Kipp, also a former president of the bank, served as one of the directors, along with several other prominent east side businessmen. Security State Bank had already helped fund much east side development since it was founded in 1912, and the 1924 State Journal article announcing the new directors labeled the east side as “progressive” thanks to the bank’s work.[xxxi] “Hundreds of East Side workmen depend on this bank…” the article highlighted. Further, “all of the elements that make up a progressive community are to be found on the East Side…The new bank is a good example of this progress.” This “new part of the city,” it said, had the advantages of “the latest ideas in permanent street paving, new schools, new churches, and new business houses.” Also, the State Journal noted, Coleman’s presidency of Madison-Kipp made him a commendable choice as president of Security Bank, because it “adds to his knowledge of local conditions and gives him a more thorough understanding of the needs of that community.”
Baseball was also central to Kipp’s community-relations efforts. In 1922, the “Madison Industrial Athletic Association,” of which Kipp was a member, sponsored the first of several vaudeville shows at a local high school. The following year, Kipp generously funded the grandstand and fence for the athletic field, named “Kipp field,” where Kipp’s baseball team and teams sponsored by other Madison industries, including Oscar Mayer, competed for decades to come.
Madison’s industries and economy largely unaffected by Great Depression
During the second half of the 1920s, still defending the Madison Compromise, Madison headlines screamed success for the industrial eastside. The year 1925 was “Epochal for Madison Industries” as “Industry Girds for a Bigger Madison.”[xxxii] Looking back, a 1928 headline happily reported “1927 Smiled on Madison”–and was tellingly subtitled “$55 million dollars in the city’s banks.” It proudly noted that Madison’s factories, nearly all on the eastside, had done extraordinarily well.[xxxiii] The next year, it was a “Prosperous Year Seen For East Side Industries” with “Key Plants Assured of Increases.”[xxxiv]
On the last day of 1929, following Black Tuesday in October marking the beginning of the Great Depression, a lead article on the business-finance page of the Wisconsin State Journal newspapers admitted that it “was not a record-breaking year in the history of Madison finance.” However, indicating the relative wealth of Madison’s residents, it was nevertheless an “unusually prosperous one for the city’s banks and trust companies” with “a record-breaking number of wills made by Madisonians in which fiduciary powers were conferred on corporate executors and trustees” and “[s]aving deposits of the more conservative element of the population increased steadily.”
In other words, Madison’s wealth made it more immune to the depression’s effects. “There has been no collapse of commodity prices,” the newspaper assured us. “There has been no inventory problem. There has been no breaking down of the banking system…there have been no great business failures, nor are there likely to be. The great corporations of the country were never in better shape financially, or from the viewpoint of efficiency and skill in their management.”
Industrial growth was seen as critical to the city’s immunity to the Depression. “City Industrial Building Urged” was the section’s headline, and it featured photos of Madison Kipp and several eastside industries. A dramatic photo of smokestacks against the sky had a caption encapsulating the city’s proud belief, reflected in the Madison Compromise, that it could have it all—industry, progress, and beautiful clean lakes: “Tossed against the sky, these towers of industry typify Madison’s mechanical progress. Bulwarked by staunch basework, slender pinnacles dedicated to achievement thrust themselves against the angled horizon of Madison’s four lakes, informing visitors in this famed region of ‘Four limped (sic) lakes, four Naides,’ as Longfellow said, that the capital city of Wisconsin balances its workaday advancement against educational progress.”[xxxv]
Colemans rise in Republican ranks and battle Progressive politicians, Social Security Act
While funding the growth of the “progressive” east side, the politically active Coleman family, allied with the Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, aggressively fought the Progressive wing of the Republican party, led by Robert La Follette—often called “Fighting Bob.” La Follette was Wisconsin’s governor from 1902 through 1906, and a U.S. senator until he died in 1925. The Colemans were adamantly opposed to key platforms of the progressive wing of the party—especially union rights, as their union-busting tactics during and after WWI abundantly illustrated.
In 1927, Thomas E. Coleman became president of Madison-Kipp after his father passed away.[xxxvi] Politically, he followed in his father’s footsteps, going on to become “one of the most powerful and revered GOP political leaders” who for several decades “exerted a stronger and more continuing influence on the Republican party in Wisconsin than any other individual.”[xxxvii] A front page Wisconsin State Journal article the day after he died (in 1964), he was referred to as “Mr. Republican of Wisconsin.”[xxxviii] He eventually headed the Republican Voluntary Committee, which was created in 1925 to allow Republicans to avoid “financial limitations upon campaign expenditures” that restricted other political parties.[xxxix] In 1928, Coleman volunteered for Walter Kohler Sr.’s successful gubernatorial campaign, and in 1930 he directed Kohler’s campaign for re-election, which he lost to Philip La Follette, son of Robert La Follette.[xl]
[1] This farm is still there as of spring 2023, though no longer in the family.
[2] Leaders of both companies also knew that Madison workers hadn’t yet formed or joined strong (or any) unions, as they had in Chicago and other big eastern and Midwestern cities.
[3] Madison business and commerce interests continued to shape the city’s development. In 1918, in a preliminary report for the Directors of the Association of Commerce, a “public utility statistician” argued that Madison needs a comprehensive plan to “unify and direct the future growth of Madison because the city had outgrown its “country town” phase. “We need to apply the economic principles of organization and management to our municipal business,” he opined.
[4] Now the site of Madison-Kipp’s Fair Oaks factory
[5] In 1904, Mr. Kipp died unexpectedly on the streetcar on the way home from the factory.
[6] Thomas A. Coleman, Kipp’s future owner, was likely one of the wealthy citizens who bought stock in Kipp at this time.
[7] During these early years, there seems to have been some confusion as to what the factory would be called. Land companies selling lots near the factory in 1902 referred to it as Madison Kipp Lubricator Company, but from 1903 to 1905 advertisements refer to it as Mason Kipp Lubricator Company. In 1906 and 1907, they again say “Madison Kipp.” The name seems to have been officially changed to Madison-Kipp Corporation in 1919.
[8] In stark contrast to the east side ads, a University Bay Company advertisement for lots in “College Hills” on the city’s west side lists many restrictions for the subdivision, including “No lots sold for manufacturing, trade, or commerce.”
[9] My great grandfather and his siblings also lived in the Fourth Ward, and several built homes there; they were not, however, “movers and shakers” of Madison.
[10] A “personal and social” posting in a 1900 Wisconsin State Journal names Coleman and Stelting on the “arrangement committee” of the “annual social and banquet” of the Madison Implement and Vehicle Association at the Capital House
[11] Ironically, in 1915, when the area just north of Kipp was proposed as a site for the Farmers’ Cooperative Packing Company, the proposal received “intense opposition” from Colemans as well as residents and it was shot down (Mollenhoff, p. 256).
[12] These additional stories were never built; this kind of exaggerated reporting about Madison-Kipp was common for the State Journal .
[13] The multi-day East Side annual festivals, indeed, continued through at least the 1980s, and were sometimes held in the Kipp factory.
[i] Mollenhoff, 255
[ii] 1923.12.31. Cap Times
[iii] 1884 article
[iv] 1936.9.24.Centennial edition, pg. 12 (82 on pdf).
[v] Winkley, 6.25.1936.WSJ
[vi] 6.25.1936.WSJ
[vii] Mollenhoff, p. 261
[viii] 11.4.1902 WSJ article
[ix] 3.12.1913. CT
[x] Mollenhoff, 261
[xi] Mollenhoff, 261
[xii] WSJ, Nov.4 1902
[xiii] Mollenhoff, p. 246.
[xiv] Mollenhoff, p. 261
[xv] 1936.9.24.Centennial edition, pg. 12 (82 on pdf).
[xvi] 1939.9.24 WSJ
[xvii] 6.1.1913 WSJ
[xviii] Cap times 2.5.64
[xix] 1939.9.24
[xx] 3.7.1908 WSJ
[xxi] 1909.4.14.WSJ
[xxii] WSJ. October 1914 (can’t read date!)
[xxiii] 1917.8.17
[xxiv] 1919.11.29, 1919.12.4., 1920.3.50
[xxv] 1920.10.8. 1920.10.9
[xxvi] 1920.12.21
[xxvii] 1919.10.21
[xxviii] 9.25.1920
[xxix] 1923.9.24
[xxx] 1923.9.24
[xxxi] 1924.1.15
[xxxii] 1925.12.31 CT
[xxxiii] 1928.1.1 CT
[xxxiv] 1928.12.31 WSJ
[xxxv] 1929.12.31 WSJ
[xxxvi] WSJ, 1964, 2.5
[xxxvii] Cap Times 2.5.64, check this
[xxxviii] WSJ, 1964.2.5
[xxxix] Reeves, year? P 65
[xl] WSJ 1964
© 2023 Maria C. Powell. All rights reserved.