A silver boiler, not much worse for the wear and made by employees in the Kewanee Boiler plant as much as 70 years ago, has found its way back home.
Mark Mikenas, president of the Kewanee Preservation Society, which is conducting a fundraising campaign to establish a Kewanee Boiler Makers Memorial on a small triangle of land at Rose and Franklin streets in front of the plant’s century-long former location, found the Type C Series 4 boiler in North Carolina and arranged to have it trucked back to Kewanee earlier this month. The 4,000-pounder, intact and with little or no rust, was in a storage lot at the Blizzard Construction Co., in Beulaville, N.C.
Mikenas has been looking for old Kewanee boilers (that people would part with) since last summer after an Alabama firm announced plans to build a solar farm on the 33-acre plant site with the goal of restoring them and placing them on display on an adjacent piece of vacant property as part of the memorial to the thousands of men who built boilers in Kewanee.
Mikenas finally found the Type C in North Carolina and contacted the owner of the construction company, Sam Blizzard. Blizzard salvaged the boiler from the former North Carolina National Guard Armory in Wilmington, about 60 miles south of Beulaville.
In 2018, Blizzard was involved in demolition of the building to make way for a new National Guard Readiness Center and saved the boiler.
“He said he had thought about taking off the two doors, with the Kewanee lettering on them and scrapping the rest but hadn’t gotten it done for the past five years. If we hadn’t taken it off his hands, it probably would have been cut up for scrap,” Mikenas said. He said he believed the building which the boiler serviced, located near an airport, was constructed in the ‘50s by the Air Force and later turned over to the National Guard.
Getting a two-ton steel boiler from Buelaville to Kewanee was no small task. Mikenas sought bids online and found the best offer from Anthony Edwards of On-The-Go Transportation, which happened to be just 30 miles from Belleville. Edwards business is moving things. He loaded the boiler on a long flatbed trailer on Nov. 13 and headed for Kewanee, a journey of over 980 miles.
The trip took two days and Edwards sent a quick text along the way, “All’s well. Boiler handling the journey with pride and a lot of heads turning and questions being asked at every stop…I think it’s loving the attention.” The traveling boiler arrived in Kewanee late in the day on Nov.15 where Joe Chamberlain, of J & D Tree Service was ready to unload it at his building on Third Street where it is temporarily stored. The boiler will soon be moved to Midwest Trailer Manufacturing (MTM) on Kentville Road where it will be sandblasted and repainted. Mikenas said they plan to paint it the familiar orange color most associated with Kewanee boilers over the years. It will then be stored until a place for it is ready in the memorial.
Mikenas said the boiler has a Kewanee-Ross Boiler Corporation tag which provides a general idea of when it was built.
According to the Star Courier archives, the Kewanee Boiler Corp. was combined with Ross Heater & Mfg. Co., of Buffalo, N.Y., in 1952 to form the Kewanee-Ross Corp., which would operate as a subsidiary of their parent company, American Radiator & Standard Sanitary, which later became American-Standard.
Ross would continue to make heat exchangers, surface condensers, and allied equipment in Buffalo while Kewanee would continue to manufacture steel heating and power boilers here. In 1955, American Radiator dissolved the coupled Kewanee-Ross name with each company continuing to make their respective products under their own names.
In 1959, however, the powers that be decided to form the American-Standard Industrial Division through the combination of three separate divisions, American Blower Corp., which made industrial fans in Dearborn, Mich., Kewanee Boiler and Ross Heat Exchangers. It appears that the Kewanee-Ross name only appeared between 1952 and 1955, which means that might be when this boiler was built. The front doors bear the name “Kewanee Boiler Corporation — Kewanee, Ill.”
According to a post on the homecoming journey on the KPS Facebook page, funding is still being sought to continue creating the memorial.
“Although some money has been raised, KPS wants to move forward with further development of the site since fire destroyed the administration building a couple of weeks ago. We need your help. KPS is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization run by community volunteers. Please consider donating this holiday season.”
Donations, which are tax deductible, may be sent to Kewanee Preservation Society, c/o Kewanee Chamber of Commerce, 113 E. Second St., Kewanee, Ill., 61443. Note “Boiler Memorial” on your check. KPS hopes surviving former Boiler Makers, their families and descendants around the country and beyond will respond to help make the memorial a reality.
