For generations they made something that carried the name of their city around the world. From the Eiffel Tower to the Statue of Liberty and in thousands or homes, hotels, hospitals and military installations around the world, if you needed to heat something with a boiler, you called the Kewanee Boiler Company in a bustling midwestern town where it got its name, Kewanee, Illinois.
It has been more than 20 years since the sprawling plant operated on Kewanee’s west side where riveters, welders, assemblers and others, turned out fire tube boilers with the Kewanee name and the company’s orange and black “Circle K” logo on the side. As time passes, however, fewer and fewer people remember those days. While the Kewanee High School teams are called the Kewanee Boilermakers, how many of today’s students, let alone anyone who was born or came to Kewanee after 2002, when the plant closed its doors, know what a boiler maker is or what they did?
Kewanee Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Mark Mikenas, under the flag of the Kewanee Preservation Society, a non-profit organization established to preserve Kewanee’s history, of which he is president, wants to change that and has a plan to convert a vacant, triangle-shaped parking lot adjacent to the plant site, into a memorial to the workers who, for generations built the boilers sold around the world.
While there are still quite a few present-day Kewanee residents who worked in the shop or office at Kewanee Boiler, and many who had a member of their family who worked there over the years, Mikenas has no personal connection to Kewanee Boiler. But he grew up a few blocks from the plant and vividly remembers shop workers walking past his house, lunch pails in hand, to and from their jobs at the Boiler shop.
He also remembers the whistle which blew so loud it could be heard across town, signaling the beginning and end of the workday. He thinks those people — the men who built the boilers with the sweat of their brow and strength of their hands and backs — should not be forgotten.
To that end, he has been working on a plan to transform the lot once used for employee and visitor parking across the tracks from the office building, into the Kewanee Boiler Workers Memorial.
The project, or some forms of it, has been on Mikenas’ mind since the plant was shuttered two decades ago. A longtime collector of Kewanee Boiler memorabilia, in 2013 Mikenas, with the help of retired Ratliff’s employee, the late Bob Neirynck and others, moved the towering, 105-foot flagpole from the plant site where it stood for over 100 years, to the southwest corner of Berrien Park, where it stands today under the care of the Kewanee Preservation Society.
Mikenas has enlisted the help of local welder Mark Washburn to build a new flagpole for the memorial that will be 35 feet high, one-third the height of the original pole, and placed on the east side of the triangle, so that someone driving north on Franklin Street, south of Rose, would see the new pole in line with the location of its predecessor to the north. It would fly both the American and Kewanee Boiler “Circle K” flags.
A few years ago, again with Neirynck’s help, Mikenas obtained an 8-by 50-foot sign, long hidden under layers of siding and more recent signage, from the south wall of the main building just before it was torn down by a salvager who had purchased the property. The sign, which reads “Kewanee Boiler Corporation,” in stylized lettering, “Home of Kewanee Boilers,” was taken down in five-foot panels which Mikenas has stored on his “ranch” north of town. Mikenas would like to restore the sign and make it part of the memorial.
Beyond the symbolic flagpole and sign, Mikenas’ main goal is to tell those who pass by what Kewanee Boilers were and, more importantly, to honor those who made them for more than 130 years. He would like to see a weatherproof display of some kind that would tell the history of the company and its impact on the community, the nation, and the world. He also hopes to restore several actual Kewanee Boilers which would be displayed in the memorial, and has already acquired one which is being refurbished.
To top off the memorial, Mikenas would like to save the arched entryway on the front of the office building and have it moved across the tracks to the memorial. He said masonry contractors have examined the brick and concrete archway and found it to be solid.
Mikenas said the current owner of the property has given KPS “thousands” of paving bricks, gathered, stacked on pallets and left behind by salvagers, which can be used in creation of the memorial, most notably for walkways. Landscape designer Kathryn Dieter Newman, a Kewanee native, is working on a plan for the memorial.
So, how much will all of this cost and where will the money come from?
The project, he said, is estimated to cost around $100,000, with an estimated $70,000 of that amount needed to move the archway.
The Kewanee Preservation Society was formed in 2015 as a non-profit, 501c3 organization for the purpose of restoring the log cabin built in 1837 on the south edge of Kewanee by Abner Little. His great-grandson, Lou Little, made a substantial donation to KPS to do the work. Mikenas said the Kewanee Boiler Workers Memorial project has no “sugar daddy,” like the late Mr. Little, to fund the project, but anything is possible.
Mikenas has pooled some funds from various sources to get the project started this summer and is sending letters to former owners, including Burnham Industries, which owned the company from 1991 to 2002, and others who might be interested, but said if any of it is going to happen, people, including major donors, will have to step forward and contribute. He is hoping he can count on people who had a relative who worked at Boiler and would like to see what they did remembered.
Donations, which are tax deductible, can be sent to the Chamber office at 113 E. Second St., Kewanee, Ill., 61443. Checks should be made out to Kewanee Preservation Society and designated for the “Kewanee Boiler Memorial.”
