Independent Steel Company

Independent Steel Company was incorporated in Kenova in July 1909 with $2 million in capital stock, backed by Arthur Hirsh of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, along with H.T. Lovett, M.P. Wiswell, John S. Shepherd, and E.M. Williams of Huntington. ⁸ At its peak, the company employed 500 workers, but it struggled with insufficient working capital and entered receivership in February 1911 due to insolvency. ¹⁰ On March 10, 1911, Federal Judge Dayton, presiding over a special session of the U.S. Court in Charleston, ordered the company closed, with the exception of its spring manufacturing shop, which was permitted to continue operating. ⁹

In July 1915, the Kenova Mine Car Company purchased the former 20-acre plant of the Independent Steel Company of America (also known as the Independent Bridge Company), including its power plant, though the machinery inside was slated for disposal; the company subsequently applied for a charter. ^{5 6} A separate portion of the former steel plant site was sold to the Jeffery-Dewitt Insulator Company.

In July 1917, the Kenova Mine Car Company merged with the Fulton Pit Car & Manufacturing Company of Fulton Canal, Ohio, forming the Fulton Kenova Mine Car Company, which manufactured a full line of mine cars, including a five-ton wooden car and a two-ton all-steel car, along with hitchings, couplers, and bumpers, out of its two factories at Virginia Point in Kenova and Fulton Canal, Ohio. ^{2 3 4}

Following financial and legal restructuring around 1927, prompted by the case Finefrock v. Kenova Mine Car Co., the company’s Kenova-based assets and liabilities were assumed by the Kenova Mine Car Company. ¹ That same month, in March 1927, the Champion Switch Plant Company relocated from Buffalo, New York, to the former Kenova Mine Car Company site. ⁷

The roots of the Jeffery-Dewitt Insulator Company trace back to 1908, when Dr. Joseph A. Jeffery (a dentist), his brother Benjamin A. Jeffery, a machinist, and Benjamin’s brother-in-law Mortimer C. Dewitt, a grocer, founded the Jeffery-Dewitt Co. in Bordentown, New Jersey, to manufacture Reliance spark plugs, the brothers having filed a spark plug patent in mid-1906 and opened the Reliance Automobile Co. in San Francisco around the same time. ¹³ The company also produced porcelain for sanitary ware, insulators, tumbling jars, and crucibles. In February 1910, the spark plug plant relocated to Detroit, with production beginning that June.

In January 1916, Robert Johnston filed a patent for a thick porcelain suspension insulator and assigned it to Jeffery-Dewitt, though the patent wasn’t granted until February 1920. ¹³ Even during the pending period, orders for thick porcelain insulators exceeded the company’s expectations, more than the original Detroit kiln, designed for spark plug bodies, could handle. In 1915, Champion Spark Plug Co. purchased Jeffery-Dewitt in order to gain Dr. Jeffery’s spark plug porcelain expertise in its competition with rival Champion Ignition Co. (AC), and in early 1916, Champion bought a site along the Ohio River in Kenova to build a dedicated plant for manufacturing thick electrical porcelain insulators.

That plant wasn’t ready until late 1918, and recurring flooding along the Ohio River, a persistent problem throughout the plant’s history, delayed actual production until early 1920, the same year the insulator patent was finally granted. ^{12 13} In the interim, from 1915 to 1920, Jeffery-Dewitt filled orders by contracting the porcelain body work out to other manufacturers, including Pittsburgh High Voltage Insulator Co., Ohio Brass, and Thomas.

The company filed for bankruptcy in November 1921, reorganizing on January 10, 1922, under the name Jeffery-Dewitt Insulator Co. ^{12 13} It continued operating at Kenova from 1921 onward, but faced bankruptcy again in December 1940. ¹² The Line Material division of McGraw Electric subsequently acquired the operation, running it until the Kenova plant was destroyed by fire on October 29, 1952. ¹³

The property was later repurposed by the Kenova Terminal Company for off-loading coal from railcars onto barges and for storage, until newer facilities opened along A Street in Ceredo. Today, the only remnant of the site is a single warehouse.