Foote Foundry rings a bell in Fredericktown

FREDERICKTOWN — One of Knox County’s longest-running industrial businesses was known for much of its life as the Foote Foundry.

The company got its start in 1851 when it was founded by L.D. Rankin on the square in Fredericktown. 

The foundry cast bells, an item of an importance hard to grasp today. With our instant electronic communication everywhere, we can forget that in the not-so-distant past, the only easily accessible form of communication to cover a large area was sound.

Loud sound, specifically.

In the 1800s, no farm would be without a bell to summon farm hands and family members for meals or emergencies, and churches within towns could both call citizens to worship or gather for emergencies with bells placed high in steeples for maximum broadcast range. 

Rankin’s foundry provided bells for this purpose to local clients.

Unfortunately, Rankin passed away in 1867, and the foundry’s future was in question until it was sold to Will Cummings. He renamed it the Fredericktown Bell Company, and it ran under that name for two decades until Cummings sold it to James Bedell Foote in the 1880s.

As Foote Foundry, the business took on new vitality when a traveling salesman was added to the staff. Myron T. Herrick traveled far and wide promoting Foote’s bells, resulting in orders from all over Ohio, then all over the United States, and ultimately, from several foreign countries.

Foote sold the operation in 1913 to Ralph Struble and Frank Zeig, who kept an eye on changing technology, recognizing that increased use of telegraph and the newer telephone technologies were making bells less important to communities. 

They began diversifying the foundry’s products, adding cement mixers and playground equipment.

Guy Fearn bought the foundry in 1930 and began making products available through the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. After Fearn died in 1940, his wife Goldye kept the business running with help of operations manager C.R. Ruggles.

Later, owners modernized operations after bells were dropped due to low demand. The foundry finally closed in 2014.

Though some of the Foote Foundry’s bells are still around, there aren’t as many as one might think.

During both World War I and World War II, massive scrap metal drives were held to recycle available metal for the war efforts.

Many old bells were melted down during these drives and used to manufacture ammunition, artillery shells, vehicles, army tanks, cannon, ships, and more.

While the finished products of the company were gleaming, the actual work to cast these bells and other products from molten metal was dirty and dangerous.

Numerous commenters on the Knox Time Facebook group where this picture was hosted pointed out that while foundry jobs were perceived as a desirable one, the work took its toll on long-time workers, who often suffered from such issues chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, and lung cancer.

Inhaling fumes from molten metal, especially at a time when most people smoked, was highly destructive to people’s lungs. Yes, in many ways the industrial economy was “the good old days” financially, but it came at a steep cost.

Metal manufacturing in the US is today much safer, but one wonders how much safety is actually being applied in the overseas markets that today do much of the world’s metal manufacturing.

The photo from Knox Time only has identification as circa 1900. No names are known for the workers shown. This was during the height of the foundry’s bell making capabilities.

In 1911, the company published a 19-page brochure detailing their bell offerings, and how to install and care for their bells.

Less than a century later, bells would be dropped entirely from the foundry’s product lines.