Acme Steel (Chicago, Illinois)

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In 1880, a Shelbyville, Missouri, furniture maker named M. E. McMasters developed a barbed steel staple that he used to join wooden bed rails. The staple was a rigid metal form with teeth cut into it. When hammered into place, it held two pieces of wood securely at a specific angle. In 1882 the business relocated to Quincy, Illinois where the operation was reincorporated as the Quincy Plate and Staple Manufacturing Company. After several years making metal plates and staples of the type invented by M. E. McMasters, the company added a line of new implements to the product line, prompting yet another name change, this time to the Quincy Hardware Manufacturing Company.

In 1889, the enterprise was acquired by the Acme Flexible Clasp Company of Chicago which had been established in 1884 to make hinges and similar devices. Demand for building materials was so strong that by 1904 Acme built a new production facility on South Ashland Avenue. The company’s headquarters were moved to this site from Clark Street, as were other small production shops. Another name change to Acme Steel Goods Company followed in 1907. Frustrated by the quality and quantity of available steel the firm decided to roll its own steel and purchased a 133-acre site on the Little Calumet River at Riverdale, Illinois in 1917. A year later the company built a hoop mill on the site.

In 1926 Acme Steel built a second rolling mill, and three years later added the number three hot mill, both of which were used to produce formed and sheet steel, as opposed to block ingots. The new plants were built at the Riverdale site, which had become the company’s center of production.

During World War II, Acme Steel became deeply involved in war production, turning out a variety of steel products for artillery and mechanized armament manufacturers. In 1947, after the war, Acme acquired the Hoffert Machine Company in Racine, Wisconsin. This brought Acme into a new line of finished products, manufacturing stitching machines for the boxboard and graphic arts industries. Acme made its first international expansion in 1952 when it established a steel strap slitting and painting facility at Scarborough, Ontario.

In 1954 the company added a new building at Riverdale for the production of stitching and strapping tools and machines and other accessories. The company continued its expansion in 1956 by acquiring the Newport Steel Company in Newport, Kentucky, becoming a producer of steel ingots made from scrap steel and pig iron, freeing it from increasingly unstable supply prices. Newport also manufactured hot and cold rolled steel products, silicon and alloy sheets and bars, and electric weld line and conductor pipe, in addition to other steel products.

A year later Acme closed its South Ashland Avenue plant and transferred all production from that facility to Riverdale. In 1959 Acme opened a new steel line at Riverdale using the more efficient, higher quality oxygen converter system. Five years later, in 1964, Acme merged with Cleveland, Ohio based Interlake Iron Corporation a producer of pig iron, coke and ferroalloys with iron mines in Minnesota and Ontario, Canada and facilities in Toledo, Ohio, Wilder, Kentucky and a blast furnace on the Calumet River located 15 miles from Acme's Riverdale plant.

In 1967 the company adopted a plan to diversify through the acquisition of a number of metal fabricating concerns and within 3 years steel sales had dropped to 68% of total revenues. The Toledo operation was closed in 1978, followed two years later by those in Newport and Wilder, Kentucky. By 1986 it was decided to split the company into two parts with the steel assents becoming Acme Steel Company and the other assets becoming Interlake Companies Inc.