Closing a chapter

DeWITT -- Harriet Petersen Fort and her family devoted much of their lives to building the Petersen Manufacturing Co., and to selling the innovative Vise-Grip invented by her father, Bill Petersen.

Now, more than 80 years after the invention of the locking pliers, the DeWitt plant where it all started is expected to close and Fort, 99, will clean out the family office she has held onto throughout the years.

“I felt it was there forever,” said Fort, who left the business 15 years ago. “It’s like losing my family.

“The plant was my life, next to my family and kids.”

News of the closing came as some surprise to Fort, she said. Just like everyone else, she had heard rumors it might close, but no one ever knew for sure, especially considering the high plant production and comments from Newell-Rubbermaid officials about how the DeWitt plant was a key component to overall operations.

“Everybody has been holding their breath to see what happens,” Fort said Tuesday at her home a few blocks from the factory that still employs about 330 people. “It looked like they couldn’t possibly do away with it.

“They were making millions of tools over there.”

Newell-Rubbermaid bought the plant in 2002 and it has operated under the name of Irwin Industrial Tools, a company American Tool bought in 1993.

Workers got the news Wednesday that the plant will close by the end of October.

“Today is a very difficult day in DeWitt,” Irwin spokesman David Doolittle said Wednesday morning. “It was a hard decision to make. It is no reflection on our employees’ great work.”

Doolittle said the decision stemmed from the realities of an ever-changing global economy and the need for the company to stay competitive.

Irwin will provide 330 employees with supplemental unemployment pay, employment transition services and assistance with working with federal and state agencies.

“We’re going to do everything we can to help our employees land on their feet as quickly as possible,” Doolittle said.

The closing brings an end to an era that started when Bill Petersen patented the tool in 1924, and began production at his blacksmith shop in DeWitt.

Bill Petersen immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1902 and began work as a blacksmith in Minden, Fort said. But his true vision was to become a farmer.

“It became his ambition to own some farmland and make a fortune farming,” she said.

He did buy some land with his brother, Nels, Fort said, but his attempt at farming failed and he returned to blacksmithing in Axtell. At some point, he tried farming again, this time in Arkansas, but turned back to the blacksmith trade and bought a shop in DeWitt. He, his wife, Ane, and their children, Ralph, Christian, Harriet and Richard, made the Saline County town their home.

It was here that Bill Petersen, known for his innovations, developed and patented the Vise-Grip, Fort said.

During the Great Depression, he began to make a go at the business, she said, and sons Ralph and Christian left jobs at a garage in Gary, Ind., to come home and work with their father.

“That was the beginning of the Petersen Manufacturing Company,” Fort said. “It was slow at first, but it was a lot of fun, and they met one challenge after another.”

Fort left her job as a rural school teacher and joined the business to oversee marketing.

She said she worked with different peddlers, often running promotions to entice them to buy the tool and go out and sell it.

In the early days, Fort said, the family used a variety of money-saving practices to keep costs low. For example, they purchased no packaging except cartons for individual wrenches. To mail the tools, they salvaged packing cases from local merchants and cut them down to the size of individual orders, then taped or tied them with twine.

In 1933, DeWitt participated in the New Deal Works Progress Administration, but Petersen’s company paid better than the WPA, so many people came to beg the family for a job, Fort said. Her father, she said, was proud to be able to hire every WPA worker in town.

With two and three generations of families working for the company, Fort said, it became a large family in its own right.

Petersen Manufacturing continued to thrive under the leadership of the Petersen children, who all served as executives, Fort said.

She served as secretary-treasurer of the business and has been honored by the University of Nebraska business college and the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce. During the early years of Petersen Manufacturing, Fort was among few women in executive positions in the state.

In 1985, the Petersen family sold to American Tool Company Inc., which acquired Irwin Tool in 1993. In 2002, Newell-Rubbermaid bought Irwin Tool.

It will be hard to watch the factory close, Fort said.

And it will be hard to clean out her office.

“That’s when the reality will really set in, when I clean my office out.”