In 1907, the F.H. Smith Lumber Co.’s trustees sold the property at the northeast corner of North Broadway and Warren Street to the Kingman Plow Company of Peoria for $18,000. Recently relocated from East St. Louis, the new Kingman St. Louis Implement Company, was part of a wave of new factories that had relocated to the area due to new rail connections thanks to the Southern Rail Terminal around and after 1906. A branch opened in Texas at the same time.
The company was founded by Martin Kingman, a Civil War veteran.
The building cost $85,000 and was designed by local architect Albert B. Groves and has dimensions of 80 x 150 feet. The general contractor was the William M. Southerland Building and Construction Company.
Kingman was eventually acquired in 1917 by LeTourneau, that other great Peoria industrial institution that we looked at back in December of 2021.
A little further south on North Broadway is a building that somehow I’ve always missed, but that also has an interesting pedigree.
Built in 1904 at the price of $400,000, this was the second of two John Deere factories on the block surrounded by North Broadway, Clinton, North Second and Monroe. (It seems that farm implements were a common commodity stored and manufactured in this area.)
Interestingly, we have a photo of what the area looked like before the heavy industry moved in; like most of the city east of Broadway, it was at least partially residential, though perhaps today 99% of it is now gone.
Amazingly, John Deere had roots going back to 1874 in St. Louis but under the name of Mansur and Tebbetts, which was a branch of the much more famous company. Eventually, the other name was discarded and John Deere was used exclusively. The original factory shown in the newspaper photo above, on the same block as the one shown in my photographs, is actually still standing but has a date of unknown construction. It is surely from the Nineteenth Century and judging from the color of its brick, might have used imported building materials outside of St. Louis.