The Screw Capital of the World: Rockford's Machine-Tool Century

There is a phrase associated with Rockford that its residents have spent decades deciding how to feel about. The city once called itself the Screw Capital of the World. The name was not ironic. It was a boast.

The story of how Rockford became a manufacturing powerhouse begins with the furniture industry and the tool-making businesses that grew up alongside it. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Swedish craftsmen filled Rockford's furniture factories, and the city's machine shops grew up alongside them. Those shops, supplied with skilled immigrant labor and constantly competing to improve their equipment, became some of the best precision manufacturers in the country.

By the time the First World War created enormous demand for heavy machinery, Rockford's modest machine-tool start-ups had grown into major industrial operations. On the eve of the Depression, Rockford was one of the nation's leading machine-tool centers, in the company of Cleveland and Cincinnati.

The fastener industry followed the same arc. Rockford screws and bolts found a huge new market in the postwar housing boom of the nineteen forties and fifties. The city gave itself the nickname and meant it. Fastener manufacture expanded to fill the demand for war-time machinery and then the suburban construction wave that followed.

By the second half of the twentieth century both the furniture and the machine-tool industries were in serious decline, unable to compete with lower-cost production elsewhere. The deindustrialization that reshaped much of the Midwest hit Rockford with particular force. But for most of a hundred years this city built things that were used to build other things, and it was very good at it.