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When brothers Jesse Cyrus and Enoch Lester Williams fashioned their first Marshalltown trowel for the contractor building the Marshall County Courthouse in 1890, word spread quickly that the two men were onto something.
Nearly 100 years later, Marshalltown Trowel Co. produces some 4 million trowels and related hand tools annually and employs 210 people. With its headquarters in Marshalltown and additional manufacturing and shipping plants in Fayetteville, Ark., the company is one of the world's leading manufacturers of trowels for cement, brick, drywall and plaster finishing work.
Marshalltown trowels and related tools are available in more than 50,000 retail outlets worldwide. Although their final destinations are difficult to trace, Marshalltown trowels have been used in many major building and renovation projects during the last 75 years.
During World War I, American soldiers stationed in France reported that masons building the great Pershing Stadium near Paris used Marshalltown trowels. The Iowa company's trowels also were used in the recent renovation of the Statue of Liberty, as well as in the construction of Hoover Dam and the building of the Alaskan pipeline. The pointing trowel, also a product of the Marshalltown-based company, is used extensively by archeologists throughout the world.
The Williams brothers first worked with David Lennox, a Marshalltown businessman and inventor who eventually founded Lennox Industries, the world's largest manufacturer of residential heating and cooling systems. But their real success came when they opened a small machine shop on South First Avenue in Marshalltown and began producing plaster finishing trowels.
John Stine, a Marshalltown mason, ordered some trowels and suggested several improvements to the design the two men were using. The Williams' created a trowel that suited Stine and produced a...