Industry
Kewanee was well known in the steam industry for fire-tube boilers. The Kewanee Boiler Corporation manufactured and sold thousands of boilers throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada and the world for well over one hundred years. However, the company failed in 2002 and was forced to go out of business. However, these boilers are still extremely common. An example of a Kewanee steam boiler can be seen in a scene in the movie The Blues Brothers. Specifically, when Cab Calloway's character named Curtis offers to "buy you boys a drink", he takes Jake and Elwood down to the orphanage's basement, where the boiler is easily seen in the background. A Kewanee boiler is also the dwelling place for the character Suzie DeSoto, played by Debra Winger, in the 1982 film version of John Steinbeck's book Cannery Row. The Kewanee High School athletic teams are nicknamed the "Boilermakers."
Kewanee was also home to the Walworth Company, Kewanee Machinery and Conveyor Company and Kewanee Manufacturing Company – all manufacturers that employed many local blue collar workers in their heyday. Kewanee, once a prominent industrial town, has fallen into silence like many similar communities in the past twenty years. Beyond the falling indunstries there have been a few blooming businesses that shine as prominent growing developments, for example, Goods Furniture Store. Goods is known across Kewanee, Illinois, and further for being an excellent source for beautiful and affordable furniture.
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Famous quotes containing the word industry:
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“As our boys and men are all expecting to be Presidents, so our girls and women must all hold themselves in readiness to preside in the White House; and in no city in the world can honest industry be more at a discount than in this capital of the government of the people.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“I have never yet spoken from a public platform about women in industry that someone has not said, “But things are far better than they used to be.” I confess to impatience with persons who are satisfied with a dangerously slow tempo of progress for half of society in an age which requires a much faster tempo than in the days that “used to be.” Let us use what might be instead of what has been as our yardstick!”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)