The Burlington Soap Company

Several family members, including Glenn William Brumm's wife, Anna Maxine, worked at the Burlington Soap Company. This information from it was found in the book A History of Des Moines County, Iowa, and Its People - Illustrated, Volume II, Augustine M. Antrobus, editor, Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1915; pages 117-118.

The Burlington Soap Company, which is one of the large, productive industries of the city and a factor in its commercial development, was organized in 1905 with T. W. Alexander as the president, Frank Linnell, vice president, William Archer, secretary, and E. F. Holsteen, treasurer. The business is located at Nos. 508-14 North Main street, occupying a three-story building with one hundred and twenty foot frontage and one hundred and seventy feet in depth. In 1906 Mr. Archer sold out to E. F. Holsteen, but otherwise there has been no change in the personnel of this company. Employment is furnished to twenty-six people and there are five traveling salesmen upon the road, covering Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, eastern Nebraska, Indiana and parts of Michigan and Wisconsin.

The company manufactures a full line of toilet and laundry soaps, producing altogether twenty different brands of those soaps, besides special lines for certain customers. They sell largely to the grocery and drug trades and they specialize in French violet and honeysuckle perfumes. Their business is also represented by brokerage firms in California, Alabama and West Virginia, and they are now selling quite extensively over the south. Their plant has a capacity for manufacturing daily soap worth one thousand dollars. It is supplied with new and modern machinery, one kettle alone holding ninety thousand pounds of soap. Steam power is used in the operation of the plant and the business has been most carefully systematized so that there is no useless expenditure of time, labor or material. All work is done with the utmost precision, and the wise management of the house is manifest in its growing success.

Next Document: The United States Navy World War I Records of Harry Christian Brumm
Previous Document: A Biography of Fred Wuellner, 1915