![]() ![]() Walter Kohler instituted a company policy stating that promotions would only be given to American citizens. According to Suellen Hoy’s “ Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness,” Walter Kohler, at the building’s dedication, said that he hoped the name would be “ a factor in inculcating in the men of foreign antecedents, a love for their adopted country.” Kohler, like his workers, lived in Kohler, on a lavish Tudor Revival estate called Riverbend that reportedly cost him, in the early twenties, more than a million dollars to build. The first building in Kohler was called the American Club, and it was decorated with American flags and portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. ![]() ![]() By 1914, Kohler employed more than a thousand workers in its factory, many of them immigrants. Kohler, turned the land into Kohler, Wisconsin, a company village. Kohler died in 1900, but his son, Walter J. The company hit it big with bathtubs, and, in 1899, Kohler bought land west of Sheboygan, which sits an hour up the coast of Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, to situate a new factory. During the financial crisis of 1873, an Austrian immigrant to Wisconsin named John Michael Kohler bought the Sheboygan Union Iron & Steel Foundry from his father-in-law and created the Kohler Company. ![]()
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