Jacob Johann Vollrath

The firm’s headquarters remain at 1236 North 18th Street, generations after a Rhineland iron molder decided kitchenware, not plumbing, would be his second act in Wisconsin.

He learned to cast iron in Dörrebach in the Rhineland, crossed the Atlantic in the 1840s, and settled in Sheboygan in 1853. In 1873 he transferred the Union Steel and Iron Foundry at Ninth and St. Clair to son-in-law John Michael Kohler, who had married his daughter Lillie—sale or gift, the surviving paper trail never settles. Then he started over. The Sheboygan Cast Steel Company, founded in 1874, poured railroad frogs, furniture castings, and ranges before enamel became the bet. Son Andrew traveled to Germany twice to learn the process, failed at home, returned abroad, and came back again. Limited enamelware production began in 1876. By 1881 the works employed about forty men, did roughly $50,000 a year, and occupied a new plant on North 18th Street that is still Vollrath’s front door. He claimed gray enameling—a method, not a color—as his contribution.

Family ties tangled the city’s two hardware fortunes. After Lillie died in 1883, Kohler married her sister Minnie, making Vollrath father-in-law twice. Kohler’s plumbing empire grew into a company town west of Sheboygan; Vollrath’s pots and pans stayed in the city. He died in Sheboygan on May 15, 1898. The company he restarted still lists a global footprint of facilities on three continents from that same North 18th Street address.