Jerome Increase Case

He was born in Williamstown, New York, on December 11, 1819, came west with a threshing machine in 1842, founded the works in Rochester, Wisconsin, and moved the plant to Racine in 1844. By the Civil War, with farms short of men and the Union hungry, he was selling more threshers than anyone. In 1863 he organized J.I. Case Company with Massena Erskine, Robert Baker, and brother-in-law Stephen Bull. The town later called itself the Machine Shop of the World; Case was why the phrase did not sound like a joke.

Voters made him mayor in 1856, 1858, and 1860, then sent him to the Wisconsin Senate for 1865–66. In 1865 he watched the 8th Wisconsin come home with Old Abe, the bald eagle of thirty-eight battles, and put the bird on the company trademark. He later bred trotters at Hickory Grove Farm. His favorite, a black gelding named Jay-Eye-See, a pun on the initials, became the first 2:10 miler at Narragansett Park in 1884 after Case bought the youngster from Col. Richard West near Lexington, Kentucky. When the horse died in 1909, the New York Times ran an obituary from Racine.

Case died in Racine on December 22, 1891. There is still a Jay-Eye-See Avenue off Jerome Boulevard, and the lakefront historical marker still calls him inventor, manufacturer, mayor, senator, and a founder of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.