Shortly after the Civil War, Raymond Wickwire helped his son, Chester, start a grocery store on Main Street in Cortland. After his father’s death, Chester turned the grocery store business into a hardware store instead, and ran that store with the help of his brother, Chauncey. Unfortunately, Chauncey also passed away, and so his other brother, Theodore, joined him to help run the business, and that is when the company became known as The Wickwire Brothers.

As with most country storekeepers, Chester allowed customers to trade their goods for his products. One such payment would change his life forever.  In 1873, Chester acquired a carpet loom from a customer named Rowland Hall. Chester tinkered with the loom, and realized he could make it weave wire instead. This realization was the beginning of a very prosperous era for Chester and his family, and for Cortland, NY as well. 

By 1876, Chester went solely into wire-weaving. The brothers expanded operations until they had doubled their manufacturing capacity, and in 1881, they built and moved into a large factory site on South Main Street. Between 1879 and 1915, the company built at least 11 additions to the Wire Works.

The factory resembled many late 19th Century industrial plants, with its undecorated brick walls, plain board floors, exposed leather belts overhead, constant motion from the looms, and unending noise. The factory also had a permanent odor. The Cortland Democrat reports an incident in 1885 when a female book agent entered the factory to sell her wares and fainted from the smell of the “swill” used to soften wires.

Employees performed their work in a production-line style. Weavers tended to looms. Annealers treated finished wire with protective coatings by dipping it in large vats. Other employees transported materials to workers and carried bolts of woven wire to loading docks. Wire Drawers pulled metal rods through a tapered hole in a die. Successive drawings through smaller dies created wire of finer diameters. Foremen and managers kept the process going.

The factory saw seven industrial accidents between 1887 and 1897. In February 1888, a 14 year-old boy running a planer at the nearby Cortland Door and Window Screen Co. lost his toes and part of his foot. In April 1888, John Grant had his fingers mangled in the gears of a loom at the plant.

Indeed, Chester’s factory workers encountered high risk, but their hard work made rural America thrive.