Dayton Malleable Iron Company Records

Dayton Malleable Inc. was established in 1866 as The Dayton Malleable Iron Company by Charles Newbold and Peter Loeb. It became a corporation in 1869. The Dayton Malleable Iron Company has been credited (History of Dayton 1889) as being the second oldest such malleable iron foundry west of the Allegheny Mountains, the first having been established in Cleveland, Ohio, just a few years earlier in 1865. The foundry made iron castings for saddles, carriages, wagons, and later automobiles.

The original Dayton Malleable Iron plant was located on East Third Street in Dayton opposite Gebhart's flour mill, and in 1872 operations were moved to a much larger property on West Third Street, in an area then known as Miami City, between Summit Street and Dale Avenue. More specifically, the address was 1307-1327 West Third Street, next to the railroad tracks. (This was on the north side of West Third Street, between Summit and Dale. Summit was later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar Street, and Dale became North Conover.) The larger facility allowed the firm to handle increased trade. According to historian A. W. Drury, the plant employed approximately 1500 men in 1909. At that time it was one of the top ranked malleable iron firms in the United States and perhaps the world.

Much later, in 1958, the corporate offices were moved to 3931 S. Dixie Drive in Kettering, Ohio.

The first officers of the company were Edwin A. Parrott, president; his brother Henry Eugene Parrott, secretary/treasurer; and Peter Loeb as superintendent. Other early leaders of the company included Thomas P. Gaddis, Robert C. Schenck Jr., Charles A. Phillips, E. Fowler Stoddard, John W. Stoddard, Samuel W. Davies, J. Sprigg McMahon, and others.

During the time period documented by the majority of the records in this collection, the company's presidents/ general managers were as follows (according to Dayton city directories, approximate date spans in parentheses): Robert C. Schenck Jr. (1890-1902), William B. Earnshaw (1903-1906), Pierce D. Schenck (1907-1914), John C. Haswell (1915-1936), William B. Runyan (1937-1942), Anthony Haswell (1944-1950+).

In addition to the main plant on West Third Street in Dayton, Dayton Malleable eventually acquired a number of other plants, companies, and divisions elsewhere in Ohio and the United States. Many of these were acquired in the 1950s or later, but ones relevant to the span of this collection include the Ironton Division in Ironton, Ohio, purchased by DMI in 1916; the G.H.R. Division, discussed in greater detail below; and the Pratt and Letchworth Division in Buffalo, New York, purchased in 1923 and became a full division in 1953.

The G.H.R. Foundry Division of Dayton Malleable originally began in 1920, when the Gartland-Haswell-Rentschler Foundry Company (Matt Garland, John C. Haswell, and Gordon S. Rentschler) purchased from Platt Iron Works the site on the north side of the Mad River between Webster and Keowee Streets. In 1930, the name of the company was officially changed to "G.H.R. Foundry Company," with Dayton Malleable as a major stockholder. G.H.R. became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dayton Malleable in 1935 and was ultimately folded in as a division in 1943.

Another point of interest in the history of Dayton Malleable relates to Jacob Moskowitz and the Dayton Hungarian community. Moskowitz is better known in Dayton history for helping to recruit Hungarian immigrants to live in Kossuth Colony and work for the Barney and Smith Car Company beginning in 1906. However, about 1898, he answered a Toledo newspaper advertisement for a job with Dayton Malleable as a foreign-labor contractor. Moskowitz was hired and was instrumental in hiring 700 immigrants (mainly Hungarian) as mechanics and unskilled laborers for Dayton Malleable, as well as constructing onstructed homes and shops nearby for the workers, an area referred to as the West Side Colony.

Dayton Malleable Inc. later went through a restructuring in the 1980s and became known as Amcast at that time. Amcast filed for bankruptcy in 2004.