How Rockford Became the Screw City

Of all the nicknames Rockford has accumulated over the years, none has quite the personality of Screw City.

It sounds like a joke now. It wasn't.

For much of the twentieth century, Rockford was one of America's great manufacturing centers for screws, bolts, nuts, fasteners and the machinery used to make them. The industry became so important here that Rockford eventually proclaimed itself the “Screw Capital of the World.”

But the story of Screw City actually begins with something completely different: furniture.

From Furniture City to Screw City

Beginning in the nineteenth century, large numbers of Swedish immigrants settled in Rockford, many bringing woodworking and metalworking skills with them. Those craftsmen helped turn Rockford into one of the country's leading furniture-manufacturing centers.

By the 1880s, Rockford had become a major furniture producer.

And furniture factories needed things.

Hinges. Locks. Cabinet hardware. Nails. Screws.

Instead of importing everything from somewhere else, Rockford entrepreneurs increasingly began making those things here.

That helped create an industrial ecosystem in which one Rockford factory supplied another. Furniture manufacturing encouraged hardware manufacturing. Hardware manufacturing encouraged metalworking. Metalworking encouraged machine-tool manufacturing.

The city became very good at making things that made other things.

National Lock and the Rise of Fasteners

One important step came with the development of National Lock Company in the early twentieth century.

National Lock manufactured locks, hinges and other hardware and eventually became one of Rockford's major employers. By 1950, the company employed more than 2,000 people.

Then came companies devoted even more directly to fasteners.

Rockford Screw Products was organized around 1930 by former National Lock associates. It began modestly, reportedly with just 15 customers, but expanded rapidly as it developed specialized screws and fasteners for industries such as automobile manufacturing.

Rockford was no longer simply making screws for furniture.

It was making fasteners for America.

Then Came the War

World War II transformed Rockford manufacturing.

The enormous demand for aircraft, tanks, vehicles, weapons and machinery created an equally enormous demand for the humble pieces holding all those machines together.

Screws.

Bolts.

Fasteners.

Rockford already possessed the factories, machine tools, skilled machinists and industrial knowledge to produce them.

Companies such as Camcar and Rockford Screw Products became important parts of wartime manufacturing. Rockford Screw Products became a major producer of aircraft bolts, while the city's larger network of machine shops and manufacturers supplied components needed throughout American industry.

By the 1940s, Rockford was being called the Screw Capital of the World.

For once, civic boasting wasn't much of an exaggeration.

Billions of Them

After the war, Rockford's fastener industry didn't disappear.

America entered a massive period of automobile production, housing construction and industrial expansion. All of it required hardware.

Rockford factories responded by producing screws, nuts, bolts and specialized fasteners by the millions—and eventually billions—for manufacturers around the country and the world.

By mid-century, manufacturing dominated the local economy. Generations of Rockford families went to work in factories producing machine tools, automotive components, cabinet hardware, aircraft parts and fasteners.

The city's identity became inseparable from manufacturing.

Screw City stuck.

More Than a Funny Nickname

Beginning in the 1970s and especially during the industrial upheavals of the 1980s, Rockford lost a substantial portion of the manufacturing economy that had created Screw City.

Factories closed. Companies moved. Employment declined.

But the nickname survived.

And perhaps that's because Screw City came to mean something slightly larger than screws.

It describes the Rockford that knew how to make things.

The city of machinists, toolmakers, engineers, factory workers and small manufacturers. A place where one company made furniture, another made the hardware for the furniture, another built the machines that made the hardware, and somebody down the street figured out how to make all of it faster.

Today you can still find Screw City on shirts, sports uniforms, businesses and signs around Rockford.

Sometimes it's used affectionately. Sometimes ironically. And occasionally someone unfamiliar with Rockford hears it and wonders exactly what kind of town they've wandered into.

But the explanation is wonderfully straightforward.

For decades, if something somewhere in America needed to be held together, there was a pretty good chance Rockford made the thing that held it together.

That's why we're the Screw City.