Kohler Company

About Kohler Company Main Manufacturing Plant Kohler Wisconsin

Historical Overview of Kohler Company’s Flagship Wisconsin Facility

The Kohler Company was founded in 1873 by Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler. What began as a small iron and steel foundry in Sheboygan, Wisconsin relocated and expanded into an entire planned industrial village — the unincorporated community of Kohler, Wisconsin, approximately four miles west of Sheboygan.

The main manufacturing plant grew through the early and mid-twentieth century, eventually encompassing millions of square feet of industrial floor space dedicated to producing plumbing fixtures, enameled cast-iron products, and industrial machinery components. The Kohler facility is one of Wisconsin’s most historically significant manufacturing campuses — an integrated heavy industrial complex where foundry, finishing, mechanical infrastructure, and power generation all operated under one organizational umbrella, exactly the kind of facility that defined the industrial economy of the upper Midwest throughout the twentieth century.

Major Industrial Operations at the Kohler Main Plant

The Kohler complex historically included operations among the most asbestos-intensive industrial processes identified by occupational health researchers:

• Iron foundry operations, including cupola furnaces for melting pig iron and scrap
• Sand casting and molding departments, where raw castings were formed
• Enamel firing kilns and vitreous coating operations, applying fused enamel to cast-iron bathtubs, sinks, and fixtures
• Steam generation and distribution systems serving the entire campus
• Pipe fitting and mechanical rooms
• Boiler houses and utility infrastructure
• Electrical generation and switching facilities
• Maintenance shops and machine shops

Each of these operational areas has been associated — in litigation and occupational health research — with the presence and disturbance of asbestos-containing materials. Workers in these departments may have been exposed to asbestos-containing insulation, gaskets, packing, refractory materials, and coatings throughout the peak asbestos era, roughly the 1930s through the late 1970s, with potential residual exposures continuing through demolition and renovation work into the 1980s and beyond. The Kohler plant shares this industrial asbestos exposure profile with other major Wisconsin manufacturing facilities of the same era, including the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, the Allis-Chalmers complex in West Allis, the Falk Corporation facility in Milwaukee, and the A.O. Smith plant in Milwaukee — all of which have been the subject of Wisconsin asbestos litigation involving similar exposure pathways and comparable product defendants.

The Industrial Logic Behind Asbestos Adoption

Asbestos is a naturally occurring silicate mineral with extraordinary heat resistance, tensile strength, and chemical stability. These properties made it the industrial material of choice across virtually every heavy industrial sector in twentieth-century America. At a facility like Kohler’s main manufacturing plant — where foundry furnaces and kilns reportedly reached temperatures exceeding 2,500°F, where vast networks of high-pressure steam pipes served the entire complex, and where electrical insulation had to withstand intense thermal stress — asbestos-containing materials were considered standard industrial components.

The industrial logic was straightforward:

• Furnace insulation: Without effective thermal insulation, furnaces hemorrhage energy and are impossible to control
• High-pressure steam systems: Without fireproof gaskets and packing, steam systems fail catastrophically
• Refractory linings: Without heat-resistant refractory materials, cupola furnaces and firing kilns simply cannot operate

Asbestos-containing products addressed all of these needs. Manufacturers including Corporation**, /, and gaskets and packing aggressively marketed these materials to industrial purchasers — including Wisconsin facilities — as economical, durable, and safe, even as internal company records later revealed they privately knew about the deadly health consequences. Wisconsin workers across the industrial corridor stretching from Sheboygan and Kohler through Milwaukee and Racine may have been exposed to products from these same manufacturers throughout the peak asbestos era.

Multiple Concurrent Exposure Pathways

The Kohler facility concentrated asbestos-intensive processes within a single geographic campus. Workers were not exposed to one type of asbestos hazard in isolation. They may have faced multiple simultaneous exposure pathways — across departments, across trades, and across decades.