THE TOOL DEPOT

Building Maintenance > Building Equipment and Tools

It all began over 110 years ago.The Faith Company christened its branch office in Sioux City, Iowa and that’s when The Sioux City Iron Company got its start. The year was 1892. Faith sold horseshoe nails, coal, hand tools, hardware for horse carriages and much more.
There was a something happening in our country at that time. It was an exciting period for those pioneers that were forging the future. Terrific growth was taking place.
While The Sioux City Iron Company began as a simple supply house for blacksmiths for a central source of supplies for the implements dealer and garageman, we were poised to become a trusted partner in the building of a region … like many others we helped in the growth of a nation.
We started with 40 people in our shop and 10 men on the road. Our roadmen covered northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota, all of South Dakota, up into Wyoming and the north half of Nebraska. The life of a pre-turn-of-the-century salesman was a difficult one.

According to historian Walter Friedman, “For the average salesman, used to traveling more or less on his own (and at that time, almost all were male), this meant a number of changes. His routes were planned, his customers evaluated before his departure, and he recorded his every move in sales reports and receipts. Sales managers assigned salesmen specific territories and gave them monthly or weekly quotas to meet. They aimed to make salesmanship uniform and predictable, and capable of being taught to new recruits. They often even instructed salesmen how to stand while talking with a customer, or how to hand over the pen at "closing."

Back then, business was mostly done by rail. Salesmen journeyed throughout Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota – even as far as Wyoming – to bring high-quality products to extreme rural north-Midwest America. Once an order was approved, in stepped the U.S. Postal Service. The early business partnered with the most expedient governmental agency of the time to ensure that what the client ordered was received quickly and without problems.
Flash forward to 1910. Following the lead of such respected retailers as Sears and Montgomery Ward’s, we developed a printed catalog. It was not one of the first “tool catalogs.” That came many years earlier by Brunner & Lay, who developed a catalog for “Manufacturers of Marble, Stone, Granite and Bricklayers’ Tools, Stone Jacks, Derricks, and Contractors’ Supplies” in the early 1800’s.
But, our “tool catalog” was just a year after Stanley Rule & Level Co. first released its 1909 “Carpenters & Mechanics Tools: No. 102” order book.

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