Asbestos Textile Company, Inc.

The Asbestos Textile Company was an asbestos textile and brake lining maker organized in 1915 with offices in New York City, with mills first at Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, and then at North Brookfield, Massachusetts. It sold asbestos yarn, cloth, packings, gaskets and Aztec brake lining, and in 1932 it was bought by Thomas L. Gatke and run alongside his Gatke Corporation of Chicago. Our library does not record when it stopped making asbestos products or what became of it.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History

In April 1920 the trade journal Asbestos printed a short biography of the company's president, Arnold W. Koehler. It says he had run his family's New York brewery, sold his interest in it in 1914, and early in 1915 organized the Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., with its factory at Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, and offices in the Woolworth Building in New York City. The article says the company grew so quickly that in 1919 it bought a plant at North Brookfield, Massachusetts, with about four times the capacity of the Reynoldsville plant, though the new plant was not yet running.¹

The company's full-page advertisements in Asbestos from 1919 through early 1921 list its mills at Reynoldsville and its products as asbestos fibre, wick, rope, yarn, tape, plain and metallic cloth, bushings, sheet packing, theatre curtains, gloves, clothing, listing, gaskets and packing.³ In 1921 the advertisements began to name North Brookfield, at first beside Reynoldsville and from May 1921 alone.⁷ In October 1921 the magazine described the company's plant as having been moved from Reynoldsville to North Brookfield.² The general offices moved from the Woolworth Building to 18 East 41st Street by June 1921, to 475 Fifth Avenue in May 1926, and to 369 Lexington Avenue in early 1931.⁷⁸⁹

Asbestos reported on the company regularly through the 1920s. It named A. J. Bromberg as sales manager in 1920 and as secretary in 1925, and Koehler as president through 1930.¹⁰¹¹¹² Koehler served as a vice president of an industry trade association in the mid-1920s, and in 1929 the magazine said he was in Europe doing contact work for the Asbestos Brake Lining Association.¹² In July 1928 the magazine reported that Oscar W. Trumbull had been put in charge of production and that the company reported a 38 percent sales increase for 1928.¹² In December 1928 it wrote that many departments were running day and night.¹²

In June 1932 Asbestos reported that Thomas L. Gatke of Chicago had bought the Asbestos Textile Company at North Brookfield with all its other assets. A new Massachusetts corporation, Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., was formed, "entirely owned by Mr. Gatke," with the same officers as the Gatke Corporation. Trumbull was to run manufacturing at North Brookfield, and sales and purchasing moved to Gatke's general offices in Chicago.⁵ Trumbull left in October 1936 to join the Crane Packing Company.¹³ In February 1964 the magazine reported that Frank T. Gatke had been elected president of both Asbestos Textile Company, Inc. and the Gatke Corporation, succeeding the late Thomas Gatke, and mentioned the companies' factories at North Brookfield, Massachusetts, and Warsaw, Indiana.¹⁴

Asbestos products

Besides textiles, the company made brake lining. In April 1923 Asbestos reported that "Aztec" was the new brand name the company had adopted for its brake lining.¹⁵ In December 1928 the magazine said the company had offered Aztec Moulded Asbestos Brake Lining to the trade on November 15.¹² In 1923 and 1924 the company's advertisements described it as a maker of compressed sheet packing, high-pressure and valve stem packings, metallic sheet packing, gaskets, yarns, cloth, tape and brake lining for asbestos and rubber packing companies.¹⁶ Our library holds an Aztec brake lining catalog cover marked "Made of Asbestos" and an advertisement for Aztec asbestos products that includes Metallobestos plastic pump packing.⁴¹⁷

What the documents show

The Saranac dust experiments. The company was among the asbestos textile makers that paid for Dr. Leroy Gardner's dust experiments at the Saranac Laboratory. On April 18, 1946, T. L. Gatke, as president of Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., wrote to Vandiver Brown of Johns-Manville that the group had still not received Gardner's final report.⁶ Gatke wrote that a Mr. Bowditch, with whom he had discussed the tests, had suggested Gardner might be reluctant, "as a scientist," to say what his preliminary report had indicated, "that the invisible dust was not injurious." Gatke proposed that Gardner could state that the tests over five or six years "gave no evidence of permanent injury, or words to that effect." He wrote that such a report would help offset "the damaging effects" of doctors' "unsupported statements" that invisible dust caused asbestosis, and that publicity would help the company hire at North Brookfield, where "new help we would like to obtain is sometimes influenced by fear of dust promoted by our neighboring manufacturers."⁶ He also recalled "an objectional statement wherein Dr. Gardner referred to the possibility of cancer," which he thought "rather far-fetched" and with "no place in Dr. Gardner's final report."⁶ Johns-Manville's own chronology describes the letter as concerning whether Gardner would state that invisible dust is not injurious, to dispel new workers' fear of dust.⁶ Two later letters from Gatke on the same report, written on Gatke Corporation letterhead in August 1946 and September 1948, are also in the library.¹⁸¹⁹

The Asbestos Textile Institute. The company was represented by Thomas L. Gatke at the November 1944 organization meeting of the Asbestos Textile Institute, and it was among the companies that voted for the institute's constitution.²⁰ Asbestos listed it among the institute's founding members in May 1945.²¹ By the mid-1950s it appears to have left: in December 1955 the institute's Air Hygiene Committee suggested asking the company about its use of oil sprays, and in March 1956 the Board of Governors minutes record that Frank Gatke of the company had attended the committee's meeting and asked about "the possibility of rejoining" the institute.²²²³ The same board meeting agreed to engage the Industrial Air Hygiene Foundation (as the minutes name it) for a preliminary survey of the relationship between asbestosis and cancer, and to invite Garlock Packing Company and Asbestos Textile Company to take part.²³

End of the company

Our library does not show when the Asbestos Textile Company stopped making asbestos products, whether it was merged into the Gatke Corporation, or whether any asbestos trust pays claims for its products. We found no court decision in our case library that names it; two 2003 decisions name the Gatke Corporation.²⁴ One of them, Chavers v. Gatke Corp., describes Gatke as "a dissolved, bankrupt company that had in the past manufactured automotive brakes and clutches"; neither mentions the Asbestos Textile Company.²⁴

References

1. Asbestos, April 1920, pp. 15–16 ("Arnold W. Koehler")
2. Asbestos, October 1921, p. 61 (News of the Industry)
3. Asbestos, November 1919, p. 29 (company advertisement)
4. Catalog cover: Aztec Brake Lining (Asbestos Textile Company), ACL Doc 20782
5. Asbestos, June 1932, p. 50 ("Asbestos Textile Company, Inc.")
6. T. L. Gatke of Asbestos Textile Company to Vandiver Brown on Gardner's Final Report, April 18, 1946, ACL Doc 11866, pp. 1–2
7. Asbestos, April 1921, p. 33; May 1921, p. 33; June 1921, p. 32 (company advertisements)
8. Asbestos, June 1926, p. 47 (News of the Industry)
9. Asbestos, March 1931, p. 47 (News of the Industry)
10. Asbestos, April 1920, p. 7 ("The Gasket and Its Proper Use," by A. J. Bromberg, sales manager)
11. Asbestos, March 1925, p. 48 (birthdays)
12. Asbestos, November 1924, p. 44; December 1926, p. 30; July 1928, p. 47; December 1928, p. 50; July 1929, p. 55; September 1930, p. 55
13. Asbestos, November 1936, p. 36
14. Asbestos, February 1964, p. 15 ("Frank T. Gatke")
15. Asbestos, April 1923, p. 42 (News of the Industry)
16. Asbestos, July 1923, p. 30, and May 1924, p. 25 (company advertisements)
17. Advertisement: Aztec Asbestos Products (Asbestos Textile Company, New York City), ACL Doc 20871
18. Thomas L. Gatke to J. F. D. Rohrbach on Getting Gardner's Report, August 12, 1946, ACL Doc 13176
19. Thomas L. Gatke to Vandiver Brown on Finishing the Saranac Report, September 14, 1948, ACL Doc 11876
20. Minutes of the Organization Meeting of the Asbestos Textile Institute, 1944, ACL Doc 11764
21. Asbestos, May 1945, p. 36 ("Asbestos Textile Institute Formed")
22. Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene Committee Minutes, December 7, 1955 (ATI-191)
23. Asbestos Textile Institute Board of Governors Meeting Minutes, March 7, 1956 (ATI-211), pp. 1, 3
24. Ferris v. Gatke Corporation (2003); Chavers v. Gatke Corp. (2003)

Asbestos products

5 products our documents name Asbestos Textile Company, Inc. as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Asbestext (Asbestos Textile Co.)
• Aztec (Asbestos Textile Co.)
• Aztec Brake Lining (Asbestos Textile Co.)
• Metallobestos Plastic Pump Packing (Asbestos Textile Co.)
• Mother Lode (Asbestos Textile Co.)

Plants

Plants where asbestos products were made that the documents say Asbestos Textile Company, Inc. ran.

• Asbestos Textile Company, Inc. / The Asbestos Textile Company of Massachusetts plant at North Brookfield, Massachusetts
• Asbestos Textile Company, Inc. plant at Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania

In our library

3 documents in our library name Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., by collection.

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Asbestos Textile Company.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Asbestos Textile Company, Inc., across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.