Cole Manufacturing Company [1]
Cole Manufacturing Company
by Douglas Helms, 2006
[2]
Cole Manufacturing Company [3] was founded by brothers E. M. and E. A. Cole in Charlotte [4] in January 1900 to manufacture seed planters invented and patented by E. M. Cole. Brightly painted farm implements bearing the Cole Manufacturing Company label were a common sight on North Carolina farms during the first half of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, the company was the world's largest factory devoted solely to making seed planters and fertilizer distributors.
Cole Manufacturing, which operated its own foundry, made the transition from mule-drawn implements to multirow tractor-drawn implements and had sold more than 2 million seed planters, fertilizer distributors, and grain drills in the domestic and export markets by 1961. By the mid-1970s, the company had introduced a line of hand-pushed equipment to capitalize on the interest in home gardening. Jean Cole Hatcher [5] succeeded her father, E. A. Cole, as president of the company, and she was followed by her son John Cole Hatcher. The company ceased operations in the early 1980s.
References:
LeGette Blythe and Charles Raven Brockman, Hornet's Nest: The Story of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (1961).
Edgar T. Thompson, Agricultural Mecklenburg and Industrial Charlotte, Social and Economic (1926).
Additional Resources:
Cole Planter Company History: http://www.coleplanter.com/history.htm [3]
Search results [6] for Cole Manufacturing Company in the Department of Cultural Resources Collections.
Image Credit:
A seed planter made by Cole Manufacturing Company, 1920-1940. Image courtesy of North Carolina Museum of History. Available from http://collections.ncdcr.gov [7].(accessed June 26, 2012).
1 January 2006 | Helms, Douglas
