The Kable Brothers Company

Brian Anderson
Oregon High School, Oregon

Since the early 1900s Mount Morris has been characterized as a printing town. This has been due entirely to the Kable twins and their printing business. Without the business, Mount Morris would never have become the town it is now. Harry G. and Harvey J. Kable contributed immensely to the growth of the town not only with financial support but by donating their time to start organizations that money cannot buy. It all started with their first printing press in 1898 and grew into a large-scale production factory.

In 1898, when Harvey J. Kable graduated from Mount Morris College, he decided to quit his job printing the Mount Morris News and join his brother in printing another town newspaper. They took over the abandoned country print shop of Charles T. Coggins and began their printing careers at the age of eighteen, printing the Mount Morris Index.

They called their business the Kable Brothers Company, and they were awarded their first contract in the summer of 1904. They also printed forty thousand copies of the eight-page monthly The Mystic Worker. It was more than they could handle. They were still setting the type by hand, and the lone press was operated manually. They were able to solve those problems with their usual resourcefulness.

Being a business with potential for further growth, the Kable Brothers Company was able to sell stocks. With the money invested in their company, the brothers bought a gasoline-powered printer, which made possible a field of printing that few until then had exploited. Unlike other printers of their time, the Kable Brothers Company was able to operate profitably from the beginning. Whenever they needed to buy more equipment or acquire more space, it was no problem financially.

One year after acquiring The Mystic Worker, Kable Brothers made a contract to print the Columbian Knights' official paper. Each year the company contracted for many more publications of the kind. The Kable Brothers Company was known across the land as a specialist in the printing of fraternal society publications. Those publications were the backbone of the business up until about 1925, but other items were printed, including catalogs, circulars, leaflets, pamphlets, booklets, and the occasional book.

The Kable Brothers Company also contributed to the growth of the town. Before the turn of the century Mount Morris was an average midwestern country town. But from 1898 to 1938 when most Ogle County towns recorded a falling population, Kable was able to help workers either buy or build homes in Mount Morris. The new workers in the printing business helped Mount Morris more than double in population. In 1930, a large tract of land was laid out in lots just for Kable Company workers. It became known as the Kable Addition.

Harry G. and Harvey J. Kable did not just help the town grow, they improved life in the community. They backed a program of street, water, and lighting improvements, which turned the village into a modern town. They also played in a community band that became known as the Kable Band, which celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary in the summer of 1996. They even showed interest in the youth of the community by helping establish a Boy

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The Kable Printing Company has been one of the major industries in Mount Morris since the early 1900s. A long, bitter strike at the plant in the 1970s seriously affected the local economy. The company has recovered and today prints publications for clients across the country.

Scout troop. "Economically the community has benefited greatly by the presence of a company that service built, but that company takes greater pride in directly or indirectly providing the things that money cannot buy," reads a company history.

The twins' company definitely was a very special business. Even through the Depression years of 1931 to 1936 and Harvey J. Kable's death in 1931, the company kept its wheels turning and its employees eating. The result was that Mount Morris, Illinois, and Hershey, Pennsylvania, were nationally known for having felt the Depression least of all among the cities and towns where a single company was prominent.

By 1940, due largely to the Kable Brothers Company, Mount Morris had become what citizens would call a dream town. The company provided job security not only for the inhabitants of Mount Morris, but for workers living within a thirty-mile radius of Mount Morris. The employees of the company received a paycheck enough to live a fulfilling life with many luxuries.

How much the community benefited from the company was demonstrated on May 10, 1974. On that day photo engravers at the company began a strike. A week later the book binders joined them on the picket line. This strike continued for six and a half years, one of the longest in northern Illinois' history. The enrollment in the Mount Morris schools declined in the strike years. Many community leaders feared Mount Morris would become a ghost town when many of the Kable employees found work elsewhere and moved away. After the strike ended, everything began to look much brighter for the community. The strike seriously depressed the community's economy.

The printing business of Harvey J. and Harry G. Kable has grown from printing a town newspaper to printing hundreds of publications from all over the country. Without this business, Mount Morris would never have become the prosperous town it is today. Both financially and in other ways, the community has benefited from the work of the two brothers.— [From Kable Brothers Company, Kable Brothers Company; Harry G. Kable, Mount Morris; Rockford Register Star, Dec. 2, 1980.]

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