The trowel maker that never left South 8th Avenue
A plasterer’s request to two Iowa machinists in 1890 started a toolmaker that still makes its products on the Marshalltown street it moved to in 1902.
Marshalltown, IA
The first trowels started as a custom job. In 1890, Jesse and Lester Williams ran a small machine shop on East Church Street in Marshalltown, Iowa, where they repaired bicycles and automobiles and filled the occasional tool order for local contractors. A plasterer in town asked the brothers to customize some of his tools. He was pleased with the result, and more requests trickled in.
The brothers made a few more trowels and put them on the market. According to the company’s published history, word traveled fast, orders began arriving from outside the state, and the repair shop grew into a manufacturing and mail-order business. By the history’s account, the brothers believed they were doing quite well.
The company is now known simply as MARSHALLTOWN, and it has spent well over a century on one stretch of ground. In 1902 the Williams brothers moved to South 8th Avenue, and the company is still there. “And yes, you heard me correctly, we’ve been located on 8th Avenue for 123 years,” Jon Vance, the company’s director of category sales and marketing, said at a groundbreaking on the site in 2025, according to the Times Republican in Marshalltown. The company was there to break ground on another addition.
The 1902 move gave the brothers the space they needed. On South 8th Avenue they put up a two-story machine shop, a blacksmith shop, an automobile shop, a boiler and engine room and an office. They began specializing in trowels and called that part of the business Marshalltown Trowel Works. In 1905, the brothers and a salesman named Albert Higgin incorporated it as the Marshalltown Trowel Company.
Until 1909 the business relied on word of mouth and sold to customers who found it. That year Jesse Williams and Higgin loaded a sales truck with trowels and set out across the plains and over the mountains, building a network of distributors and collecting orders as they went. Sales spread through the United States and into Canada. The company put up new buildings and bought new machinery to keep pace.
War took the trowels abroad. In 1918 the company shipped 18,000 of them overseas for the U.S. Army, and soldiers working on European jobsites, including Pershing Stadium in France, used them, the company’s history says. After the wars, the history continues, immigrant builders and plasterers returning to Europe took their Marshalltown trowels with them, even though the tools often cost more than European brands. Orders poured in. By 1930, the history says, the company was the largest exclusive manufacturer of masonry tools in the world. It won the Presidential E Award in 1975 for its export sales, and six years later the E Star Award for its continuing contribution to the nation’s balance of trade.
Much of the craft story is told in small changes to tools that tradespeople hold all day. In 1928 the company introduced its Xtralite finishing trowel, with a forged aluminum mounting in place of the heavier malleable iron that had been used for decades. It also began making aluminum hawks and darbies as lighter alternatives to the traditional wooden versions. In 1930, a company employee named J.B. Troutner received a patent for a handle molded onto a brick trowel to keep it from twisting.
Other changes came later. The company added bumpers to brick trowel handles to stop them from mushrooming, and it developed patented technology for its PermaShape trowels. In the early 1990s, according to its history, it became the first company to put a soft-grip handle on a construction tool.
It had also started buying other toolmakers. The first purchase in its history came in 1969, when it acquired the power trowel line of Construction Machinery Company in Waterloo, Iowa. That machine was one of the only ones on the market that stopped automatically when the operator released the lever, and it became the first powered equipment in the company’s line.
Iowa could not hold all the work. When demand outran what the company could produce, it formed a subsidiary, Marshalltown Tools, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after long deliberation. Production started there in 1982, office space followed in 1983, and shipping and distribution eventually moved to Arkansas as well.
Starting in 2018, the buying sped up. The company acquired Spin Screed, a Quincy, Illinois, maker of roller screeds, that year. In 2019 it bought Clark Tile Company of Batavia, Illinois, known for its all-plastic notch trowels, along with Barco Industries and Bullet Tools, a Hayden, Idaho, maker of flooring and siding shears. In 2020 came a Maple Lake, Minnesota, company specializing in roof snow removal systems, and Gatorback, a Minneapolis maker of mortar boards and pans. Frederick Tool Corp., an Elkhart, Indiana, masonry tool maker, followed in 2021.
In 2022 the company made what its history calls its largest acquisition to date, WAL-BOARD TOOLS, a Long Beach, California, maker of drywall tools. At the end of 2023 it bought Barwalt Tool Co. of Post Falls, Idaho, which was founded by Walter Pytlewski, a third-generation tile installer, had been in business since 1977 and was known for its tile spacers and knee pads. In 2024 it bought the assets of Vaughan & Bushnell Manufacturing Co., the hammer and pry bar maker, along with DASCO PRO, a chisel and punch maker that Vaughan had acquired in 2018.
The result was a trowel company that no longer made only trowels. “We now have over 10,000 products in our catalog. We’re supporting something like 15 different trades and industries,” Vance said at the 2025 groundbreaking, as reported by the Times Republican. “What was once simply Marshalltown Trowel is now MARSHALLTOWN, home of the iconic American made tool brands,” he said.
The company has also kept making its own products. “Manufacturing, when done well, is extremely difficult,” John Christen, its vice president of Iowa and Illinois operations and engineering, said at the same ceremony, according to the Times Republican. Almost every company wants to make a good product, he said, “but very few of them take on the challenges of manufacturing those products themselves.” Christen, a regular viewer of the television show Shark Tank, noted that entrepreneurs on it never ask for money to manufacture their products and are often advised to have them made in other countries at a lower cost.
Vance made a similar point. Many of the company’s competitors have come and gone, he said, but it outlasted world wars, the Great Depression, recessions and housing crises because, in his words as reported by the Times Republican, “our people show up.”
The 2025 groundbreaking marked an expansion of the South 8th Avenue campus by about 170,000 square feet, with more manufacturing space, a new employee entrance and a new break room. The Times Republican reported it was the company’s third expansion in Iowa in six years, and that a 200,000-square-foot facility was under construction in Kansas City, Kansas. The general contractor, Woodruff Construction, planned to remove a street and build a detention pond while 8th Avenue was redone for stormwater.
Direct descendants of the Williams brothers were recognized at the ceremony. Mayor Joel Greer said the company had sent more of its people to the city council, the school board and the chamber of commerce than anybody else in town. “MARSHALLTOWN Company is one of those you can just count on to be involved in the community,” he said, according to the Times Republican.
“Folks, this is what it’s all about. This is American manufacturing. From Main Street to Boone Street, this is our slice of heaven,” Vance told the crowd, as the paper reported.
President and CEO Joe Carter could not attend, so Christen read a letter from him. In it, Carter pictured the new building going up with the company’s own tools. “As we build this large expansion, we’ll have VAUGHAN hammers sending nails into 2x4s, MARSHALLTOWN brick trowels laying bricks, MARSHALLTOWN placers moving concrete, WAL-BOARD taping knives finishing drywall,” Carter wrote, in a letter quoted by the Times Republican.