Excerpt from a 1955 Press Release...
From: Public Relations Department
Procter & Gamble
Cincinnati 1, Ohio
For Immediate Release
The Beginning
The year was 1905. Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, the Panama Canal was being dug, and Henry Ford's motor car was only two years old.
And one afternoon early in 1905, 20 cases of soap were packed in the new Procter & Gamble plant in Kansas City.
It was the first day of operations at the plant, and company officials were satisfied with the results. They said the first shipment would go out later in the week and that the daily output would be doubled before long.
Their optimism was boundless. They foresaw Kansas City-made soaps in the tubs and wash basins of every community to the north, south, and west and as far as the Philippines, China, Japan, and the rest of the Orient.
They were no ordinary prophets. The plant--and Kansas City--grew rapidly, and Procter & Gamble proved itself a good neighbor and employer. It was quick to identify itself with the city and the people it lived with and to share their dreams and aspirations; and the people, in turn, worked in its factory and bought its soap.
And the plant, the first P&G venture away from its Ivorydale home in Cincinnati, marked the beginning of the company's world-wide expansion. Today, the 118-year-old company has 14 plants in the United States and 13 abroad and a grand total of more than 23,000 employees.
New Plant as Viewed by 1905 Press
In 1905, Kansas City was an ideal place to build a new soap factory. The city was in the midst of an industrial and meat-packing boom. It was a terminal point for many railroads and an important Missouri River port. its people were alert and progressive. (When the Covention Hall for the 1900 Democratic National Convention was burned, they pitched in and rebuilt it in 90 days.)
According to old newspaper accounts, construction of the P&G factory commenced in 1903 and work was completed towards the end of 1904. In November, there was a critical house shortage in Kansas City and a paper reported that "many P&G people are living in tents along the bluff north of the factory."
A Kansas City Star writer who visited the plant after it was opened was deeply impressed by its marvelous engines and modern conveniences. As he put it:
"Under ordinary circumstances there is hardly anything more prosaic than soap making. When you enter a plant, however, where every room or department contains some wonderful piece of machinery, enough in itself to furnish material for profitable study for a week, the industry takes on a new appearance and you begin to wonder where the inventive genius of man will lead or end. In the plant there are marvelous engines with automatic oil feeds, with foundations so solid that a silver dollar placed on edge of one of the cross beams was not disturbed by the vibrations.
"The rooms in which the operators work are bright, scrupulously clean, well lighted, splendidly ventilated and will be kept cool during the summer by revolving fans.
"There is no lost motion from the time the raw materials are assembled in the (soap) kettles until they leave the factory--everything proceeds in an orderly and systematic manner."
The writer was apparently overwhelmed by the boiler room. "It is safe to say that, excepting possibly in the Metropolitan Street Railway Company's power house at First Street and Grand Avenue, there is not another so completely up-to-date boiler room in Kansas City."
Other 1905 newspapers carried similar accounts of the construction and opening of the new factory.
The Plant 1905-1955
And now in 1955, while the company celebrates the 50th anniversary of the factory on the Kaw River in Kansas City, Kansas, it can look back on an impressive record of production and accomplishment.
The original plant in the Armourdale section of the city included two large buildings and several smaller ones and 23 acres of land. In its early years the Kansas City manufacturing outpost made Ivory Soap, Lenox Soap, Denver's Best, and White Water Soap.
The payroll then numbered 102 and 80 boxes of each soap brand was considered a maximum daily production. Although candles were still an important part of the company's business (they're not made by P&G anymore), only bar soap was produced at Kansas City.
In the half century since the plant was first opened, 25 acres of land have been added and 33 buildings erected.
In 1917, a silicate house and the alkali plant were built here. Milled soap was in production in 1927 and the local manufacture of Camay was started.
Expansion jumped ahead in 1929. Five three-story soap kettles and two large granules towers were built and Oxydol became a new product at the plant. In 1937, another granules tower went up and Dreft, the first packaged synthetic detergent, was in full production.
A new "freezer" method of making Ivory bar soap was installed in 1940 along with equipment for the production of polished Ivory Flakes.
But the plant's greatest era of growth began at the end of World War II when the new synthetic detergents were catching the public fancy. A new tower was raised for the production of Tide, and a nw method of continuous soapmaking replaced the old kettle method, reducing the time for making a "batch" of soap from days to hours.
There was also a new facility added to provide a needed raw material for synthetic detergents and facilities for making and packaging Joy, the liquid detergent.
Today, there are some 645 men and women working in the Armourdale plant and more than 20 production departments turning out P&G soaps, synthetics, and glycerine. The factory is also a distribution point for the company's drug products.
But of the four soaps originally made there, only Ivory remains. Actually many brands were made in the 50 years at Armourdale and a number of one-time favorites have been discontinued in favor of new products, including Star Washing Powder, O.K. Yellow Soap, Lenox, Chipso, White Water Soap, Denver's Best, Rub-No-More, Lady Godiva, Selox, Chipso Granules, and Clean Quick.
Made at the plant today are the housewives' newer (and some older) favorites: Ivory Bar, Ivory Flakes, Ivory Snow, Tide, Cheer, Dreft, Oxydol, Duz, Camay, Joy, Spic and Span, Lava, and Kirk's Coco Hard Water Castile Soap.
The Spectacular Growth of Kansas City
As Kansas City is a typically American metropolitan area, so is Procter & Gamble a typically American company. Both had small beginnings and consistent, purposeful growth. Both are forward-looking and progressive and have a keen awareness of how they're doing and where they're going; and both of them know that a city and a company have to keep on growing to serve the needs of a growing, dynamic America.
Kansas City's growth has been as steady as P&G's. In 1900 the metropolitan area of Kansas City had a population of 306,000; Greater Kansas City's today is 892,000.
For Kansas City, Kansas, the population figures are 51,000 in 1900, 133,000 in 1955--but it has grown beyond the city limits and into Wyandotte County, where the population is now 180,000. From 1912, its industrial plants increased from 142 to 467 and the annual payroll from $32 million to $248 million.