04/27/2024
The leveling this past summer of the sprawling Roper Stove plant site on West Station Street echoed a demolition, almost 50 years ago, that wiped out another of Kankakee's major industrial locations.
During the spring and summer of 1969, wrecking cranes and bulldozers battered their way through a block-square complex of buildings that had housed the Bear Brand Hosiery Company since the early 1900s. Referred to locally as "The Bear Brand," the factory occupied a site bounded by West Avenue, Hickory Street, Washington Avenue and Bourbonnais Street.
Hundreds of workers (mostly women and teenaged girls) tended machines inside the tall brick buildings, turning out as many as 30,000 pairs of socks per week. The Kankakee factory was the oldest and largest of the Bear Brand's plants; others were located in Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia.
e leveling this past summer of the sprawling Roper Stove plant site on West Station Street echoed a demolition, almost 50 years ago, that wiped out another of Kankakee's major industrial locations.
During the spring and summer of 1969, wrecking cranes and bulldozers battered their way through a block-square complex of buildings that had housed the Bear Brand Hosiery Company since the early 1900s. Referred to locally as "The Bear Brand," the factory occupied a site bounded by West Avenue, Hickory Street, Washington Avenue and Bourbonnais Street.
Hundreds of workers (mostly women and teenaged girls) tended machines inside the tall brick buildings, turning out as many as 30,000 pairs of socks per week. The Kankakee factory was the oldest and largest of the Bear Brand's plants; others were located in Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia.
