Bourne-Fuller Company

The Bourne-Fuller Company in Cleveland, Ohio, was one of three constituent companies that formed the Republic Steel Corporation in 1930. The other companies were the Central Alloy Company and Republic Iron and Steel Company. The principal stockholder of Republic was Cyrus Eaton, a well-known financier who made a fortune, in part, through Republic Steel.

With the combination of these two companies with Republic Steel Corporation, Republic became the third largest steel company in the United States after U.S. Steel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Company. At the time of its combination with Bourne-Fuller and Central Alloy, Republic was headquartered in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1936 it moved its headquarters to Cleveland, Ohio.

Before it combined with Republic, Bourne-Fuller consisted of three entities: first was Bourne-Fuller Company, the sales agency or iron and steel jobber, which sold the output of its furnaces to its customers. The other two entities consisted of the Union Rolling Mill, a manufacturer of steel, and the Upson Nut Company, a manufacturer of nuts and bolts.

Bourne-Fuller acquired these two companies in 1920, although the three companies had already formed an alliance in 1911 to be “able to fight the United States Steel Corporation.” Bourne-Fuller Company wanted to purchase Upson Nut so that it would own a furnace.

These three companies were the largest independent steel companies in Ohio. The president of Bourne-Fuller Co., was B.F. Bourne, Horace A. Fuller was vice president (and president of Union Rolling Mill Co.). Horace Fuller’s father, Samuel Augustus Fuller, was founder and president of Condit Fuller & Co., which became Bourne-Fuller & Co., after Mr. Paul P. Condit’s death in 1886.

In 1912-1913 Anton Burchard designed the six-story brick and reinforced concrete office building for Upson and the one-story brick and steel forge shop.

In 1920, when Bourne-Fuller Company purchased Upson Nut and Union Rolling Mill, it added seven four and five story buildings designed and built by H.K. Ferguson Company on line with the 1913 forge shop. “The operations of the three companies include the entire process of steel manufacture extending from the making of pig iron to the manufacture of finished steel, structural, bars, plates, billets and finished products including nuts, bolts, rivets and the like.”

"The Union Rolling Mill was built in 1861 and 1862 to roll merchant bar iron." It was located a mile outside the center of Cleveland in the Newburgh township. Its excellent location, which covered seven acres of ground, was a part of the Newburgh township cemetery annexed by the City of Cleveland for the rapidly expanding steel industry in 1873. Union Rolling Mill and a railroad purchased the cemetery, moving more than 3,000 burials to a new place in 1881-1882.

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