Building America, Building A Legacy
175 Years Of The W.H. Maze Company
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Canal Stories, a series brought to you by the Canal Corridor Association to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the communities that were shaped by its legacy. It has long been said that only one third of family businesses will make it to the second generation. Despite that somber statistic, one Illinois Valley company has been going strong for 175 years, spanning six generations and helping to build America since 1848. Today, we’re tipping our hats to the W.H. Maze Company of Peru, Illinois, a legendary business with a history that has been intertwined with the I&M Canal since the very beginning.
When Samuel Nesbitt Maze entered the lumber business in 1848, he began an enterprise that would grow and flourish for nearly two centuries. As an Irish immigrant from Castleblayney, County Monaghan, Maze arrived in the United States in 1836, where he worked as a masonry contractor for several years before deciding to try his hand at the lumber business.
He established his modest yard along bustling Water Street, in the small town of Peru, Illinois, on the banks of the Illinois River. The yard stood just a few hundred yards from the south end of the newly constructed Illinois & Michigan Canal, as 1848 was also the year in which the canal first linked the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to Lake Michigan.
Maze had a small barge built, which he dubbed The Elk, and he used mules to haul loads of local grain to Chicago, by way of the I&M Canal. Before making the 96-mile journey back to Peru, The Elk was loaded up with white pine from huge timber stands in Wisconsin. Upon return, Maze sold his cargo to his contractor friends, farmers, and others who asked him to bring them lumber. Thus, the lumberyard was born.
In the late 1800’s, the Maze Lumberyard was selling an abundance of cedar shingle roof jobs. The shingles lasted fine, but the bright, steel cut nails that Maze Lumber sold, though they were the best available at the time, did not last very long. Eager to find a solution to this problem, Samuel Maze’s son, Walter, who was running the lumberyard at the time, acquired a used nail machine, which allowed them to produce their own, higher-quality nails from pure zinc strips.
As luck would have it, La-Salle-Peru was also home to M&H Zinc and Illinois Zinc, who supplied the material needed to make the cut cedar shingle nails that the small nail machine produced. Maze Lumber promoted its cedar shingle roof packages far and wide, creating a boom in business that kept their little nail machine running several more hours each week, to keep up with the growing demand.
It didn't take long for word of these zinc nails to spread to lumberyards outside of the Illinois Valley, and soon, other area dealers arrived by wagon, flatboat, and sidewheeler to get their hands on them. As Maze Lumber began selling nails to other lumberyards, the nail machine eventually ran full-time, to the point where it was joined by additional machines to keep up with the influx of orders. With that, the Nail Division of the W.H. Maze Company began.
In 1916, Maze engineers designed equipment to Hot-Dip Galvanize steel nails for a dependable but more economical product that was resistant to rust. In 1955, equipment was built to Double Hot-Dip Galvanize the nails, and business skyrocketed.
Maze Nails engineers were responsible for many other major innovations in the nail business. As building materials changed and improved, it was imperative to develop new methods of fastening them. They developed spiral shank threading in 1932, to increase the holding power of their nails, and to reduce the problems caused by nails backing out of roofing and siding products. Maze Nails was also the first mill to pack nails into both 50-lb. and 5-lb. boxes—quite a departure from the old 100-lb. kegs, which were considered the industry standard.
Maze Nails gained fame for their dependable hand-driven nails, but as times changed, pneumatic nailers gained widespread acceptance. In 1996, the SSE division of Maze was established to collate the nails into sticks and coils for the hundreds of air-driven tools on the market. Along with collating nails, SSE also packaged stainless steel trim nails in over 100 colors.
175 years ago, the I&M Canal and the W.H. Maze Company began their journeys together, both leaving their marks on the history of Illinois and the westward expansion of the nation. Today, the 5th and 6th generations of the Maze family continue to provide quality construction materials to help build America and the world, standing tall against the test of time and carrying on a legacy that all started with a man and a canal.
That concludes today’s Canal Story. Thank you so much for joining us as we continue our journey through the history of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, pass it along to your family and friends, be sure to leave us a like or drop us a comment, and we’ll see you again very soon.