The Brown Shoe Company Factory is a historic

factory A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. T ...

located at 212 S. State St. in

Litchfield, Illinois Litchfield is a city in Montgomery County, Illinois, United States. The population was 6,605 at the 2020 census. It is located in South Central Illinois, south of Springfield, Illinois, and part of the Metro East of St. Louis. History Litchfi ...

. The factory opened in 1917 to produce shoes for the

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

–based

Brown Shoe Company Caleres Inc. is an American footwear company that owns and operates a variety of footwear brands. Its headquarters is located in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.Albert B. Groves Albert Bartleton Groves (1866 - 1925), also known as A.B. Groves or Albert B. Groves, was an American architect who practiced in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Groves was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended architectural courses at Cor ...

designed the factory, which was one of twelve he designed for the company. The factory became Litchfield's second-largest industry and brought the community prosperity through the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

; in addition, its employees formed a civic organization that created a public park on company property. The factory closed in 1967; it was later used by cabinet manufacturer Adenca. The factory was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on November 15, 2006.

References

External links

Illinois.gov - Illinois Government News Network (IGNN)

Historical Society of Montgomery County
National Register of Historic Places in Montgomery County, Illinois Litchfield, Illinois Shoe factories Industrial buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Caleres 1917 establishments in Illinois Industrial buildings completed in 1917 {{MontgomeryCountyIL-NRHP-stub