The Root Spring Scraper Company

The Root Spring Scraper Co., located on Kalamazoo’s North Side, has been making road- After Fred Root died in 1925 and maintenance and snow-removal equipment since 1891. The inventive genius of Fred Root his daughter Marie Root became provided the initial impetus for the enterprise. president of the company. She was By 1893, electric streetcars were replacing horse- drawn vehicles for public transportation. On occasion, people, much like deer in the headlights, froze on the tracks as these newfangled vehicles raced toward them. a business leader in a day when few women were executives. The company’s products, however, were in need of modernization. To save them from serious injury or death, Fred Root invented a basket—hidden under the Marie hired Ernest Weeks in 1927 front of the streetcar—that extended automatically if a sensor rod mounted on the front of and the two of them developed the vehicle bumped a pedestrian. The basket caught the person, avoiding a collision. the idea of Transit systems quickly adopted the device although its effectiveness was questionable. Fred was not content, however, and that same year he created a snow scraper to clear the tracks for trolleys. After improvements, Root’s snow scrapers a hydraulic scraper rather than a springbecame the basis of a growing company. He opened a new factory on North controlled one. This innovation kept the Street in 1910, where the company is still located today. scraper in greater contact with the road, Root loved horseracing and noticed that the horses’ hooves tore up the track. The surface needed to be smoothed before the next heat or race. So he put his inventive mind to work and developed a scraper that effectively leveled making the surface smoother. Marie Root described their invention, which they patented, as “the very best idea we ever had.” Weeks, who became president after Marie’s death in 1935, added snowplows to the company’s product line in 1928. the track. It was so effi cient that As the popularity of air travel soared in the 1950s and 1960s, Root Spring Scraper added it was quickly in demand by race yet another product—snowplows for airport runways. Today, the company is one of the tracks around the country. country’s largest manufacturers of road and runway snowplows. Scrapers that smoothed race Ernest Weeks and his son, Dan, ran the company from 1935 until the early 1990s. When tracks could also be modifi ed Dan Weeks retired, Fred and Bill Root, great- grandsons of the company’s founder, took and used to improve roads, just over the management. as the popularity of the automobile created a demand for better roads. Root developed scrapers mounted on trucks. Once d R d l d d k O more, the Root Spring Scraper Co. had a new product that was popular across the country. Asthepopularityofairtravelsoaredinthe1950s

Museography. Reprinted with permission from the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. The museum is operated by Kalamazoo Valley Community College and is governed by its Board of Trustees. For more information about the museum visit www.kalamazoomuseum.org.