Kaspar Wire Works

Kaspar's first baskets went to market by Model T around 1902, sold to country stores. Efforts to patent the basket failed, and competition pushed the firm into feed baskets, horse muzzles and poultry coops. A single 1923 shipment brought as much as 40,000 pounds of wire; from 1926 it came from a Galveston mill, and later from American Steel and Wire. In World War II steel ran short and the plant largely shut down apart from ammunition boxes and a few military goods. Sales of $79,000 in 1945 more than doubled by 1950, and the payroll once reached 430.

What the plaque says

Kaspar Wire Works Founded as outgrowth of an 1895 invention that used smooth wire discarded when barbed wire fencing was introduced in this area. August Kaspar, son of a Swiss Lutheran missionary to Texas, salvaged some of the plain wire and made a corn shuck basket for home use. A neighbor saw and bought the basket. Soon Kaspar disposed of his baskets as rapidly as he could make and put them to use in his own barn. In 1898 he began the full-time manufacture of wire baskets and horse muzzles. His backyard shop was equipped with little more than a pair of pliers and his inventive genius. A rented wagon was the original Kaspar show room. Arthur H. Kaspar, son of the founder, purchased the business in 1924. In 1949 a grandson, Don G. Kaspar, joined the organization. Kaspar Wire Works has progressed to assembly-line manufacturing of nationally and internationally distributed goods -- including display racks, baskets, newspaper racks, wire shelving and many other products. The growth and success of Kaspar Wire Works was officially recognized in 1967 by the bestowal of the first annual Governor's Expansion Award under the auspices of the Texas Industrial Commission. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 0.2 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 17 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Captain Charles Welhausen — 0.6 mi
• First National Bank of Shiner — 0.6 mi
• Shiner — 0.7 mi
• Saint Ludmila's Academy — 1.0 mi