With apologies to Tim Allen. This is a picture of my daughter, granddaughter and son in law taken about a year ago when he took the whole family on a business trip. It is taken in front of the original SIP factory. In the 1880s, the Root Brothers Manufacturing Company was based in Sandusky Ohio. Their main supplier of iron castings was based in Plymouth Ohio. During one of their business trips to Plymouth, the mayor offered them a free abandoned building if they would move to Plymouth. The building was directly across from the railroad tracks from the city’s train station which would make it convenient for shipping the product and it was adjacent to the foundry where the got their castings. This was an obvious no brainer, so in the early 1890s, they moved. Soon afterwards, they bought the rights to a prototype reel grinder and turned it over to their son, Percy Root, who had some engineering training. At the age of 19, he developed it and put it into production. It was the first commercially viable reel grinder and was hugely successful. He continued to design state of the art grinders until his passing in 1966.

Through mergers and marriages, the company eventually became the Fate Root Heath company. Percy’s brother, John, was the corporate president and had passed away two years earlier. The family decided to sell off the Fate Root Heath company and I eventually ended up owning the SIP Grinder division. The building above housed that division from 1902 until it was sold and moved to Lansing Michigan in 1966. The new owner moved it to Oldsmar Florida in the early 1980s and I purchased it from him in 1988. He had not introduced any new products or even made any engineering improvements in the more than 20 years he owned the company so they went from market leader to last in the market and almost bankrupt.

At the end of this month, the descendants of the Fate Root Heath Family are having a once in a lifetime reunion in Plymouth and I have been invited to attend. The building above was the smallest building at the Fate Root Heath Facilities and may have been the oldest but it is the only one still standing. Ironically, the SIP Grinder division is the only product line from the Fate Root Heath company that is still in business. I would like to point out that of the 122 years we have existed, 100 of those years we were run by an engineer. It is no coincidence that those were also the years we were most successful.