Acklin Stamping Company Records, 1911-1997

The Acklin Stamping Company Records is divided into six primary series: Administrative Materials, Blueprints and Die Drawings, Ephemera, Finanical Materials, Photographs, Negatives and Videotapes, Printed Materials. A seventh series contains Oversize Materials which includes items from each of the previous series.

The first series, Admistrative Materials contains the following subseries: Assessements, Correspondence, Manuals, Obsolete Tool Dispositions, Production Orders, and Retirement Materials. Assessments consists of studies performed by external organizations in order to determine Acklin's status. Included in this subseries is a Production Study conducted by the U.S. Government determining Acklin's readiness to produce Case Cartridges, as well as an Employee Survey conducted in 1992. The correspondence in the collection is spotty at best, and comes from the years 1970,1992-1993. The manuals include Procedure Manual given to new employees created in 1939, as well as a service manual and a manual recieved at 1950's Leadership Conference. Obsolete Tool Dispostions are the records of parts made for various companies and are arranged alphabetically by company. Production Orders are orders recived from various companies and are also arranged alphabetically by company. Retirement Materials includes correspondence dealing with the Acklin Pension and Retirment Fund, as well as a scrapbook containing photographs and ephemera from retiring employees.

The second series, Blueprints, contains drawings of the layout of the plant. The third series, Ephemera, includes various pieces of memorablilia, including a guest book from the 1997 Open House, C.F. Greenhill's Society of Automotive Engineers Certificate, as well as Mr. Greenhill's scrapbook (with contains a 1918 recipe for Apricot Brandy!).

Financial Materials, documenting the economic health of the company, make up the fourth series. Included in this series are Cash Books, Journals, Ledgers, Purchase Registers, Reports and Stock Certificates.

The extensive amounts of photographs, negatives and videotape contained in this collection are organized under series five. The photographs are divded into four primary categories--Building, Machinery, People, and Products, and two smaller categories--Safety, and World War II production. Within each category the photogrpahs are divided according to size, and separated according to color or black and white. The criteria for selection into each category was importance: If machinery seemed to be the most important thing in the photograph, it was placed in the machinery category, even if there were also people in the photograph. The negatives are divided into the six categories as well, one folder per category. In addition two videotapes are housed in the collection, dating from an open house held in 1997, the first documents the events of the party held at the Open House and shows a tour of the plant's facilites. The second documents a "museum" created at the Open house, including many of the histoical materials now housed in this collection.