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Look at the ground as you walk on 14th Street in downtown Sacramento and you might spot artifacts from a bygone era of craftsmanship in the form of manhole covers.
The street is dotted with at least four covers made by long-defunct Berry’s Foundry which operated in the mid-20th century at 1817 29th St. in Sacramento. Looking something like a battle shield or coat of arms, they have crosses and T’s circled around the name of the foundry and its city.
These aren’t the drab, flat and economic manhole covers that have become the norm in recent decades. Those who look into who made these nearly century-old metal castings will find stories of people who came from far away to make our city their home and left their mark on our streetscapes.
Making a start in America
By 1923, Robert Berry had made it.
A history of notable Sacramento residents published that year by G. Walter Reed proclaimed Robert Berry “a master of an important industry of the capital city.”
Reed wrote that Berry, who was then about 60, had worked in the foundry industry since even before coming to the U.S. with his wife and son from their native England in 1907. Berry started Berry’s Foundry around 1920, employing five men in the busy season.
“The product of the plant is shipped all over northern California and the concern does a very large and satisfactory business,” Reed wrote.
It was a long way from where Berry had come, both literally and symbolically.
In England, Berry had also had a foundry. When he discovered that his business partner had cheated him, Berry severely beat the man, according to Berry’s great-grandson Blaine Gaustad. Given a choice between prison or the army, Berry opted for the latter, serving in the Boer War in South Africa around the turn of the 20th century.
Following his service, Berry found a better life for himself and his family in Sacramento. Aside from his success in business, he served as secretary of the Sacramento Valley Soccer League which, as Reed wrote in 1923, “had its inception sixteen years ago and now has 1,500 training in the schools here.”
Berry’s granddaughter Kathleen McCann adored him, calling him Papa.
“She loved her grandfather,” said Dan McCann, a Sacramento man once married to Kathleen McCann, who died in 2003. “She said he was the joyous one.”
Foundry work could provide a good life for competent operators. “It sort of made our family middle class,” Gaustad said.
Certainly, foundry work could be plentiful. A 1985 article in the Sacramento Bee noted that there were then around 29,000 manhole covers in the city (with updated figures not available before press time). That doesn’t necessarily include all of the other local items a foundry could produce, from pipes to light posts and much more.
“We have an expression that most people are 10 feet away from a casting but never know it,” said Doug Kurkul, CEO of the American Foundry Society, based in Schaumburg, Illinois. “Castings are really everywhere.”
The decline of foundries
Berry died in 1941 at 77. At some point, his son Robert H. Berry took over the family business. Born in 1897, the younger Berry was an educated man, having earned a degree in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley after attending Sacramento High School and serving as a wireless operator for the British Navy in World War I.
Harold Henderson described the younger Berry as a “bibliophile of the first water,” in a 1958 article in Foundry magazine.
“His den, living room, bedrooms and other rooms were stacked high with rare books – first editions, last editions, and single editions, bound in every material that the imaginative brain of an artistic bookbinder could dream up,” Henderson wrote.
The younger Berry was health-conscious, with exercise habits that would help him live to 98, according to his granddaughter Glory Styles, who knew him as Pops.
Gaustad, who is now 75 and lives in Massachusetts, was a favorite grandchild of the younger Berry. Gaustad can still remember the smell of coke – coal used in furnaces – as he rode in his grandfather’s truck to the foundry. He also remembers, though, that for all of his grandfather’s intelligence, he lacked business acumen.
The younger Berry was gruffer in personality than his father, something other family members echoed. “I know he had PTSD from that war because he had horrible nightmares every night,” Styles said. “He would toss and turn and yell in his sleep. And that’s not unusual for World War I vets.”
Berry’s Foundry’s 29th Street headquarters burned down in the 1950s, with the land today a parking lot adjacent to the Capital City Freeway. The foundry appears to have shut down around 1963 when it held a public auction for its components.
Some of the younger Berry’s struggles in business might not have been entirely of his own making. The foundry business has contracted a fair amount over the years. Where the U.S. had 5,000 foundries 40-50 years ago, there are just over 1,700 now according to Kurkul. About 6-8 companies do the bulk of municipal business, Kurkul estimated.
The manhole cover business has turned over the years, from the sort of ornate covers that a business like Berry’s Foundry might have crafted to drabber covers that dot Sacramento’s streets today. The 1985 Bee article noted that the newer manhole covers were cheaper and easier to clean.
In time, technology might help usher in a new era for manhole covers. Bruce Dienst, president of Norcan North America and a 42-year veteran of the foundry industry based in Aurora, Illinois, said foundries now have the technology to customize manhole covers with designs like city logos.
Dienst said that foundries have “actually had the opportunity to become much more sophisticated and artistic with the castings that they can provide communities.”
It’s unclear when or if this era will unfold in Sacramento. Kevin Waller, a supervisor in the city’s Department of Utilities didn’t respond to a request for comment.
How the foundry lives on
Kathleen McCann didn’t speak often about the foundry, having had a difficult relationship with her father. She would have four daughters – Styles and Katy Styles-Rogers, who each live in Oakland; Sally Styles-Zanotti, who lives in Acampo; and Cindy Moore, who lives in Sacramento.
The Berry’s Foundry manhole covers were something as if in the periphery for the family, though to some extent, they were also inescapable.
Styles-Zanotti said she remembered one near Melarkey’s, a defunct bar and music venue she worked at on Broadway.
One time when Moore’s son Colin Moore was visiting Sacramento, his grandmother pointed out a Berry’s Foundry manhole cover. He spotted a familiar sight when he got back to Shasta High School in Redding, where he lived.
“I have this very distinct memory of walking through the campus one day and noticing that this was a Berry’s Foundry manhole cover and telling my friends who all thought this was an incredibly lame thing to notice and point out,” Moore said.
There are those who care a lot about the covers, though, such as Dienst. “Every time I walk through any city, I’m always looking around to see who made the fire hydrants or who made the valves and things like that,” Dienst said. “That’s kind of a professional hazard for a lot of us.”
The covers sometimes inspire creative work, too. Moore has a 1994 book, “Manhole Covers” by Mimi Melnick and Robert A. Melnick in which Berry’s Foundry is featured.
Those Sacramento-casted covers have also inspired beer coasters.
In August 2016, artist Russ Muits made a print of a Berry’s Foundry cover that rests on a hole at 14th Street and Victorian Alley, behind Urban Roots Brewing & Smokehouse near Southside Park. He estimates he’s made prints of 300-400 manhole covers over the years. The design elements of Berry’s Foundry’s manhole cover jumped out at him.
“I’m always looking for something that has a foundry name plus a city name,” Muits said.
Muits began selling coasters of the print online thereafter.
Styles said she found the beer coasters on Muits’s website. She had done a search online related to her family’s foundry after becoming concerned upon reading a news story that manhole covers in Sacramento were being stolen.
Styles-Rogers remembered her reaction to when she saw the coaster herself.
“I’m looking at the coaster, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s one of the manhole covers that my grandfather’s foundry made,’” Styles-Rogers said.
Muits said that Styles-Rogers reached out to him and that he eventually sent her the original print. She gave it to a cousin who cared for Robert H. Berry later in his life.
The descendants of Robert Berry and his son expressed pride that their family history is embedded in the alleys and streets of Sacramento.
“When I was a kid and still as an adult, when I see those manhole covers, I feel really rooted in Sacramento,” Styles said.
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