LOCAL

MarionMade: Marion Power Shovel

Marion Community Foundation

Each week, this series will share stories of our many wonderful people, places, products and programs in the greater Marion community. To read more stories of Marion’s great people, places, products, and programs, or to share some of your own stories, visit MarionMade! online at marionmade.org or on Facebook.  

Marion powered shovels and draglines constructed the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, and many other projects across the country. At its peak, Marion Power Shovel employed 5,000-6,000 and was the world’s largest manufacturer of earth moving equipment. Their machines are still in use across the world.

It all began in 1884 as the Marion Steam Shovel Company under the direction of a group of Marion businessmen and inventors -- Henry Barnhart, Edward Huber, and George King. The company manufactured heavy construction equipment for the mining and railroad industries and public works projects all over the world.

One of the company's most famous projects was the construction of two crawler-transporters for NASA. The Marion crawlers, a pair of tracked vehicles, built and delivered to Kennedy Space Center in 1964, were used to transport rockets during the Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and Space Shuttle programs. They provided 50 years of excellent performance until retired from service at the end of the space shuttle program.

The idea for a crawler-launcher platform started when a NASA engineer visited his father’s farm near Paradise, Kentucky, and observed a giant strip mining shovel in operation. The shovel–that he described as having a platform as big as a football field, with tracks 8-feet high, and diesel engines in each track–was the Bucyrus-Erie Company’s Big Hog. If that engineer had driven a few more miles, he would have been equally in awe of the Marion Mountaineer in operation at another nearby mine. This equipment is just one example of a 100-plus year rivalry between these two companies.

While the Bucyrus-Erie machine’s undercarriage sparked the design concept for the crawler-transporter, the Crawler Transporters which were eventually built were a Marion creation — the work of the talented Marion Power Shovel engineers. Their original goal was to build a system capable of moving extremely large structures, several miles, in a reasonable amount of time.

William C. Dwyer, Vice President of Marion Power Shovel Company, was instrumental in Marion Power Shovel obtaining the NASA contract. He reminded NASA that his company had years of experience building large shovels, giant strip mining machines and dragline machines going back to the Panama Canal and Hoover Dam projects. Marion won the contract and the crawler-transporters were assembled in 1965-66 for under $15 million and provided five decades of service life.

Although Marion Power Shovel was eventually purchased by Bucyrus-Erie, and they, in turn, by Caterpillar, the large draglines Caterpillar now produces had their beginnings on the Marion drawing boards and still carry the Marion Power Shovel model numbers.

Former Marion Power Shovel employees continue to hold reunions annually in Marion at Lincoln Park. These events have been organized for decades by Bea Kellogg, secretary to 17 Marion Power Shovel presidents during her career there.