Foundry History

The Casting Foundry behind the name, Faircast Inc., has had a history of names, owners, and new beginnings. Throughout the years, the Foundry has persevered through the hard times and excelled in the best. As we start anew, we guarantee to accomplish and persevere in any situation that comes to us and putting our customers, employees, and community first.

William H. George was the founder of the original Foundry that is now Faircast Inc. He was an intelligent inventor, start-up manufacturer, and a talented business man with a dream to save effort with inventions.

He was born on June 24th, 1862 in Muscatine County, Iowa to Clark and Martha J. (Morrison) George. After growing up on the family farm and graduating school, he embarked on his business journey as an agriculturist. Throughout those years, he spent his time marrying his Love, Miss Olive M. Nolte, starting a family of four children, and working on an invention in which he secured patents for.

In 1890, William was employed with Scott & Company as a traveling salesman for threshing machines (in which his invention was a threshing machine tooth) for 2 years. Within that time frame, he had built his own small business to manufacture his thresher tooth, which soon required his entire attention. This business soon grew in 1892 to become, “The Thresher Tooth Company,” or as we know today, “Dexter.”

The original factory was erected in Dexter, Iowa in 1903 to further the growing business with proper tooling and capacity. However, in 1907, the factory was devastated by a fire. Fortunately, this did not hold Mr. William George back. He decided to rebuild and move his business to Fairfield, Iowa in 1912 in order to have a larger space and better transportation options. So, he decided to build his business right beside the train tracks on 905 W Depot Avenue, Fairfield, Iowa.

In 1954, the Foundry was purchased by Philco-Ford.

In 1972, a group of investors purchased the company in hopes to keep work local when Philco announced that they were no longer interested in manufacturing and selling commercial laundry appliance. Instead, they were going to focus on their main consumer product and sell the Foundry.  In a press release on December 17th, 1971, “A corporation consisting of 18 top management employees of the Fairfield Operations, and 7 key Philco-Bendix Distributors was recently formed for the purpose of purchasing all of the net assets of the Philco-Ford Corporation’s facility located in Fairfield, Iowa. This Iowa Corporation will do business as The Dexter Company.”