Eagle Crusher Company
Manufacturer
Address | 525 South Market, P.O. Box 537, Galion, OH, 44833, US |
Phone | 800-25-EAGLE |
[email protected] | |
Website | eaglecrusher.com |
About Eagle Crusher
It all began in the early 1900s with one man's vision, that of C.L. Woods, an Ohio distributor of
Eagle Tractors. Woods observed that farmers were taking the cobblestones from their fields
and placing them along the dirt roadsides. He imagined, "What if someone created a small jaw
crusher that could mount to the front of a tractor to crush the stone and use it to improve the
roads?"
Woods approached Eagle Tractors with the idea, but when the company didn't share his vision,
he founded his own company to manufacture the jaw crusher he had imagined. Thus, in 1915,
in Kenton, Ohio, Eagle Crusher Company was born.
While Eagle Tractors eventually ceased production, Eagle Crusher Company continued to
innovate and expand. To help with further expansion, Woods sold a 25% share of Eagle Crusher
to Ralph Cobey.
When Woods retired in 1952, Cobey purchased the remaining 75% of Eagle Crusher Company,
and soon moved manufacturing to Galion, Ohio to be closer to the other companies he owned
and operated, including Perfection Steel Body, manufacturer of steel grave vaults and truck
bodies and hoists (started by his father, Harry Cobey), and Cobey Corporation, Bucyrus-Ohio
manufacturer of a line of farm wagons.
In the 1960s, Eagle Crusher had won numerous large contracts for the manufacture of portable
crushing plants, including one contract with the United States government to produce more
than 300 crushing plants for road production during the Vietnam War.
In 1965, Perfection Steel Body and Cobey Corp. was sold to Harsco Corp. While Cobey stayed on
as President, Harsco separated Eagle under a different management, which only focused on
their large contracts, ignoring their normal customer base. When the contracts ended in 1969,
there was no business left.
In 1970 Cobey bought Eagle Crusher back and restarted the company with one employee. As
Cobey said, "I bought a name and some bad inventory." Eagle slowly grew and in 1974 and
1975, purchased Diamond Iron Works and Austin-Western for their parts sales.
Cobey recruited his daughter, Susanne Cobey in 1974, becoming the company's tenth
employee to handle the parts sales. She had previously been with Ford Motor Company where
she was the first, female, junior executive.
Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Eagle Crusher sales grew in the aggregate industry,
but the company's primary focus was the sale of portable coal crushers for strip mining. In
1983, the resolution of the coal strike caused portable coal crusher sales to virtually disappear.
Susanne Cobey sought a new direction for Eagle Crusher. She knew of the frustration customers
were having processing asphalt and concrete with rebar with the traditional aggregate jaw and
cone. She determined that the Horizontal Shaft Impactor (HSI), which was developed after
World War II to process debris, was the answer. Susanne concluded that only one HSI style
suited the US market. With that impactor, Eagle built the first US commercial recycling plant,
Eagle's Jumbo 1400, in 1984, and a new industry was born.
As Eagle Crusher's own manufacture of a range of portable recycling plants progressed, the
company found a need for a more innovative and robust impactor, thus in 1994, introduced its
own line of a superior, UltraMax® HSI, featuring a unique, sculpted, solid steel, three-bar rotor,
the industry's heaviest, for the recycling market.
The UltraMax HSI has proven to continue to outperform all other impactors in the aggregate
and recycle markets helping aggregate and recycling producers using Eagle Crusher impactors
worldwide to out-produce their competition.
In 1990, Ralph Cobey officially retired, naming Susanne CEO of Eagle Crusher. In that same year,
Susanne purchased The Stedman Machine Works, manufacturer of industrial and aggregate
crushers for stationary installations, located in Aurora, Indiana.
Today, Eagle Crusher continues to consistently lead the industry in new product innovations
and delivery of the most advanced, high-performance, and lowest operating-cost crushers in
the industry for the recycle concrete, asphalt, aggregate, and sand and gravel industries. The
company stands by its products with unsurpassed aftermarket service and support to make
producers' jobs easier and their businesses more profitable.