Pohl Iron Works is one of the oldest family

Various metal pieces are pictured in the workshop, where the team takes on jobs of all shapes and sizes.

Christopher Fryer

When Nancy Pohl says, about her only son Travis, "he’d better hurry up and get married," it's more than a mother's lament about becoming a grandmother.

It's also an observation about the succession at Pohl Iron Works on East Main Street, now more than 150 years in business, all under four generations of Pohl family ownership and management.

Incomplete early details suggest that the business was started sometime in the 1860s by recent Austrian immigrant Edward Pohl.

Travis Pohl, a fabricator in the shop who works closely with shop foreman Rob Baker, represents the fifth generation of family management. He also is potentially a fifth-generation owner (his father, Rodney Pohl, and mother currently own the business) and the only one who’d be able to spawn a sixth generation of Pohl involvement.

The exact date that Edward started his business remains unclear, but Nancy Pohl said it is known that he moved the already-existing business into a building at 618 E. Jefferson St. in 1880 — when, according to a 1939 Courier-Journal article, "Jefferson Street had pleasant homes and a ‘short-line’ railway running smack-dab down its middle to the ancient Haymarket depot."

Any way you cut it, using whichever dates you choose, it's one of the oldest remaining family-owned companies in Louisville.

Pohl moved into its current location, at 901 E. Main St., in 1938. So, it's a very old business that's now part of the hip NuLu neighborhood.

According to Nancy, the building's original owner was J. Edinger, another 150-year-old, fifth-generation, family-owned Louisville business that's still around. (It began in 1867 as Jacob Edinger Wagon Manufacturer, a livery stable making carriages and wagons. The horses are gone, but J. Edinger & Son Inc. has transitioned into the truck and automotive equipment and repair business, on Story Avenue.)

Pohl took the building over from DeHart Paint & Varnish, after a fire caused DeHart to move across Main Street. But that's getting ahead of the story.

Edward and his wife Maria had seven children, four of whom joined him in the business. Over the generations, the family sprawled, but the number of members participating in the business gradually dwindled. Nonetheless, there was always at least one son per generation ready to step up and take over.

Rodney Pohl (the founder's great-grandson) became the co-owner, with his father Arnold, in 1975. Arnold subsequently retired and Rodney ran the company alone until his retirement in 2016.

That year, before he retired, he was joined by Travis — his and Nancy's sole child. Travis was primarily interested in aviation as a child, his mother said, and joined the Navy as a flight engineer serving in Hawaii. He subsequently returned to Louisville, working with a remodeling company.

"He had said from the beginning that he wanted nothing to do with the family business," Nancy said. "If he’d gone through with that, we might not even be having this conversation. But I gently worked on him and convinced him to come aboard."

Nancy, married to Rodney for 36 years, also works at Pohl Iron Works, as secretary/treasurer and administrator.

The business Travis has stepped into is very much different than the one Edward Pohl started in the 19th century. Edward had been trained as a blacksmith in Europe, Nancy believes, "and opened an iron-works job shop manufacturing iron fencing, hay racks, fences, gates, awning frames, cellar grates and stair and chair rails" for the thriving Louisville community of the Golden Age.

If you’ve ever gone on one of Tom Owen's or Steve Wiser's historic neighborhood tours, you likely saw all the ornate iron fences and gates lining the streets of Old Louisville or Cherokee Triangle, part of the elegance of residential life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A number of ornate iron fences still line the homes on Butchertown's East Washington Street, just around the corner from the Pohl factory.

And the likelihood, as well, is that many of those fences were forged, shaped and produced by Pohl Iron Works. As the mansions around Cherokee Park and Central Park were being built by the wealthy, price was no object and Pohl Iron Works had plenty of business in a growing, expanding Louisville — the more decorative and ornate, the better.

But times changed for the business, as would be inevitable for any company that's been around this long. Ongoing technology produced iron imitations that were cheaper and lighter. Aluminum grew in favor, and iron tubing was much less expensive than wrought iron.

Styles and tastes changed, too, and homeowners in newer residential neighborhoods extending to the East End didn't feel they needed massive iron gates and fences with increasingly contemporary architecture.

There also was a depression and a couple of recessions, World War II and a post-war generation that preferred change to looking backward. And there was urban renewal that spread through American cities in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, tearing through some of Louisville's once-exclusive neighborhoods and relegating those historic Pohl gates and fences to scrap metal.

That history would suggest the extinction of companies like this one. And yet, Pohl Iron Works is still very much a thing of today, still thriving on East Main Street.

"We survived some very tough times," Nancy said. "We’re like iron."

Even in the recession of the last decade, which particularly hit businesses that had anything to do with housing, the Pohls remained resilient.

"Recession did take away from the bottom line, but we just toughed it out," Nancy said. "We had to take out a loan, which has been paid back. Thankfully, we owned the building. If we’d had to pay rent, times would have been a lot tougher."

There was also a change in management thinking along the way.

"The organization is being run a little differently, and I think that helps," she said. "We’re going out and seeking jobs we might not have sought before, and we’re quoting more aggressively."

Rodney was innovative, she says of her husband's tenure at the company. Few jobs were too small or too challenging. The key word for the company, said Nancy, has always been "custom."

Company literature says, "The company continues basically as a job shop, specializing in ornamental and light structural fabrication — bleachers, ornamental iron railings, stairways, gates, steel tanks, hay racks, trailers, book drops, heavy-duty park benches, farm needs and special needs of restaurants."

It made trash containers for the Fourth Street Association, repaired the fences around Cave Hill Cemetery, made chair railings for the Kentucky Center for the Arts and stair railings for Louisville Water Co.

It's done work for the Louisville Free Public Library, the Kentucky School for the Blind and Churchill Downs. It made fencing and gates at the St. Xavier High School campus on Poplar Level Road.

It made the base for the huge bat statue outside the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. It made tables and chairs for Masterson's Catering and the Bristol Bar & Grille. It made gates for Bernheim Forest and table bases for Bittners interior design.

It made a gate for a woman who wanted to keep her dogs out of the living room. It made a homeowner's patterned window frames.

It even made the oar locks for Tori Murden McClure's solo rowing trip across the Atlantic Ocean in 1999.

Pohl never advertised and took only a short fling on Angie's List.

"We’ve always had a reputation in this town," Nancy said. "People come to us."

All kinds of people, for all kinds of jobs. One customer sent them an iron gate to repair, all the way from The Bahamas.

And it's a celebrated company anecdote that Lynn Winter came through the door 25 years ago wanting the company to fabricate an 8-foot-tall, 400-pound, tipped campfire coffee pot that would continually pour recycled water into a large coffee cup outside her late, lamented Lynn's Paradise Café on Barret Avenue.

Winter came in without any drawings for her inspiration, according to a 1994 Louisville Magazine article. And Rodney Pohl calmly said, "Well, let's draw one."

More recently, the company has started doing brass balcony railings, though most of its output remains steel.

It also doesn't hurt that the economy has improved.

"Our business has gone up every year since I joined the company," said Baker, who came to work for Pohl 10 years ago after NST Metals closed its doors. "It's about twice the revenue it was then."

Pohl Iron Works is a closely held corporation, of course, so there's a reluctance to share revenue figures, but Nancy suggested a figure of somewhere around a half-million dollars.

The company also has been willing to adopt some of the industry's technological advances. Today, the shop is strewn with CAD (computer-aided design) drawings of upcoming jobs. The CAD capabilities and another somewhat modern technology, powdercoating — a system of adhering paint powder to metal surfaces electrostatically, in lieu of liquid paint — gives Pohl efficiency and versatility in providing custom products.

Pohl used laser-cutting technology to fabricate the large shamrock on the outside of Pat's Steak House on Brownsboro Road.

On the shop floor is an ornate, curved, 30-foot railing intended for the Louisville Palace, precisely replicating the Spanish Baroque railing at the top of the theater.

A couple of other factors have played into the company's success. One is the fact that young people are buying up the homes in those older neighborhoods where wrought iron fences once proliferated, with a desire to replace the existing fencing or install new ones.

"These are mostly historically protected neighborhoods," Nancy pointed out, "and the rules on remaining true to original architecture and design on the homes’ exteriors are very strict."

In these cases, homeowners and their contractors are turning to the companies that manufactured the originals. And there aren't many of those remaining in town.

There also aren't as many experienced ironworkers. The Pohl workforce is at four or five, roughly half of what it was in its heyday.

"We’re playing catch-up — we could use more good help," Nancy lamented. "The phones ring and I have to tell people that it might be a week or so to get back to them."

Do they wait?

"They do, because we’re so good at what we do — and they know it."

Nancy said they try to make special accommodations for emergencies, such as someone just coming off surgery and having a hard time getting up and down steps at home. That's another factor contributing to Pohl's ongoing success — the current aging-in-place movement, which supports the contention that the rising elderly population is more comfortable remaining at home than moving to adult care centers.

"We’re getting a lot of calls from people needing durable indoor and outdoor railings to help themselves get around in the house," Nancy noted.

And then, said foreman Baker, there's been new business tied to the provisions of the Americans for Disability Act (ADA), which requires ramps and railings in all government and public-access buildings.

Of course, the idea is that, above all, they be solid and durable.

Nancy acknowledged that new railings and fences made of aluminum or iron tubing are threatening the company's business. But while they’re less expensive and more lightweight, they also have a shorter lifespan.

"Iron tubing absorbs moisture and rusts," she said, "and aluminum is not as strong and durable. It doesn't stand up to severe weather. People don't want to have to replace their fences every five or 10 years.

"We always boasted that our work would last 100 years." Of course, she sighed, "not everybody seems to want that anymore."

She admits the prefab metal fencing, the kind you can buy at Home Depot or Lowe's, "is a lot cheaper than we can make it."

Does it look as good? Is it as durable? Absolutely not, she said, "but some people just don't have the money."

Maybe, but the company stands by what it has always insisted on — producing attractive but also solid and durable work is worth it.

A wooden plaque on Nancy's desk bears a statement variously attributed to either Aldo Gucci or Benjamin Franklin or Sir Henry Royce of the Rolls-Royce automotive company: "Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten."

Nancy and Rodney are both in their 70s and assume that their son Travis will carry on the family business. They aren't worried about the current company operations. Nancy has confidence in her son and Rob Baker carrying on the high Pohl standards.

"Travis is a fast learner and Rob is excellent," she said. "They work well together."

As for the future beyond Travis, Nancy shrugged.

"That will be up to Travis. We don't have a formal plan in writing, and never have. Succession has always taken care of itself."

SO YOU KNOW

Pohl Iron Works

Owners: Rodney and Nancy Pohl

Address: 901 E. Main St., Louisville

Founded: It's unclear, but likely sometime in the 1860s

Current location: Pohl moved to its present spot in 1938

Employees: About 5

Website: facebook.com/pohlironworks/