Boiling soap photograph

Dated ca. 1930-1943, this is a photograph of boiling soap at one of the Procter and Gamble buildings. The Procter and Gamble Company Plant, located on Spring Grove Avenue between Mill Creek and Township Avenue, in the Cincinnati suburb of St. Bernard, originally covered 11 acres in a section called Ivorydale. It was, and still is, one of the largest soap manufacturing plants in the world. The original plant dates to about 1885, when Proctor and Gamble expanded operations from their downtown location. William Procter, a candlemaker, and James Gamble, a soapmaker, formed the company known as Procter & Gamble in 1837. The two men, immigrants from England and Ireland respectively, had settled earlier in Cincinnati and had married sisters. The two men decided to pool their resources to form their own company, formalizing the relationship on October 31, 1837. During the Civil War, the company won contracts to supply the Union army with soap and candles. In addition to the increased profits experienced during the war, the military contracts introduced soldiers from all over the country to Procter & Gambles products. Once the war was over and the men returned home, they continued to purchase the company's products. In the 1880s, Procter & Gamble began to market a new product, an inexpensive, yet high quality, soap called Ivory soap. Over time, the company began to focus most of its attention on soap, producing more than thirty different types by the 1890s. As electricity became more and more common, there was less need for the candles that Procter & Gamble had made since its inception. Ultimately, the company chose to stop manufacturing candles in 1920. In the early twentieth century, Procter & Gamble continued to grow. The company began to build factories in other locations in the United States, because the demand for products had outgrown the capacity of the Cincinnati facilities. The company diversified its products and began producing products such as Crisco, Tide laundry detergent, Prell shampoo, Crest toothpaste, Downy fabric softener and Bounce fabric softener sheets, and Pampers, the first disposable diaper. This photograph is one of the many visual materials collected for use in the Ohio Guide. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration by executive order to create jobs for the large numbers of unemployed laborers, as well as artists, musicians, actors, and writers. The Federal Arts Program, a sector of the Works Progress Administration, included the Federal Writers’ Project, one of the primary goals of which was to complete the America Guide series, a series of guidebooks for each state which included state history, art, architecture, music, literature, and points of interest to the major cities and tours throughout the state. Work on the Ohio Guide began in 1935 with the publication of several pamphlets and brochures. The Reorganization Act of 1939 consolidated the Works Progress Administration and other agencies into the Federal Works Administration, and the Federal Writers’ Project became the Federal Writers’ Project in Ohio. The final product was published in 1940 and went through several editions. The Ohio Guide Collection consists of 4,769 photographs collected for use in Ohio Guide and other publications of the Federal Writers’ Project in Ohio from 1935-1939