Richard T. Crane

Richard and his brother Charles soon formed R. T. Crane & Bro., which manufactured and sold brass goods and plumbing supplies.

The new company soon won contracts to supply pipe and steam-heating equipment in large public buildings such as the Cook County courthouse and the state prison at Joliet.

In 1890, when it had sales branches in Omaha, Kansas City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the company changed its name to Crane Co. By this time, Crane was supplying much of the pipe used for the large central heating systems in Chicago's new skyscrapers, and it was also selling the enameled cast-iron products that were soon found in bathrooms in residences across the country.

During the next few decades, Crane continued to employ thousands of Chicago-area residents at its Kedzie Avenue plant, and the company's annual sales rose to over US$300 million by the mid-1950s.

Evans proceeded to turn Crane into a global conglomerate that made aerospace equipment as well as plumbing supplies; the headquarters eventually moved from Chicago to Bridgeport.

By the end of the century, Crane was doing annual sales of about $2 billion, but it was no longer a leading company in the city in which it was born.

In 1886, he was the vice president of the Chicago Manual Training School, which provided one of the first vocational education programs in the city.

He strongly criticized fellow industrialists, for example Andrew Carnegie, who were donating millions of dollars to support higher education.

Richard T. only had two or three years of formal schooling before embarking on a series of factory jobs, first in Patterson, and then New York City.

Crane lost two nieces, Barbara and Mary Gartz, at the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago in 1903.

Crane died on January 8, 1912, in Chicago, Illinois,[2] and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.