If you grew up anywhere near the U.P., you know the hat. The black wool cap with the red plaid earband, pulled down over a grandfather’s ears at deer camp, sold in every hardware store from Ironwood to the Soo. It is about as Yooper as a hat can get. And here is the twist most people who wear one never learn: the Stormy Kromer was not invented in the U.P. at all. It was born in Wisconsin, dreamed up by a frustrated railroad engineer and sewn together by his wife, more than a hundred years ago.
The engineer was George Kromer, a semi-pro baseball player from Kaukauna, Wisconsin, whose temper on the diamond earned him the nickname Stormy. When baseball did not pay the bills, he took a job driving locomotives for the Chicago and North Western, on a route that swung up through Ironwood before heading back to Chicago. Every time he leaned out the cab window to check the tracks, the wind tore his ball cap right off his head. So in 1903 he handed one to his wife, Ida, and asked her to fix it. She stitched a snug pull-down earband onto the cap, and that was it. The next day every other railroader wanted one.
How a Wisconsin hat became a Yooper icon
The Kromers turned it into a business almost overnight, selling the first cap that December and eventually moving production to a Milwaukee factory. But the hat found its truest home across the state line. Ironwood kids wore them to school for generations. Decades later, when the company looked at its sales, it realized something striking: around eighty percent of every Stormy Kromer sold went to customers within twenty miles of Ironwood. The U.P. had quietly adopted the hat as its own long before the U.P. ever made one.
The handshake that saved it
By 2001 the legend was nearly dead. Sales had fallen to fewer than four thousand caps a year, and the Milwaukee company that made them was ready to shut the line down for good. Then Bob Jacquart heard about it. Jacquart ran a cut-and-sew factory in Ironwood that stitched everything from boat covers to dog beds, and he had a personal stake in the story, because his own grandfather had worked the same railroad as Stormy Kromer and owned one of the caps. Within three months he had bought the rights on a five-paragraph contract. No lawyers, no bank loan, just a handshake. Production moved to Ironwood, and the hat that nearly disappeared went from a few thousand caps a year to more than fifty thousand.
Still sewn in the U.P.
Today the Stormy Kromer is still made by hand in Ironwood, by people from the Gogebic Range, in a family-run factory now led by Jacquart’s daughters. The cap that started it all is only the beginning of a full line of American-made gear shipped all over the world, and it has been called the coolest thing made in Michigan. There is a ten-foot replica cap standing out front of the plant, and they run free tours if you want to watch your own hat get stitched together. President Obama was handed a few when he came through Marquette. Not bad for a hat a railroad man’s wife threw together to stop it from blowing off a train.
So yes, the most Yooper hat in the world started life in Wisconsin. But the U.P. claimed it, saved it, and now sews every last one. Some things just belong here, even if they had to travel a little to get home.
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Sources: Stormy Kromer Mercantile; Wikipedia "Stormy Kromer cap"; Upper Peninsula Travel; Michigan BLUE Magazine.
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