Ashland City, 1946, and fifty-five years in private hands.

State Water Heaters is the trading name of State Industries, Inc., a water-heater maker based in Ashland City, Tennessee, a small town on the Cumberland River north-west of Nashville. The trade magazine Plumbing & Mechanical, reporting on the company’s sale in October 2001, said State had been founded in 1946 by the Lindahl family and that the sale marked the end of its private ownership.

By the time it changed hands, State was spread across several towns. Plumbing & Mechanical listed its plants in 2001 as Ashland City, Franklin and Cookeville in Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina. It also owned a components business, APCOM, which the magazine described as a maker of heating elements, thermostats, drain valves and other water-heater parts. Through APCOM, State made parts as well as finished heaters.

The company’s own description today keeps the same base. On its website State calls itself “a brand of State Industries, Inc.” and a manufacturer of commercial and residential water heaters, “based in Ashland City, Tennessee.” It says it sells to residential homeowners, wholesalers, contractors “and other members of the engineering community,” and that its products are backed by customer technical support and tank and parts warranties. The Ashland City address is the thread that runs from the family firm to the present-day brand.

An agreement in September, a closing at the end of December.

The sale was announced from Milwaukee. In a press release dated 17 September 2001, A. O. Smith Corporation said it had “reached a definitive agreement to acquire State Industries, Inc., a privately held manufacturer of residential and commercial water heaters.” A. O. Smith’s chairman and chief executive, Robert J. O’Toole, was quoted in Plumbing & Mechanical saying the deal “would expand the breadth and depth of our product line,” and describing State’s marketing as “well-balanced, with a strong presence in the retail, wholesale, OEM home construction and specialty market channels.” The magazine added that the purchase included APCOM, which would take A. O. Smith into the water-heater component business.

The fit was about channels as much as products. Supply House Times reported in December 2001 that, according to A. O. Smith, State’s retail, wholesale, home-construction and manufactured-home business would complement A. O. Smith’s residential business, which until then had been sold through wholesale only. At the time, Plumbing & Mechanical noted, A. O. Smith’s water-heater arm was run from Irving, Texas, with facilities in McBee, South Carolina; Renton, Washington; El Paso, Texas; Florence, Kentucky; Alsip, Illinois; Juárez, Mexico; Veldhoven in the Netherlands; Stratford, Ontario; and Nanjing, China. The purchase added State’s Tennessee and North Carolina plants to that network.

The deal needed regulatory clearance. Supply House Times said A. O. Smith closed the purchase after the US Department of Justice indicated it would not challenge or modify it, and that the purchase closed on 28 December 2001. A. O. Smith confirmed the date in its results for the fourth quarter of 2001: “On December 28, the company completed the acquisition of State Industries Inc. of Ashland City, Tenn.” A. O. Smith has owned State since 2001.

The State name stayed in use after the sale. English Wikipedia lists State Water Heaters among the brand names A. O. Smith operates, alongside American Water Heaters, Reliance Water Heaters, Lochinvar, Takagi, GSW, John Wood, Giant and U.S. Craftmaster, and names State Industries and APCOM among the company’s acquisitions of the 2000s. State keeps its own website, catalogue and product names within that group. English Wikipedia describes A. O. Smith itself as a maker of residential and commercial water heaters and boilers, with manufacturing in North America as well as plants in Bengaluru in India, Nanjing in China and Veldhoven in the Netherlands, and with water-treatment products sold in Asia.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the equipment behind water at home: pool pumps, filters and cleaners, above-ground pools, water-softening and filtering systems, and the tanks and tankless units that heat water for kitchens and bathrooms. Brands in these trades sit at many different points in the market, from names that began as small family workshops to labels that now belong to much larger industrial groups, and the same badge can be sold through a pool shop, a plumbing wholesaler or a big retailer.

Because the products are often installed out of sight, in a pump room, a basement or a utility cupboard, a brand’s identity in these fields tends to be carried by its name, its labels and its packaging rather than by the product’s shape. Ownership can change several times while a familiar badge stays on the box, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and where its products are made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A full catalogue under one short word.

The State range today reads like a map of how water is heated in American buildings. Its website groups residential products into gas tank, gas tankless, electric tank, electric tankless, hybrid electric heat pump, split-system heat pump, combi boiler and solar water heater tanks, with pressure, pump and expansion tanks beside them. The commercial side covers gas, electric, heat-pump and tankless water heaters, oil-fired models and storage tanks, and the site promotes a national accounts team and a same-day rapid response programme for commercial customers.

Product names sit under the State word rather than replacing it. The tankless heaters are grouped as Adapt models, with Adapt+ described as premium condensing, Adapt SC as standard condensing and Adapt NC as non-condensing, and the commercial modulating gas heaters carry the name Ultra Force. Its resource pages list ENERGY STAR products and a rebates and incentives finder, and the site also offers a product selector quiz, a water-heater cross reference and sizing tools.

For a design guide, State Water Heaters shows how a family firm’s name can outlive the family’s ownership: the Ashland City company was sold in 2001, yet the State badge still has its own range, its own website and its own place in the A. O. Smith family. Compare it with A. O. Smith, the Milwaukee company that has owned it since 2001, and with Rheem, another long-standing American water-heater name. For this guide we use blue, navy and red with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep State Water Heaters’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.