“Charles Adam Bertsch was born at Hickory Flat, Butler County, Ohio, Oct. 20, 1851, and came to Wayne County with his parents in his seventh year; and with the exception of several short intervals has spent his life in Wayne county. He received his early scholastic training in the public schools of Wayne County and began his independent career by renting and operating for a time a grist mill near Hagerstown. He is the inventor of the Diamond Burr Dresser. While still engaged in the grist mill business he purchased, fattened, and sold cattle and hogs, and later continued in the cattle business in Missouri one year. Returning to Wayne County, he purchased and operated two meat markets in Cambridge City and finally formed a partnership in that business with his brother, J. J. Bertsch. About this time, he again spent several months in the West-in Kansas-buying, fattening, and shipping cattle and hogs. Later he and his brother, J. J. Bertsch, purchased the Cambridge City Agricultural & Machine Works, which they operated and managed under that name, manufacturing agricultural implements, until the firm name and kind of output were changed, in 1884, Charles A. Bertsch having invented several valuable and useful patents during that time in the line of agricultural implements. In 1884 the firm name became Bertsch & Company, but the ownership remained unchanged. At this time the company began to build small tinner's squaring shears and forming rolls, and the present business has been built up by the manufacture of that line of tools-punches, shears, and rolls for punching, cutting, and rolling plates, structural shapes, and sheet metal. They are used in shipyards, railroad shops, rolling mills, sheet iron shops, boiler shops, structural iron shops, tank works,

      The company has built several of these machines, each of which weighed fifty-five tons. They have been shipped to every State in the Union and to Canada, Australia, South America, Japan, and England. The brother, J. J. Bertsch, died in 1893, and in 1897 Charles A. Bertsch purchased from his brother's heirs their interest in the business, and has since been the sole owner and proprietor.” (Quote from 1912)

      The company manufactured sheet metal machinery as early as 1890, and was sold to Mega Manufacturing Inc. in 2003.

Information Sources

• Memoirs of Wayne County and the City of Richmond, Indiana, V2, 1912