Waupaca Foundry plant anchors Tell City manufacturing jobs and growth

Waupaca Foundry’s Plant 5 in Tell City is one of Perry County’s biggest industrial anchors, with about 1,000 workers on a 588,000-square-foot site outside the city limits. That scale makes the foundry more than a factory on the edge of town. It is a major source of local payroll, steady production work, and the kind of industrial activity that supports the county’s broader economic base.

The plant’s footprint is large even before its output is counted. Waupaca Foundry says Plant 5 sits on 170 acres, was built in 1997, and later expanded in 1999 and 2019. The company also says the site poured its first iron casting on January 15, 1997, which gives Tell City a clear marker for when the operation began turning that land and capital into long-term industrial employment.

A plant built for volume, not just visibility

Plant 5 is set up to make a lot of iron, and that matters for the local economy because high-volume manufacturing tends to support a wide mix of jobs. Waupaca Foundry says the Tell City facility produces gray and ductile iron using two cupola melt furnaces, with an hourly melt capacity of 80 tons per cupola. It also lists eight vertical molding machines, which signals a production line built for scale and repeatability.

The products coming out of Tell City are tied to sectors that stretch well beyond Perry County. The plant makes brake rotors and drums, brake calipers, crankshafts, differential carriers, differential cases, and flywheel housings. Waupaca Foundry says the site serves light vehicle, commercial vehicle, agriculture, and construction markets, which means Tell City’s work is feeding supply chains that reach across the country.

That matters locally because each of those product lines implies more than machine operation alone. A plant of this size typically pulls in maintenance, materials handling, quality control, logistics, and support services around the clock. Even without breaking out supplier contracts line by line, the scale of the operation suggests real spending on hauling, equipment upkeep, tooling, and industrial services in and around Perry County.

Engineering jobs give the plant a second role

Plant 5 is not just a production floor. Waupaca Foundry says Tell City, also known as Plant 5, is home to over 20 engineers, including nine project engineers. That makes the site one of the county’s more technical workplaces, not simply a place where iron is poured and shipped.

The company has also said it uses robotics and automation to meet customer needs. In practical terms, that usually means a broader skill mix on site, including production operators, engineers, machinists, maintenance staff, and technicians who can keep automated systems running. For Tell City, that kind of job structure can matter as much as headcount, because higher-skilled industrial work tends to deepen the local talent pool and keep more payroll circulating locally.

Waupaca Foundry’s own history helps explain why the plant has stayed important. The company says it dates to 1948 and employed just 13 people in 1955. Against that background, the Tell City plant is part of a larger growth story that moved the company from a small operation to one with five foundries and more than 4,000 employees companywide. Plant 5 alone accounts for roughly a quarter of that workforce, which shows how central Tell City is to the company’s overall business.

Investment, upgrades, and energy savings show the plant is still being built out

The plant’s value to Perry County is not just in what it already employs, but in how often it keeps attracting capital. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Plants program recognized Waupaca Foundry with a Better Project award for innovations at the Tell City plant. The company later said one sustainability project at the site was the installation of a dehumidification system, a sign that efficiency upgrades are part of the plant’s operating strategy.

The biggest example is the cupola replacement project. Waupaca Foundry said work to replace one of Plant 5’s two cupolas began in 2019, was paused in 2020 for budgetary reasons, and was completed in phases in 2022 within a four-week window. That kind of project is expensive, technically demanding, and disruptive if it goes wrong. The fact that it was completed at all suggests the company still sees Tell City as worth reinvesting in.

That matters for the county because new capital spending is what keeps a plant from becoming a legacy asset. Expansions in 1999 and 2019, plus the later cupola replacement, show a facility that is still being modernized instead of left to age in place. For a community of 19,389 people, according to the July 1, 2025 estimate for Perry County, that level of industrial commitment carries real weight.

Why Perry County watches this plant closely

For Perry County, the question is not simply whether Plant 5 is large. It is how much of the county’s economic stability is tied to one manufacturing anchor outside Tell City. With about 1,000 workers at a single site, the plant represents a significant share of local industrial employment in a county where manufacturing remains one of the major employer categories.

That concentration can be a strength. A stable plant helps support homes, restaurants, service businesses, and public revenues that depend on payroll and property values. It can also help explain why the Perry County Chamber of Commerce named Waupaca Foundry its 2016 Large Business of the Year, recognizing the plant as an important part of the local business landscape.

It also creates a dependency that local leaders cannot ignore. When one manufacturer carries so much of the county’s industrial weight, hiring decisions, maintenance outages, capital plans, and production shifts become countywide concerns. Plant 5’s size, engineering presence, and repeated investment make it one of the clearest measures of whether Perry County’s manufacturing base is holding steady, or slipping.

For Tell City and the rest of Perry County, Waupaca Foundry remains more than a familiar name. It is a large employer, a technical workplace, and a durable industrial asset that still helps define the county’s economic future.