The charcoal in most American grills traces back not to a barbecue company but to an auto plant’s scrap pile. According to Kingsford’s own company history, a research guide from the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford museum, and independent reporting from Detroit’s WDIV / ClickOnDetroit, the modern charcoal briquette grew directly out of Henry Ford’s effort to stop wasting wood at his Michigan sawmills.
A Ford Dealer’s Timberland Tip
The connection starts with Edward G. Kingsford, Henry Ford’s cousin by marriage, who ran a Ford automobile dealership in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, according to both the Benson Ford Research Center guide and ClickOnDetroit’s reporting. Ford needed a secure timber supply for the wood used in Model T body frames and other car parts, and Kingsford helped steer him toward land in the Upper Peninsula. Sources disagree on exactly when: Kingsford’s own company history dates this to 1919, stating that Kingsford helped Ford procure a stretch of timberland to supply wood for his auto plants that year. The Henry Ford museum’s research guide instead places the actual land purchase and construction of the Iron Mountain plant in the early 1920s. Both agree on the outcome — Ford Motor Company ended up owning a large timber and sawmill operation in Iron Mountain built primarily to feed its car factories, not to make charcoal.
From Wood Scraps to a Uniform Briquette
Turning wood into car parts left behind enormous amounts of scrap and sawdust. The Henry Ford museum’s research guide is explicit that Ford did not invent the charcoal briquette — charcoal was already in commercial and industrial use for foundries, workshops, hotels, restaurants, and curing tobacco, meat, and fish. What Ford did, per the guide, was modify the existing charcoal manufacturing process to reduce and standardize the size, turning an irregular lump into a uniform briquette that could be produced and sold at scale. Kingsford’s own history echoes this: Ford “found his answer in a new process for pressing blocks of reconstituted char” from the sawdust and waste his mills generated. Separately, ClickOnDetroit cites the Menominee Range Historical Foundation’s claim that an even earlier charcoal briquette design had been patented back in 1895 by W. P. Taggart, who described his invention simply as a lump of fuel — a reminder that Ford’s contribution was standardizing an existing idea, not creating the briquette from nothing.
Ford Motor Company began producing and selling its own briquettes in 1924, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide, initially marketing to the same industrial and commercial charcoal buyers already in the market, then expanding into household use. A Ford News advertisement from September 15, 1924 announced that the new charcoal briquettes could be bought at the company’s Highland Park commissary store, suitable for fireplace grates, cooking ranges, and furnace kindling — an early sign the product was being aimed at homes, not just factories and hotels.
Selling Charcoal Through the Car Dealership
The briquette became a genuine consumer product almost by accident. In 1932, Walter Stoepple, an Iron Mountain plant employee and self-described avid outdoorsman, came up with the idea of a simple campfire starter kit — a shoebox-sized cardboard box packed with a dozen charcoal briquettes, pine cones, and curled wood shavings, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide. By 1935 the Ford Sales Department had formalized this into “Ford Charcoal Picnic Kits,” sold at Ford dealerships nationwide. The pairing made commercial sense for the company: promoting camping and picnicking encouraged the kind of leisure driving that sold Ford vehicles, even though the guide notes dealers weren’t required to sell briquettes and cars together. ClickOnDetroit adds that small charcoal grills were marketed alongside the briquettes at dealerships and eventually through hardware, sporting goods, and department stores, priced at $1, $2, and $3.
From Ford Charcoal to Kingsford
The Ford-branded charcoal business didn’t stay under the Ford name. By 1951, with the automaker no longer needing wood for car bodies, Ford Motor Company sold the Iron Mountain plant to the Kingsford Chemical Company, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide, Kingsford’s own company history, and ClickOnDetroit — a rare point where all three sources line up exactly. The plant kept making briquettes, but under the Kingsford name rather than the Ford brand, an honor named for Edward Kingsford rather than for the Ford family. The Henry Ford museum’s guide adds one further step neither of the other two sources mentions: in 1961, Kingsford Chemical closed the Iron Mountain plant entirely and relocated production to Louisville, Kentucky, ending the direct manufacturing link between the briquette brand and the Michigan site where it began.
An Automotive Byproduct, Still Burning
What started as a way to avoid dumping sawdust from a Model T timber operation became, within three decades, a separate consumer brand with no remaining operational tie to Ford. Kingsford’s own history describes the company today as converting more than a million tons of wood waste into charcoal briquettes annually — a figure the company reports itself rather than one independently verified here. The core historical claim, though, is corroborated across a museum research guide, the brand’s own company history, and independent news reporting: modern briquette charcoal exists in its current form largely because an auto company needed somewhere to put its scrap wood.
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