Cartoon stick figure cowboy in front of a wire fence with silver/aluminum painted posts — representing a blog post about the CHS Aluminum Fence Post position mark trademark registration.

Trademark: CHS Aluminum Fence Post Position

First Used: 1923

First Registered: 1929

Current Owner: CHS ACQUISITION CORPORATION [1]

Trademark Type: non-traditional trademark; trade dress; position mark

Primarily Associated With: metallic fence posts [2]

Brief (and likely incomplete) History [3]:

The CHS Aluminum Fence Post position mark is a significant piece of trademark history – it is one of the oldest, still active position mark registration in the United States (oldest honors still go to another fence post trademark, the Keystone Red Brand Fencing position mark)!

Chicago was once one of the great steel capitals of the world. Beginning in the mid-19th century, mills along the Chicago River and Calumet region grew rapidly, fueled by access to Lake Superior iron ore and the city’s booming railroads and construction markets. By the 1880s, Chicago companies were producing nearly a third of the nation’s steel, with tens of thousands of workers shaping steel into rails, skyscrapers, and countless industrial products.

Inland Steel established operations in the Chicago Heights in 1893, re-rolling discarded railroad rails into new products. While the company’s Indiana Harbor plant, built in 1901, became Inland’s flagship facility with thousands of employees, the Chicago Heights mill carved out its own niche as a high-volume producer of rail-steel fence posts and other specialty products. In 1969, the site was spun off as Chicago Heights Steel, which continued the tradition of recycling old rail into durable posts used on farms, highways, and job sites. Today, CHS is the nation’s largest special-market mill of its kind, with a legacy stretching back more than a century.

CHS owns related position marks for the CHS Aluminum Fence Post mark [4] and the CHS Silver Fence Post mark [5], both first used in December 1923. Why did they start using aluminum and silver colors on its fence posts as a brand identifier? Unfortunately, CHS does not share information publicly on this decision. Most likely CHS started using the accent colors to help distinguish its fence posts from others like the Keystone Red Brand fencing (first started using red as an accent color in 1915). Whatever the reason, what likely began as a practical touch for visibility and differentiation has endured for more than a century as a defining element of CHS’s product identity.