The Jackson factory that put the honk in your car

The next time a car honks at you, you’re hearing an idea that got big in Jackson. Around 1900, William Sparks went into business with brothers Philip and Winthrop Withington, and the little firm started out making buggy parts — exactly the wrong product, since the buggy was on its way out. Then they pivoted to the noisy new automobile, and in 1911 they landed on the thing that made them: an electric car horn.

They needed a name for it, so they jammed their own together — Sparks plus Withington — and got “Sparton.” It caught on fast. The horns went onto Hudson cars first, and within a decade dozens of other automakers were buying them too. By 1929 the Sparks-Withington Company employed more than seven thousand people in Jackson and had branched out into “Spartan” radios as well, a household name in its own right during the early broadcast years.

Sparks did something memorable with the fortune. He’d seen an illuminated fountain on a trip to Barcelona, and he came home determined to build something like it for his town. In 1932, on his fifty-ninth birthday, he opened the Cascades — a 500-foot stair of lit, tumbling water on the south side of Jackson — to a crowd of 25,000. The horn money, in a sense, became a waterfall.

The company outlived its founder, eventually renaming itself Sparton after its most famous product, and kept a horn plant running in Jackson until 2008 — close to a century. The work has moved on, but the legacy is hard to escape: a Jackson invention that, more than a hundred years later, is still going off in every parking lot in America.