The National Tinsel & Toy Manufacturing Company Building is a three-story brick building located on Manitowoc’s south side. It was constructed in phases, with the original portion completed in 1918 as a factory for the Tinsel Manufacturing Company, a Christmas tree ornament manufacturing concern owned by entrepreneur William C. Protz after he bought the Stolze Manufacturing Company, specializing in the same product, from founder Henry Stolze Jr. Protz went on to purchase the National Toy Manufacturing Company of Milwaukee, merging it with the Tinsel Manufacturing Company to create the National Tinsel & Toy Manufacturing Company in 1920. In 1923, he renamed the enterprise National Tinsel Manufacturing Company. Christmas tree ornaments were manufactured at the building from its original construction in 1918 until 1998, by which time the company had become National Rennoc (operating under an arm called Santa’s Best).

The building conveys the early industrial, labor, and entrepreneurial history of Manitowoc and is associated with innovation within the Christmas tree ornament industry. During the early twentieth century, the company was a major local industry and employer of women. The enterprise emerged from the Stolze Manufacturing Company of Manitowoc, established in the late nineteenth century by German immigrant Henry Stolze, Jr. as one of the nation’s first Christmas tree ornament manufacturers outside the East Coast. Under subsequent owner William C. Protz, also a German immigrant, the company grew to become the largest of its kind in the nation and eventually the world by the beginning of World War II. The original 1918 portion of the building and its later additions (1919, 1926, 1927, and c. 1938-1956) together communicate the growth of the company, as mergers occurred and manufacturing activities evolved, under several generations of ownership by the Protz family who secured several ornament-related patents.