Our history
Since 1949, in Oklahoma City, on SW 21st Street.
Cook's Fence & Iron Co Inc has had four owners and one continuous trade. Every one of them was a working fabricator before they were an owner, and that is still true of the crew in our shop today. This is the short version of how a welding instructor's fence company became one of Oklahoma's most complete ornamental iron fabrication facilities.
Read the four chapters below, or go straight to what we build in the shop today.
Dick O. Cook founds Cook's Fence & Awning. He had spent the war as a welding instructor in the shipyards of San Diego, and came home to Oklahoma with the trade in his hands. Over the next three decades he built the company's name on honesty, quality workmanship and competitive prices, the same three things our customers still mention in their reviews.
Cook retires and sells the company to Bill Svejkovsky and Frank Swanda, partners of many years in Meridian Sheet Metal. They bought a fence company with a reputation already attached to it, and they wanted to continue the tradition of excellence Cook had established, not start over.
David Swanda, who had been hired to manage the company and learned the trade working alongside Dick Cook himself, purchases it outright. He renames it Cook's Fence & Iron Co Inc, a name chosen to say plainly what the shop had grown into: a fence company that fabricates its own iron rather than only installing someone else's panels.
Our current employees carry 175+ years of combined service between them. We're rated A+ with the Better Business Bureau, we belong to the National Ornamental and Miscellaneous Metals Association, and we are a preferred Ameristar contractor. We give free estimates on everything we build, and we offer military discounts.
What the name means now
Fence & Iron isn't a slogan. It's the org chart.
Most companies that sell fence buy their panels from somebody else and install them. Ours has an anvil in it. We weld, bend, roll, hammer, forge, punch, shear and press iron in our own shop, and we detail custom work in AutoCAD before anyone lights a torch. That capability is the entire reason David Swanda changed the name in 1985, and it's the reason the shop still looks like this.
We honor manufacturers' warranties on the products we install, and we back our own fabrication work with the same honesty Dick Cook started the company on in 1949. Free estimates, always. Military discounts, always. If you'd rather talk it through first, send us the job details and we'll come look at it.
What the shop is signed up to
A+
Rating with the Better Business Bureau.
NOMMA
Member of the National Ornamental and Miscellaneous Metals Association.
Ameristar
Preferred contractor. We honor manufacturers' warranties.
175+
Years of combined service among the people here now.