The collegiate summer level Rockford Rivets will pay tribute to their hometown’s textile and manufacturing heritage when they take to the field as the Screw City Sock Monkeys for two games this season. The Sock Monkeys nickname derives from Rockford, Illinois’s claim to “Home of the Sock Monkey”—a term the town can claim thanks to actual patent litigation.
Rockford has played host to the red-heeled socks that are the hallmark of sock monkeys for well more than a century. The town’s association with the knitting history can be traced to Swedish immigrant John Nelson, who invented a knitting machine and established the Nelson Knitting Company in the 1870s. That history lives on today in the form of the world’s largest sock monkey—just over seven feet tall—housed at Rockford’s Midway Village Museum.
The Rivets’ rebrand uses “Screw City” as its geographic signifier, a reference to the town’s association with fasteners. In the late 1960s, Rockford was the fifth-largest producer of screws, thanks to government contracts, earning it the nickname “Screw Capital of the World.”
The logo, designed in house, features a sock monkey character running with a baseball bat and a screw. The team will take the field July 20 and 27.