Gibson Guitars and the Workers Who Stayed

In nineteen oh two, five Kalamazoo businessmen pooled their resources with a local store clerk who had been spending his evenings hand-carving mandolins in his room. The store clerk was named Orville Gibson, and the company they formed, the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company, would go on to make some of the most important musical instruments in American history.

Gibson moved into its permanent home at two hundred twenty-five Parsons Street in nineteen seventeen, a facility that would expand five times over the next sixty years until it occupied an entire city block and one hundred twenty thousand square feet of floor space. The factory employed nearly a thousand workers at its peak and produced more than a thousand guitars a day during the postwar boom.

In nineteen fifty-two, Gibson introduced the Les Paul solid-body electric guitar, designed in collaboration with jazz guitarist Les Paul. The instrument helped define the sound of rock and roll for the next seven decades. It was built in this building, by workers who lived in this city, using skills passed from one bench to the next.

Then the company's fortunes shifted. Sales declined through the nineteen seventies. In nineteen eighty-four, Gibson moved its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, and closed the Parsons Street plant. The workers who had spent their careers there faced the same sudden ending that came to autoworkers and paper mill employees across the industrial Midwest.

Some of those workers refused to let the facility go dark. Five former Gibson employees, led by luthiers who had spent their careers on the Parsons Street floor, formed Heritage Guitar in nineteen eighty-five and took over the old factory. They kept making guitars by hand, in the same building, using many of the same techniques. Heritage Guitar still operates today, a direct continuation of the craft tradition that Orville Gibson started when he was still just a store clerk with a mandolin and some good wood.