Tagged: company towns

Changing Gears
11:26 am
Fri July 29, 2011

Road Trip: Orrville, more than a company town (Part 5)

Credit Dan Bobkoff / Changing Gears
John Schmid vice president of Smith Dairy in Orrville, OH. The family adopted the business name Smith before World War I—a time when the German-sounding Schmid was not an asset.

Our Changing Gears team has been on the road this week traveling to some of our company towns in the Midwest.

Changing Gears is a Michigan Radio project looking at the economic transformation of the industrial Midwest.

Our final stop is Orrville, Ohio: A place that seems like a company town, but there’s long been a whole lot more going on in Orrville.

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Changing Gears
10:16 am
Thu July 28, 2011

Road Trip: Norwalk saves its company (Part 4)

Credit Dan Bobkoff / Changing Gears
Saving Norwalk Furniture means about 150 locals have jobs again.

When a company bears the name of its hometown, it can be hard to separate the two. Such is the case with Norwalk Furniture and the town of Norwalk in Northern Ohio. Sue Lesch is the town’s mayor.

“It really is our flagship company,” said Sue Lesch, Norwalk’s mayor. “It’s the company we’re proud of. We’re known for furniture all over the country.”

For more than a hundred years, Norwalk Furniture made custom-order sofas and chairs in its Ohio factory. For a long time, it was the biggest business in town, employing about 700 in this town of 17,000.

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Changing Gears
8:00 am
Wed July 27, 2011

Ishpeming: Where iron ore built a city (Part 3 - with photos)

Our Changing Gears project is on the road, bringing you stories of towns where one company still affects everybody’s lives. Today we head north, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That’s where North America’s biggest supplier of iron ore has been blasting the earth, and creating jobs, for more than 160 years. 

Our destination is the city of Ishpeming. It’s small.  Basically, you can’t throw a rock here without hitting a miner.

Take Steve Carlson. After high school, he worked 37 years for the mines.

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Changing Gears
8:40 am
Tue July 26, 2011

Road Trip: Decatur, The Heart of Illinois Agribusiness (Part 2)

Credit Niala Boodhoo / Changing Gears
Corn being grown across the street from Archer Daniels Midland Co. headquarters in Decatur.

Our Changing Gears road trip continues. Yesterday, I was in Kohler, Wisconsin. Today, I went down state in Illinois to Decatur.

Driving south from Chicago, it only takes about 25 miles to hit the corn fields. For the next 150 miles to Decatur, it’s a sea of yellow corn tassels, a head tall.

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Changing Gears
10:38 am
Mon July 25, 2011

What company towns look like today: Kohler, Wisconsin (Part 1)

Credit Niala Boodhoo / Changing Gears
The name you see in many bathrooms around the country has its roots in Kohler, Wisconsin.

From Pullman in Chicago to Firestone in Akron, these employers loomed large in everyone's daily lives.

But what does a "company town" look like today?

The Changing Gears team hit the road to find out.

All this week, we’re looking at how these places are coping with economic change.

For our first story, I visited the village of Kohler, Wisconsin.

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