Kingsbury's original success was rooted in toys
As published in the Oct. 22 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
The story of Kingsbury Corp.'s early years, told repeatedly in marketing brochures and historical pamphlets and by proud employees, is the stuff of legend.
In 1894, Harry Thayer Kingsbury, a 25-year-old bicycle shop owner with a talent for mechanics, purchased the Wilkins Toy Co., which had been producing cast-iron toys in Keene since 1890.
Kingsbury's grandson and namesake, H. Thayer Kingsbury, 90, is now retired from the insurance industry and lives in Keene, where he's a frequent volunteer at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene.
But as a boy of 7 or 8 years he would take a basket full of candy his mother had made into the toy factory and peddle penuche, divinity and chocolate fudge to workers who were busy stamping out, painting, assembling and testing metal clockwork toys.
"My grandfather used to tell me, sometime in his 80s, that he took pride in the fact that he never fired a single person," Thayer Kingsbury said. "It was pretty much of a family operation. We had fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers; I mean whole family groups were working there."
During the Depression the factory shut down in the summer to save money, rather than laying off employees.
"They were trying to figure out how to survive, and this is what they came up with," Kingsbury said.
Kingsbury's father ran the toy company with his grandfather, producing an array of clever gadgets for sale in stores like JC Penney across the country and around the world. There were planes that flew, submarines that dove, mechanical banks that counted change, and clockwork replicas of every vehicle to be found on the road, complete with electric headlights.
An extensive collection of the company's toys are on display at the Historical Society of Cheshire County.
Harry Thayer Kingsbury was an "innovator and inventor," said Alan Rumrill, executive director of the society.
And it was innovation, rather than toys, that defined the company's future.
In 1916, Edward Kingsbury -- the elder son of the company's founder and Thayer Kingsbury's uncle -- graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering. Two years later, he invented a new kind of mechanical drill, designed to solve the problem of drilling axle holes in the wheels of the toy cars.
By 1928 the Kingsbury Machine Tool Co. was big enough to move into a new building next door to the toy factory, which then closed during the buildup to World War II.
From a single drilling machine the company's product evolved into machine tools that would drill, rotate and drill again to automatically produce custom-designed metal parts.
"It grew rather rapidly, but it was a sort of an evolution from just a little two-headed machine to sometimes it had 25 or 30 stations," Thayer Kingsbury recalled.
But while the company's products changed beyond recognition, the traditions of innovation and a close-knit workforce continued to the modern era.
tagged with: history, Keene N.H., Kingsbury Corporation, manufacturing
<< Winchester building on 'Seven to Save' list Embattled Kingsbury was a success story >>