GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — On the second floor of the Grand Rapids Community Archive and Research Center are thousands of objects: desks, chairs, bed frames, stadium seats — even a trash can.
Each of those objects tells a different chapter of the same story: Furniture City.
“In Grand Rapids, it was...it really was a town that put kind of all of its eggs in that one basket of furniture making," said Alex Forist, the Grand Rapids Public Museum's chief curator.
It's a metaphorical basket formed by the foundation one man built 14 years before Grand Rapids became an official city.
"For a lot of people, this William Haldane, in about 1836, when he came to Grand Rapids, is kind of regarded as the 'Father of the Furniture City,'" Forist said.
Grand Rapids was just a frontier settlement at that point. It was a place missionaries, fur traders and Native Americans saw as their home, and a place Europeans saw as their future.
They were “starting to put down some roots and build up what would have been a small town of just a few 100 people," Forist said.
The boom started after the Civil War. The furniture industry needed a city with natural resources, people and access to markets.
Grand Rapids had all three.
“The rivers were how they got their raw materials to the factory," Forist said. "It was also an early source of power for the factories. A lot of them ran off of electricity that was generated by the flow of the Grand River.”
As a result, Grand Rapids's growth took shape in a way the country had never seen.
“Something like 30% of the labor in Grand Rapids, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, was working in this one industry," Forist said. "That's really uncommon, even in, you know, places that have an identification with a particular product like Detroit as the Motor City. Detroit was such a bigger city. The percentage of people that were working in automotive was smaller.”
As the workforce increased, the industry evolved.
"The furniture factories in Grand Rapids — they figured out how to make something that looked [complex] and make it affordable to middle-class people," Forist said. "It wasn't an assembly line, but they used machinery, and they made things in parts and then assembled them all together."
Eventually, Michigan's hardwood forests began to vanish. The materials people used to create the furniture were essentially exhausted.
Some companies were able to adapt, like the Metal Office Furniture Company, which became known as Steelcase.
However, much of the local industry was hit with a second shock — one it couldn't survive.
"The roaring '20s were good to Grand Rapids and the furniture industry," Forist said. "Then, of course, the Great Depression happens and kind of brings it all crashing down.”
Although the industry moved on, Grand Rapids still gives you a glimpse into what it once was.
While the Furniture City name has faded, it laid the groundwork for others to take its place.
“Furniture making really was baked into the early identity of the city," Forist said. "Even when that manufacturing left for other places, kind of in the mid-20th century, I think people had a hard time letting go of that, really, until a new identity, like Beer City, was there to take its place.”
READ MORE: Learn the hidden history and secrets of Grand Rapids in this brand-new book