The Cass City plant that puts fuel in engines worldwide

Pull the cord on a chainsaw or a leaf blower somewhere in the world, and the little fuel system inside it may have been made in Cass City. That’s a village of a couple thousand people, ringed by bean and beet fields in the heart of the Thumb. The company is Walbro, and engine people know the name even if they’ve never heard of the town.

Walbro was founded in Michigan in 1950 and moved to Cass City in 1954. It makes carburetors, fuel pumps, and fuel tanks — the guts that feed gas to small engines. Its parts go into mowers, generators, outboard motors, and farm machines. The company has plants in the United States, Japan, Thailand, Mexico, and China, and close to 2,000 workers in all. About 350 of them are in Michigan, which is a lot for a town this size.

It has stayed put, too — no small thing in farm country, where the young people often leave. In 2021 Walbro picked Cass City for an $11.4 million expansion and up to forty new jobs, choosing it over rival sites in Indiana, Ohio, and Mexico. A global parts maker decided to keep growing in a village most of the state couldn’t find on a map.

What makes it worth a second thought is the mismatch. Cass City takes its name from General Lewis Cass and the river that runs nearby, and for most of its life it has been a farming village like a dozen others in the Thumb. But tucked inside it is a company whose products hum inside engines from here to Asia. Each fall the combines roll in off the fields a few miles from a plant whose fuel systems are spinning blades and pistons half a world away.