Grand Rapids: the original Furniture City

Long before it was anything else, Grand Rapids was ‘Furniture City.’ From the 1870s through the 1930s, it was the center of the American furniture industry — at one point, around a third of everyone working in the city made furniture. That’s a huge share for a single industry — bigger, by some accounts, than autos ever were in Detroit. It started with West Michigan’s huge pine forests: loggers floated timber down the Grand River to mills in town, and the river’s flowing water even helped power the early factories. Grand Rapids furniture got famous at a giant world’s fair in Philadelphia in 1876, where several local companies won medals, and after that ‘made in Grand Rapids’ meant quality furniture all over the country. The home-furniture giants are mostly gone now, but the city reinvented itself making office furniture — Steelcase, one of the biggest office-furniture makers in the world, is still based here. You can read the whole story on a historical marker in front of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, at Pearl and Front Streets downtown.