From the Refrigerator Capital to the birthplace of Meijer

For more than a century, Greenville was known as the “Refrigerator Capital of the World.” Starting with the Ranney Refrigerator Company in 1892, the town built refrigerators for famous brands — Gibson, Frigidaire, and finally Electrolux — and those factories employed thousands of people for generations. That era ended in 2006, when Electrolux closed its big Greenville plant and moved production to Mexico, a hard blow that cost the town about 2,700 jobs. Greenville has been working to reinvent its economy ever since.

Greenville has another claim to fame, though: it’s the birthplace of Meijer. In 1934, during the Great Depression, a Dutch immigrant and local barber named Hendrik Meijer opened a small grocery store here. With his teenage son Fred, that store grew into the Meijer supercenter chain now found across the Midwest. A statue downtown marks where it all began.

It’s a town with deep working roots — proud of what it built, and still writing its next chapter.