In 1920, Woodrow Wilson was the United States president, the eighteenth amendment had made alcohol consumption illegal, Wallace Beery starred in a film version of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Last of the Mohicans and the H.W. Gossard Company was the world’s leading manufacturer of ladies’ undergarments.
Henry Williamson Gossard made an impact on the women’s undergarment industry when he was a representative for a wholesale dressmaking company in 1900. On a business trip to Paris, he was introduced to a new front-lacing corset patented by Countess Consuelo Gould de Grasse. This type of corset had the approval of doctors because it did not harmfully squeeze internal organs.
In 1901, Gossard created the H.W. Gossard Company. He imported 150 of the new corsets at a cost of $25 each at a time when corsets sold for anywhere between thirty-five cents and $1.50. He decided to produce them himself and for years was the sole manufacturer of front-lacing corsets in America.
In 1919, Ishpeming’s Braastad Store Company, the most extensive market in the U.P., dissolved and left its large building unoccupied. At the same time, the Gossard Company was undergoing an expansion.
Members of the Ishpeming Industrial Association were looking for a type of industry that would be willing to take over the Braastad building and, in turn, diversify the city’s economy. They met with Gossard himself and reached an agreement: the city of Ishpeming would raise funds to purchase the building from the Braastad estate and turn it over to the company which would then establish a factory.
On April 19, 1920, Agnes Harnett, the factory’s first employee, signed up to be an operator for the new plant located on Cleveland Avenue. The following day, the Gossard Company occupied the building and opened for business under plant manager E.S. Axline, a Gossard employee from the Chicago office, and superintendent Maynard Slater.
A week later, Gossard sent a letter to Axline commenting on the first days of production at the new factory. “The record for the first week in Ishpeming is undoubtedly one hundred per cent,” Gossard wrote. “That fact that no operator was absent or quit is a matter to be heralded throughout the entire organization as it is unique and augurs well indeed for the future of the organization in Ishpeming. Accept, please, my congratulations.”
In addition to Harnett, twenty-seven employees were hired in 1920. None of the machine operators had experience in the needle trade and the company provided all training necessary to manufacture its products. The Ishpeming factory specialized in producing bras, girdles or a combination of the two in white, black, pink and peach.
In its first year, the Ishpeming plant employed fifty women, had seventy-five machines and produced 2,000 dozen garments. By 1939, it employed 450 women and fifty men, had between 600 and 700 machines and produced between 150,000 and 200,000 dozen garments.
Edna Swanson became a “Gossard girl” in September 1932 when she was seventeen years old and a new Ishpeming High School graduate.
“I just loved it because I loved to sew,” Swanson said. “I couldn’t wait for school to end. I was ready to go right after school was out, but they weren’t hiring then.”
Swanson worked alongside two friends and three of her aunts. Two other aunts had previously worked there, and her mother would eventually for a brief time.
At the factory, employees could work in a variety of areas, including cutting, section fitting, boning, lacing, pressing, seaming, fancy stitching, eyelet making, buttonholing and buttoning. Swanson began working on seaming and later used both three-needle and six-needle sewing machines.
“It seems to me I also worked on a twelve-needle machine,” Swanson said.
Production at the Gossard factory was done primarily using a process similar to an assembly line. Each woman would receive a bundle with materials for one dozen garments. She was responsible for sewing her part of each garment. When her portion of the twelve garments was finished, the bundle was repacked and delivered to the next shaft where another girl would complete the next part of the process. This continued until the end of the day.
“You only worked on what was your part of the brassiere,” Swanson said. “Maybe that was just the little half of one side.”
A typical day at the factory began at 7:00 a.m. and ended at 4:00 p.m. The hours were subject to change depending on the workload. The power was turned off each day at 9:00 a.m. so that the machines could be oiled and dusted.
“We had fun,” Swanson said. “When we oiled our machines, we’d have a candy bar or a sandwich or a piece of cake. We’d sit and visit all day long.”
Gossard employees were paid every Friday according to the number of garments they completed in the course of each day. The piecework system, as it was called, had been instituted in 1933 and was the same as other members of the Corset and Brassiere Manufacturers’ Association.
“There was a big card on the bag and you’d clip off what you had done,” Swanson said. “That’s how you knew how much you’d make that day.”
Swanson married in 1941. She left the Gossard factory in September of 1943 to join her husband in Ely (Nevada) where he was stationed with the military. Even there, the Gossard legacy was with her.
“I saw a little shop out in Nevada and I saw a Gossard [sign] so I went in,” Swanson said. “I told the lady that I’d worked at a Gossard factory and she was so interested. She said ‘I have a few little things that I’d like to complain about.’”
Swanson took the woman’s list of complaints and mailed it to her aunt who was a factory floor lady.
Swanson and her husband returned to Ishpeming in 1945 with their new baby. She did not return to her job.
“I enjoyed working,” she said. “I intended to come back, but it just wasn’t to be.”
While Swanson was in Nevada, the Gossard factory in Ishpeming had instituted a new program. In March 1944, the H.W. Gossard Company began serving a free noon meal to its more than 500 employees at the Ishpeming factory. The basement of the plant was remodeled into a state-of-the-art cafeteria, later described by The Mining Journal as “the pride of Gossard.” Chef Paul Maloney and his staff of six became permanent personnel.
The idea came from company president R.C. Stirton. Each day’s menu was designed to provide the maximum nutritional value for women doing their type of work.
Employees were divided into groups of eighty. Groups were dismissed every seven or eight minutes beginning at 11:30 a.m. The last departmental group was in the cafeteria at 12:10 p.m. and all employees were served using only 200 trays.
According to The Daily Mining Journal, the first meal, served on March 20, consisted of baked sugar cured ham with champagne sauce, candied yams, choice of beets or minted carrots, chef’s special salad, rolls and bread, ice cream and choice of coffee, tea or milk.
“On opening day, the cafeteria was gay and warm with the color and fragrance of a dozen floral sprays presented to the management by employees of various departments, another fine manifestation of good employer-employee relationship,” reported The Daily Mining Journal.
The Gossard Company was expanding. It had other factories in Logansport and Huntington (Indiana), in Canada and in Australia. It also had warehouses in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Toronto, Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Sydney (Australia).
The company was expanding locally as well. In 1945, the yearly payroll for the Ishpeming plant totaled $800,000. In the beginning of September 1946, the Ishpeming factory employed 580 workers and was expected to reach 600 by the end of that month.
In February 1947, plans were announced for a second Gossard factory in Marquette County, this time in Gwinn. The Gossard Company purchased and remodeled a building that Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company had used as a hospital. The small patient rooms were turned into two large production areas on two floors as well as office space and storerooms. The building also received a new roof, heating plant with blower device and fluorescent lighting. The structure was reinforced with steel.
Cutting still was done at Ishpeming, but bundles were sent to Gwinn for assembly. Twenty to thirty operations, including inspection, were done at the Gwinn plant. As in Ishpeming, a free noon meal was provided and the factory closed for two weeks each summer for employee vacations and plant maintenance.
Although the addition of the Gwinn location provided the company with more employees and more space, a decision was made one year later to remodel the Ishpeming factory.
On March 26, 1948, The Mining Journal announced that Ranz Menze of Marquette had been awarded the contract for construction and was prepared to start the project immediately. Plans, created by Marquette architects Grant and Norton, called for the construction of a fourth floor, elevator shaft and loading shed. A new steel framework was installed, windows were replaced and a new main entrance and exit were built.
The fourth floor added 14,000 square feet for a facility total of 72,000 square feet. It housed stock rooms and was used for cutting, while the second and third floors were used for manufacturing. Inspection and shipping was handled on the first floor where offices were located.
Until 1948, Gossard employees at Ishpeming remained non-union. The first vote for union representation by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was taken on May 27, 1943. The proposal was struck down by a vote of 251-159. Employees voted again in 1944 and 1945 to remain independent.
The ILGWU was concerned about Ishpeming employees and the result of their independence on the rest of the garment industry. The company had threatened to move work from unionized facilities to Ishpeming where, it said, the workers were more productive.
Geraldine Gordon (later DeFant), an ILGWU representative, was brought to Ishpeming to try to organize its employees.
“It became increasingly obvious to the union that it had to organize the Ishpeming plant, or have it continue to threaten wage standards at the union plants,” DeFant said in a 1989 Mining Journal article.
In November 1948, the Ishpeming employees voted to be represented by the ILGWU. This was due in part to the piecework system of wages and the abandonment of a straight dollar incentive program in favor of a confusing point structure. The rising popularity and clout of the Steelworkers’ Union also contributed to union success at the Ishpeming factory. The Gwinn plant remained non-union.
Once the ILGWU began representing Gossard employees in Ishpeming, negotiations between them and the company stalled. The union asked for the standard contract in place at all of the unionized Gossard plants, but the company only offered a two-cent-per-hour raise without union security or a seniority system.
On April 12, 1949, workers in Ishpeming walked off the job. The ILGWU organized effective, around-the-clock demonstrations and established a union hall on Second Street. It offered activities to help pass the time including classes on labor topics and child-rearing and paid employees $5,000 per week in strike benefits overall.
Hazel Schroderus was hired in 1945 to work on wide and narrow binding and later worked on the floor transporting bundles from shaft to shaft. She was a striking Gossard employee.
“If you needed anything to eat or if your family needed a doctor, the union paid for it,” Schroderus said.
Picketers were sent regularly to the non-union Gwinn factory to protest, peacefully, the delivery of unfinished bundles from Ishpeming.
“There used to be one or two carloads that would go to Gwinn to picket,” Schroderus said. “They didn’t want [the union] in there.”
The orderly protest was ended abruptly one day in Gwinn as a female motorist veered into the crowd and struck nine picketers; three were seriously injured.
“I was on the back side of the crowd and I saw when that car came around,” Schroderus said. “She just came around the corner and plowed right into the people. I remember a girl who had to have a plate put in her head. Many others had aches and pains.”
Marquette County prosecutor John Voelker later charged the female driver with felonious assault.
That was the last violent occurrence during the strike, although it continued for months. The Ishpeming City Council as well as community organizations begged mayor Mark Willey to ask the governor for police intervention. Willey, whose sister was a member of the union’s negotiating team, refused.
In early June, the city council adopted a resolution to ask the governor to send state police to break the strike. It was not signed by Mayor Willey. The governor sent a personal representative instead of the police.
Finally, on August 3, 1949, an agreement was reached between the ILGWU and the Gossard Company for the equivalent of a six-cents-per-hour raise, union security, arbitration and seniority provisions. One year after the strike, wages increased twenty-five to thirty percent as a result of piecework negotiations.
The Gossard factory in Ishpeming continued to manufacture ladies’ undergarments until 1976 when the company announced it would close the plant on December 31. Production was phased out and moved to four factories in Indiana.
E.J. Tipton, vice president of manufacturing in Chicago, confirmed the closure in a November 1 Mining Journal article. He said the cost of transportation between Ishpeming and Indiana as well as the “general business climate in the state of Michigan” led to the decision.
One hundred sixty employees lost their jobs as a result of the closure. Some management team workers were offered transfers to other Gossard plants, but transfers were not offered to non-management. Employees were eligible for unemployment benefits and other compensation from the ILGWU depending on their length of employment with the company.
Today, the Pioneer Square occupies the old Gossard factory. It houses a variety of smaller businesses as well as the 96th District Court.
For the fifty-six years the Gossard Company was a presence in Ishpeming, countless residents earned an honest living and supported the local economy.
“A lot of girls worked there,” Schroderus said. “It gave women the freedom of getting out and earning their own living. It was a good place to work.”
—Erin Elliott

Editor’s Note: The Marquette County History Museum is looking for garments manufactured at Ishpeming’s Gossard factory to add to its permanent collection. Anyone wishing to donate items can contact the museum at 226-3571.

Marquette Monthly(TM),  *  Site Comments? Web Design