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Furniture Making Industry Transitions to Construction Industry

From the All-Rental Company through to the Ziock Packaging Goods Factory, the alphabet of local industries during the past one hundred years was voluminous. Of these, no industry represented Rockford's growing reputation as a "town that built things" more then the furniture shops that were still flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century. These shops were dominated by Swedish owners and workers, almost to the exclusion of any other nationality. There were many sociological and demographic reasons for this monopoly but, in point of fact, the main reason was that Swedes were highly skilled at the crafts required in the furniture industry.

In what appeared to be the most natural of transitions, woodworkers in factories became carpenters, then house builders and finally commercial contractors. While this linear path was not followed by each Swede, it was apparent that the fathers, in the Swedish neighborhoods of Rockford, taught their male children the rudiments of carpentry at an early age. The lessons took root and flourished in the next generation's craftsmanship.

While the furniture industry couldn't survive the shifting economic priorities of the manufacturing and automobile-driven markets in post-WWI America, the shops provided the city with an early social fabric that manifested itself in the twentieth century construction companies.