Over the past 130 years, a four-square-block site in the Village of Bradley has been occupied by four different manufacturing plants (two of which were claimed to be the world’s largest of their kind), provided employment for literally thousands of men and women, and suffered two disastrous fires.

On the original 1891 plat map of North Kankakee (the village didn’t adopt the name Bradley until 1895), the title “Chair Factory” is shown on blocks 59, 60, 77 and 78. The site was bounded by Michigan Avenue, Goodwin Street, West Avenue and South Street.

The “chair factory” noted on the plat was the Gibbs Chair Co., one of four large furniture manufacturing plants that entrepreneur J. Herman Hardebeck had persuaded to move to his brand-new town.

In May 1891, Hardebeck had acquired a large plot of farmland in the undeveloped area between Kankakee and Bourbonnais. It extended from Vasseur Avenue (now Kennedy Drive) on the west to the Illinois Central Railroad tracks on the east. He promptly had the land surveyed and laid out in lots for residential, commercial and industrial uses.

The key to success for Hardebeck’s town was to attract manufacturing plants that would create jobs and, thus, workers who would buy lots and build homes. In addition to the Gibbs operation, plants locating in North Kankakee were the Ideal Folding Bed Company, Turk Furniture Company and Demme & Dierckes Furniture Company. By late summer, 1892, the Gibbs, Turk and Ideal plants were employing a total of 1,200 workers; Demme & Dierckes, still under construction, expected to hire 1,000 employees.

At the end of 1892, the Kankakee Daily Gazette described the “marvel” that was North Kankakee: “From a tract of farmland, barren of a stick of lumber, there has sprung up within 15 months a manufacturing village comprising a resident population of 450 ... four hotels and boarding houses, 22 stores, a railroad station, post office, four furniture factories ... and all the primary elements of a thriving town.”

The Gibbs factory on its four-square-block site was substantial, consisting of two large buildings housing a workforce of 600 men. Each of the four-story-tall buildings was 60 feet by 250 feet.

In 1893, a national financial panic devastated businesses nationwide; Gibbs Chair and two of the other three North Kankakee factories were among the victims (only Turk Furniture managed to survive). The once-bustling Gibbs factory site stood idle for more than six years.

The new century brought a new owner for the empty factory. The Gazette reported on Jan. 3, 1900, “The Standard Starch Company of Kankakee, Ill., is sending out an announcement, stating that it has almost completed the largest starch factory in the world, with a capacity of 6,000 bushels of corn daily, nearly double that of any other factory.”

The starch company was remodeling the former Gibbs Co. factory buildings, and would later add two one-story structures. One of the new buildings would be 250 feet by 80 feet in size, the other, 115 feet by 140 feet.

The first sample lots of starch were produced on March 10, 1900, and production ramped up through the summer and fall; by mid-September, the Gazette was reporting, “The starch factory is never idle. It runs seven days in the week and 24 hours a day.”

A workforce of 125 was employed at the plant when it was renamed as the Archer Starch Co. in June. By the time the factory was running around-the-clock in September, employment had risen to 200.

On March 12, 1901, disaster struck as flames raced through the factory’s buildings, burning them to the ground. The company’s owners decided not to rebuild. The debris was cleared away, and the site once again stood idle, this time for almost a decade.

The next chapter in the Bradley site’s story opened in 1903, when the P.E. Kroehler Company bought the vacant industrial property. In June 1911, the Naperville-based company opened the first of two huge furniture factory buildings it would eventually operate at the Bradley location.

The factory that opened in 1911 was designated as Factory No. 3, or “the Kankakee plant.” The second factory, which opened in 1930, was called Factory No. 4 or “the Bradley plant.” A 1928 newspaper article noted that Factory No. 3 “enjoys the distinction of being the world’s largest factory devoted to the manufacture of living room furniture.”

The Kroehler furniture factory was the longest-running business at the Bradley site, operating there for seven decades, from 1911 until 1981. The company fell upon hard times during the mid-1970s, and never recovered. A Chicago investment company bought a controlling interest in the distressed manufacturer in 1981.The following year, a firm called Luxor Spring Company began manufacturing furniture under the Kroehler brand name in Factory No. 4. It went bankrupt in 1986, however, effectively ending the history of the property as a major manufacturing site.

On June 9, 1989, history repeated itself as fire destroyed a large building on the property — the former Kroehler Factory No. 3. The former Factory No. 4 is used for warehousing and houses a number of small businesses.

Why did the Village of North Kankakee change its name to Bradley?

Answer: The largest of the North Kankakee factories to shut down in the economic downturn of the 1890s was the Demme & Dierkes Furniture Co. Herman Hardebeck was determined to find a new manufacturer to fill the large plant, and did so in April 1895. A Chicago plow maker, the David Bradley Manufacturing Company, agreed to move its operations to the vacant furniture plant. A name change was part of the agreement: on July 13, 1895, the North Kankakee Village Board voted to change the town’s name to Bradley City (a year later, “City” was dropped from the name).