Allan Herschell was already retired when he started the company that made him famous. He was born in Scotland in 1851, came to America in 1870, and landed in North Tonawanda in the early 1870s as a partner in an iron foundry. He watched one company go bankrupt and walked away from a second. Then, at 64, he came out of retirement and built a new carousel factory on Thompson Street. The complex he put up is still standing, still has a carousel turning inside it, and is one of the last carousel factories left in the United States.
Four builders, one small city
North Tonawanda in the early 1900s was a carousel town the way Detroit was a car town. At one point four carousel builders were operating here at the same time, in a city you can drive across in ten minutes. Herschell was behind most of them. Armitage-Herschell ran from 1872 to 1903, starting as an iron foundry and branching into hand-carved wooden carousels in 1883 after Herschell saw one on a trip to New York City. He left in 1901 to start Herschell-Spillman with his in-laws, the Spillmans, who kept the name until 1916 and then became Spillman Engineering. Then came the Allan Herschell Company in 1915.
The scale is the part that stops people. A state historical marker at the site credits the operation with more than 3,000 hand-carved wooden carousels, shipped to carnivals, parks, and resorts across the United States and abroad: Canada, Mexico, South Africa, India. The museum's longtime director has said that by 1900 the shops were finishing a carousel a day. Up to 75 carvers worked the floor. Almost none of that machinery stayed home.
Why the foundry mattered
The reason a boiler man could take over the carousel business is unglamorous and completely convincing. The hardest part of an early carousel was not the horses. It was the steam engine that turned the thing. Herschell already built boilers and machinery, and North Tonawanda (the Lumber City, where the Erie Canal met the Niagara River) had lumber stacked everywhere. He had the difficult half of the problem solved and the raw material for the easy half sitting on the docks.
The horses reflect that thinking. Herschell's were built plain and tough, sized to be knocked down, loaded on a rail car, and set up again the next week. These were portable machines for traveling carnivals, not the elaborate park carousels of Coney Island. Simple, elegant, and engineered to survive being moved a hundred times.
The 1916 Special Number One
You can ride one. The museum runs a three-abreast portable carousel built in 1916, a Special Number One, among the first machines shipped after the Thompson Street plant opened. It is indoors, it is original, and it is not roped off. For a long stretch the strange fact about North Tonawanda was that a city which built thousands of carousels did not have a working one of its own.
That changed because ten people met in 1979 to talk about saving the factory and then went door to door selling ride tickets to neighbors to raise the down payment: about $10,000, a few dollars at a time. The museum opened to the public in the early 1980s; sources give 1983 and 1984. The factory complex, six buildings put up between roughly 1910 and 1915 (mill, carving and pattern shop, paint shop, roundhouse, machine shop, assembly and testing), went on the National Register in 1985.
The last perforator
The building also holds the only functioning Wurlitzer perforator in existence. Wurlitzer bought the North Tonawanda barrel-organ works in 1909 and made the band organs that gave carousels their sound, and those organs ran on punched paper rolls. The perforator is the machine that punches them. The museum keeps more than 1,600 original hand-punched master rolls and still cuts new rolls on the original equipment.
That is the same company, in the same city, that built the Mighty Wurlitzer sitting in the Riviera Theatre downtown. North Tonawanda spent forty years making the machines that other towns had fun on, and two of the best surviving examples are within walking distance of each other.
Wear it
The Herschell Carrousel Factory tee is part of the ALL America City collection: real Western New York landmarks, one per shirt. Round out the North Tonawanda set with the Riviera Theatre and Gateway Harbor, and see what else is close to home in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it on the carousel. It is one of the few landmarks on this list you are allowed to ride.