This was summed up in the company's tag line: "The gift that starts the home." These advertisements sought to equate the ideal of domesticity with a Lane "Hope Chest," in which a young woman stored clothing or home furnishings in anticipation of marriage. Reaching new heights of production and prosperity in the 1920s, Lane began to advertise its products nationally. When the plant reconverted to the peacetime production of cedar chests, workers and management were able to adopt some of the mass production methods they had learned during the war emergency. To meet wartime demands, Lane introduced an efficient assembly system at its factory. After struggling through the first few years of its existence, Lane's fortunes received a boost during World War I, when the company contracted with the federal government to produce pine ammunition boxes. One of the Virginia concerns central to the state's emergence as a furniture center was the Lane Company, maker of the iconic Lane Cedar Chest.Įdward Hudson Lane (1891–1973) founded the company in Altavista, Campbell County, in 1912, at a junction of the Virginian and Southern railways, which allowed for easy transportation of materials to and finished products from the factory. Although North Carolina came to be synonymous with the furniture industry, Virginia played an important role as well. At the turn of the twentieth century, furniture-making became, along with textiles, one of the South's manufacturing mainstays, drawing on the region's plentiful natural resources and relatively inexpensive labor supply.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |