The spring company has been in operation making leaf springs for well over a hundred years and by all accounts, our leaf spring shop is the oldest continuously running manufacturer of handcrafted leaf springs in business in the USA. It was originally the St. Louis branch of the Jenkin-Vulcans leaf spring company that produced leaf springs primarily for Ford Model-T cars and trucks which would date it going back to at least 1908 when the Model-T first went into production. But prior to the advent of the automobile, leaf springs were the primary suspension system for the horse-drawn wagon so it’s hard to say when the Jenkins-Vulcan company started business.
What we do know is that the Moog brothers came up from Florida to St. Louis in the early part of the 1900s and bought the spring company from Jenkins-Vulcan in 1919. As time went on, the Moog brothers ambitions extended beyond leaf springs and into car parts production which they continue to do to this day.
They sold the spring company located at 3126 Samuel Shepherd Drive to an enterprising young man named Howard Emge in 1945 who successfully continued running the spring company using the same manufacturing process until transferring ownership and management to his son Perry in 1989. Today, the manufacturing process used for leaf springs is essentially unchanged from the original one used my Jenkins-Vulcan over a hundred years ago. In an era where technology has succeeded in disrupting businesses everywhere from hotels (AirBnB) to taxis (Uber), the Saint Louis Spring Company has proven to be immune and continue to be one of the last holdouts of the old manufacturing processes that used to define America. We continue to make things by hand.
