St. Pierre represents Mass. in White House, and gives horseshoes to the president
Courtesy/St. Pierre
St. Pierre forge shop manager Jose Mirabal, Edward St. Pierre and Peter St. Pierre staff a booth at a "made in America" event at the White House last month.
Courtesy/St. Pierre
St. Pierre Manufacturing Co.'s Jose Mirabal right, shakes hands with President Trump at the White House's "Made in America" event last month. Peter and Edward St. Pierre look on.
For a manufacturing company nearing its 100th birthday, Worcester’s St. Pierre Manufacturing Corp. has never been one for the spotlight, but it got more attention than most companies would dream of when it was invited to the White House last month for an event celebrating products made in America.
St. Pierre got its start in 1920 making tire chains. Founder Henry St. Pierre later bought a metal-forging plant, and after demand for aircraft parts and anchor chains dipped after World War II, the Vermont native began making pitching horseshoes.
St. Pierre Manufacturing has been most known for those horseshoes ever since, even as it continues making chains, shackles, hoists and other equipment for heavy lifting. It says it is the country’s largest pitching horseshoe manufacturer.
In an interview, Peter St. Pierre, Henry’s grandson, talked about the company’s history and that visit to Washington.
The company got its start making tire chains, and it still does. Why did it branch out to horseshoes and bocce sets? It’s a completely different audience.
My grandfather, Henry St. Pierre, grew up always playing horseshoes on a farm in Vermont, so after he bought Rogers Drop Forging Company in the late 1920s, he was able to make horseshoes to play a game he liked with the excess capacity he had. That’s kind of continued on to today.
Thanks to those horseshoes, St. Pierre was featured last month in the White House for a “Made in America” event. What was that like?
It was an incredible honor to be chosen by the White House to represent Massachusetts. We were chosen for our pitching horseshoes because it’s a unique product, our longevity and our history and our legacy as a manufacturer in an old industrial city. We basically got to spend the day in White House, which was amazing. After we set up, we were able to walk around many of the rooms and walk out on the South Lawn, where we saw the president’s helicopter land.
We talked to President Donald Trump for about five minutes about our history and our products. We also met with many senators and other dignitaries, and others in the White House: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the White House advisor Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer. It was truly quite an amazing day.
You gave the president horseshoes as a gift?
I Introduced myself, the company, and some of its history. I went with my father, Edward, and we brought a 30-year-plus employee, forge shop manager, Jose Mirabal. We said, “We’d like to present these to you.” He was interested in which one of our horseshoes was the best, and we explained it was the Eagle Tournament horseshoe. He asked why, we said because it has more weight in the tips, it’s bigger. The president said, “These are heavy,” and he told us he’d put them in his library.
How much of an honor is it to be named the only such company from Massachusetts?
We got a phone call late on a Thursday before the event from someone claiming to be from the White House, and they wanted to speak to somebody. The person who answered the phone said, you know, this could be a prank call.
Someone from the White House went online and looked at products, and I think they saw something unique in our product that was widely available on the internet, and looked at our history and saw the longevity.
In terms of the notoriety, leading up to the event and after the event, we were just constantly interviewed by news crews, the White House press corps, and by news once we came back home. Our image of Jose shaking hands with the president, with my dad and I in the background, was one of three images of the day that was shown on CBS Evening News that night, which was pretty amazing. It’s been wonderfully crazy.
There’s a lot of controversy around the White House. Has the company gotten much comment or criticism for participating?
We are just honored to be considered, to be invited, to be asked to participate, in a distinction by the White House on a day that became Made in America Day. We look at it basically as an honor, and we were proud to be selected and to be recognized, and I think it reflects the company's longevity and its success.
You say you’re the largest American manufacturer of pitching horseshoes today. Does that mean you have a big share of the market, or is much of it overseas?
We've been making them since the ‘20s, and we make them every day. We sell to big box stores, mom-and-pop stores and online resellers. We have an ability to make up to 9,000 horseshoes a day, not that we usually make nearly that many. We buy almost all our steel from Nucor Steel out of Auburn, N.Y. It comes in 20-foot lengths and diameters of ¾ inch to 1 inch. We then heat it up to 2,300 degrees and put into two-story forging press, bend them into a U shape, and then put into a die and pressed into a horseshoe. They then have to cool for at least four hours.
How hard is it to stay competitive as a manufacturer in Massachusetts when these products could conceivably be made overseas far cheaper?
It’s definitely a competitive marketplace. We forge our horseshoes, and that makes the steel stronger than the raw steel. Most of our competition is in China, and most of the horseshoes in China have a very basic design for the most part, and they’re cast, which means the steel is melted and poured into molds. So it’s weaker, there are air pockets, so there’s more of a chance of breakage. We’re competing on the lower end, but our products are very much superior. We like to refer to ourselves as an authentic horseshoe maker.
Are there challenges to having so many members – and multiple generations – of the family involved running the company?
I work with my dad, Edward, and my uncles, Richard and Henry, and my brother Michael. We have three different divisions — handling and rigging, chain and wire rope, and horseshoes — and we’re all in charge of each, so we have our work cut out for us. We really don't step on each other’s toes. We’re proud to have the legacy with deep roots in Worcester, that we’ve been involved in that history and that legacy. We’re one of the few manufacturers that have been able to survive in Worcester, all because of that, because we all get along. I’m very lucky to have a family that’s not only well-known but well-liked by many people. We’ve always found a way to move forward with that.
This interview was conducted and edited for clarity by Grant Welker, WBJ news editor.
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