1919 ad for the No. 20 Horizontal Boring Machine

There was an Otter River maker of furniture machinery, W. E. Nichols, later Nichols & Williams. In 1876 a new firm was established, McKnight & Carter, who bought machine patterns from Nichols & Williams. In 1881 the name changed to L. G. McKnight & Co. Sometime after 1901 the name changed to L. B. McKnight & Son Co., and then sometime between 1930 and 1955 the name changed to McKnight Machinery Co.

After three generations of McKnight ownership, the company was sold in 1978 to Miller Machine Co. of Statesville, NC. A new company was formed, McKnight-Miller Co., Inc. and all McKnight operations moved to Statesville.

Information sources

• From History of the Town of Gardner, by Rev. Wm. D. Herrick, 1878.

  [Referring to the building of the Heywood Foundry Company] In the upper story of the main building, is the machine shop of Messrs. McKnight & Carter, whose room has a capacity of fifty by twenty feet. Upon the opposite side, is a carpenter's shop and the office of the company. Capital required in this business is $15,000, The amount of business done annually is $30,000.

• Worcester County Directory for 1878-79, published by Briggs & Co.
  • KcKnight & Carter, Gardner, MA: "McKnight & Carter, manufacturers of the new and improved variety moulding machine, chair boring, back and rocker tenoning, mortising, stretcher and adzing machines. Shafting and wood and iron pulleys. Gardner Mass. L. G. McKnight, George Carter."
  • Listings for McKnight & Carter for "chair machinery manufacturers".
  • Under "machinists and machinery manufacturers": McKnight & Carter.
  • Moulding machine manuafcturers: McKnight & Carter.
  • Planing machine manufacturers: McKnight & Carter (surface)
• From a 1910 issue of Wood Craft comes the following excerpt in a biography of L. G. McKnight.

  On his return he settled in Worcester, being engaged at the L. W. Pond works where he acted as a contractor for various lathe parts. He came to Gardner in 1876 and established a firm known as McKnight & Carter, which in 1881 was changed to L. G. McKnight & Co. Previous to this W. E. Nichols, or Nichols & Williams, of Otter River, Mass., had made chair machinery...

• A search failed to find more information on W. E. Nichols and Nichols & Williams, of Otter River. The only mentions we found were in various histories of L. G. McKnight. Most likely their information source was the company itself.
• Some of the information here was provided by Albert Shane, curator of the Museum of Our Industrial Heritage in Greenfield, MA.
• An ad in a 1920 issue of The Wood-Worker lists a used dowel machine from this company. Another ad from the company itself says that they "manufacture a complete line of chair, cane-cutting and bending machines."
• According to Dana Batory's first book, Vintage Woodworking Machinery Volume I, Yates-American's 1930 catalog mentions that they were the exclusive distributor of L. G. McKnight & Son's vocational machinery.
• An ad in 1955-56 Hitchcock Wood Worker's Digest Directory gives the name as McKnight Machinery Co.
• Searches of the "Making of America" Cornell archive for information on this company and its founder, Levi G. McKnight, did not produce anything.