How metal fabricators build community

The people at Phoenix Products in eastern Kentucky work together to form up a long sheet metal part.

Earlier this year economic historian Louis Hyman wrote a New York Times opinion piece about misconceptions about Main Street and what’s needed for a thriving rural America. His argument: Save for a few decades in the 1800s, Main Street hasn’t been a big economic driver for most of the country’s history. Mass production in the 1920s drove many small workshop manufacturers out of rural towns, and retail chains caused the slow demise of the family storefront.

Hyman writes about the potential of rural broadband, about how the Internet will allow a receptionist near the Finger Lakes in western New York to welcome people visiting a company office in San Francisco. “Today, the underlying values of Main Street—living and working with autonomy in your own small community—can be obtained, as long as you are willing to find that work online.

He makes a fair point, but from my perspective, finding work isn’t at the heart of the matter. It’s really about community. Specifically, it’s about doing good work together.

Consider Phoenix Products Inc., a rural metal fabricator and machine shop in the woods of eastern Kentucky. The nearest town, McKee, is about 15 miles away. Company President Tom Wilson opened the shop there for various reasons, but a principal one was to provide employment to a rural economy that needed it.

As a fabricator, though, Phoenix can provide something that an Internet startup can’t: the opportunity to work with others, not just online but in the real world—lifting long parts, positioning them on a triplet press brake, and moving together to form sheet metal parts. Working on broadband Internet, typing emails, and texting colleagues around the world is fine, but there’s something about working together to fabricate something tangible.

In a sense, working together to fabricate parts helps form a local community. And that is something much of America, both rural and urban, sorely lacks.