Hammersmith finds success with Vail line made in Holton

Seventeen years ago, Horton-based Hammersmith Manufacturing expanded into Holton to take over the recently-vacated Alamo Group facility at 10th Street and Vermont Avenue, more than doubling the available space for the company’s production lines of heavy-duty construction equipment.

Today, the facility, still owned by Hammersmith, has been transformed into the manufacturing base for “the fastest-growing manufacturer of severe-duty land management attachments” in the country, according to Amanda Slavens, marketing director for Hammersmith subsidiary Vail Products, which manufactures the vast majority of its products at the Holton facility.

It’s a statement that Hammersmith president and CEO Ed Hammersmith agrees with — albeit not too loudly.

“We’ve always been the quiet company,” Hammersmith said. “But I do think people might want to know that we started our Horton facility from ground zero, and I mean zero. We developed the products and the sales team from scratch. Then we started a product line from scratch, and now about 65 to 70 percent of everything Hammersmith makes would be that attachment line.”

That line includes brush cutters, drum and disc mulchers, tree saws and other tools that can be attached to excavators, mini-excavators and skid steer/compact track loaders, as well as attachments for dozers, motor graders and construction excavators used in the construction industry.

“The term ‘severe duty’ is used because we build our attachments heavy-duty with the highest-grade materials,” Slavens said. “We build them to handle extreme conditions and last beyound the life of many other attachments.”

Now, Ed Hammersmith and other company officials are looking to increase production of Vail’s implements, speaking with students at area high schools and Washburn Tech to promote careers with a family-owned-and-operated company with a lifetime of opportunity.

“We’re trying to build long-term careers. We don’t hire to fire employees, we hire to retire them,” said Staci Hammersmith, human resources director, echoing comments made by her father-in-law shortly after the company began assembly and painting work on cranes made for Lenexa-based Broderson Manufacturing.

Broderson was sold to “a company out of Chicago” in 2014, Ed Hammersmith said, and during that same year, Hammersmith launched its Vail line, expanding the work of the original Vail Fabrication company that Hammersmith purchased in 1995.

Since then, the Holton facility has focused mainly on the “severe-duty” implements marketed under the Vail brand while still sharing some work with the Horton facility.

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