Gerstner: The Tool Chest Every Machinist Wanted

In August 1941 a machinist named Les Brower took a job in IBM's new shop in Poughkeepsie, where every man at the bench had the same oak tool chest. He couldn't afford one, so he built a copy and signed the back wall in pencil. The chest he was copying was a Gerstner, and this video is the story of that box: who built it, who carried it, and why the family that made the first one in 1906 is the only maker left. It begins in Dayton, Ohio, where Harry Gerstner, a patternmaker's apprentice at 6 cents an hour, spent a year of evenings in a corner of his father's barrel shop building a chest with drawers instead of a pile, felt in the bottoms and a mirror under the lid. He sold the first one for 6 dollars, a week's pay, and put "& Sons" over the door. He never had sons. The name was for his father, a German cooper, who went on the payroll along with Harry's brothers and sisters. The video follows the chest through the 1913 flood, which put 13 feet of water over the foundation of the new factory before it was built and took every company record with it, and into a trade where 15 companies were soon building the same box. It traces how steel arrived on the railroads, how Union of Rochester went from oak to sheet metal to tackle boxes and died in Arizona, and how Gerstner answered with a cheaper chest under a second name. One of those cheaper chests belonged to a high-school boy in Santa Ana named Phil Remington, who went on to build Shelby's Cobras and the Le Mans Fords and kept the box for 75 years. It is at The Henry Ford now, and the museum doesn't know who made it. Then the family: the son-in-law who was meant to take over and died at 50, the engineer who held the company through the lean years, the grandson who came home in 1976 and paid his children a penny an envelope, the daughter who set up the overseas line herself and still gets called to the floor to make drawers. And the owners: a retiring moldmaker in tears as his chest went into a stranger's car, a wartime chest that spent days underwater with every tool saved, a 1962 birthday present that carried two careers. The video ends with the rust claim every owner has repeated, tested against what the people who store metal for a living have measured, and with a grandson's ashes in a Gerstner case. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the tools and machines that built the trades:    / @tradearchive   Sources Belluscio, Lynne. "Wooden Union Tool Chests." Le Roy Pennysaver & News, June 21, 2015. https://leroyhistoricalsociety.org/Ar.... Brown, Kim Campbell. "Meet the Maker: H. Gerstner & Sons." Garrett Wade Blog. https://garrettwade.com/blogs/blog/me.... H. Gerstner & Sons. "Company History." https://gerstnerusa.com/company-history/. H. Gerstner & Sons. High-Grade Tool Cases, Catalog No. 11. Dayton, OH, 1911. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/gerstner-.... Henry Ford, The. "Toolbox and Tools, Used by Phil Remington." Digital Collections, object 2021.61.4. https://www.thehenryford.org/collecti.... Lerner, Preston. "Phil Remington: Shelby's Superstar Race Car Builder." Motor Sport, October 25, 2022. Machinery. Advertisement, "Gerstner Tool Cases." August 1911, 152. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/GerstnerA.... National Physical Laboratory. Corrosion of Metals by Wood. Guides to Practice in Corrosion Control. https://resource.npl.co.uk/docs/scien.... Ohio History Connection. "1913 Flood." Ohio Memory. https://ohiomemory.ohiohistory.org/ar.... Sikes, Ren, and Taylor Robertson. "Local Family-Owned Manufacturer to Help Create Presidential Medal of Freedom Cases." WHIO, August 25, 2026. Walsh, Andrew. "History of H. Gerstner & Sons." Dayton Vistas, April 21, 2022. https://daytonvistas.com/h-gerstner-s.... Woodcraft. "H. Gerstner & Sons Announces the Passing of Jack Campbell." December 28, 2016. https://woodcraft.com/blog_entries/h-....