Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum

The story

North Tonawanda built more hand-carved carousels than anywhere else in the United States and, for most of a century, kept none of them. Allan Herschell had been at it since the Armitage Herschell Company in 1873, then Herschell-Spillman in 1901, then the Allan Herschell Company, which occupied 180 Thompson Street from 1915 to 1970 and shipped more than 3,000 machines as far as South Africa, India and Tahiti. Of the 148 antique wooden carousels still standing in North America, 71 came out of this town's four Herschell firms. The company moved to Buffalo in the late 1950s and was sold to Chance Manufacturing of Wichita in the early 1970s.

In September 1979 ten people met at the Carnegie Art Center to fix the omission. They went door to door selling $2 stakes in future rides, sold peanut-filled chocolate horses on sticks, and raised enough to send three U-Haul trucks to London, Ontario in 1982 and bring home the Allan Herschell Company's very first machine — a three-abreast Number One Special built in March 1916, in this building. Volunteers restored it and opened it to the public on the first day of the first Canal Fest in July 1983. The factory was bought in 1984 and listed on the National Register in April 1985; the Carousel Society of the Niagara Frontier has run it since.

What survives inside is a factory in sequence: the carving floor, where volunteer carvers still work basswood and poplar from line drawings; the paint shop; the roundhouse; and the Wurlitzer Music Roll Department, where perforating machines over ninety years old still punch band organ rolls from a library of more than 1,600 hand-punched masters, the last operation of its kind anywhere. Out back, the Kiddieland Testing Park runs restored kiddie rides on the ground where the factory once tested them.