Improving your Grounds
and your Profitability

Since 1872

Cheesebrough Wood Rakes & Wooden Flagsticks

To Contact us:
1-616-765-5143
Cheesebrough Corporation
P O Box 41
260 Division St
Freeport MI 49325

The recognized leader in wooden rakes and wooden flagsticks for the golf industry.

Maintaining that position with the assistance of golf professionals around the world.

   This picture gives you a glimpse of our "Early American Industrial" facility. Daughter Bailey Rose says we look like "scruffy old men" and should be careful about letting our customers see us too closely.
    However, an 1800's woodshop is not an environment for looking your best. We try to let our products have that distinction.
   Here you see two of the crew covered in dust, cutting away the chips from a hardwood billet to form a grounds accessory. The well-worn overhead lever controls the flat belts powering the cutting knives and drives. 
 

 
Cheesebrough products are authentic accessories for early golf, and eye-catching in any setting. Professionals within the golf industry have taught us that along with reasonable product performance, they place high value on presentation. Nothing gets a pass with them, not even a simple rake. Whether grading sand or laying on the turf, it is expected to be a powerful component of a presentation that will build their player base. The expectation is that every item on their grounds is actively involved in marketing their property while it performs its function, no matter how humble. Challenged by that anticipation, we design "dual performance" into our products. To do their job well, and to enhance the presentation of your property.

THE MATERIALS

Our domestic products are built with hardwood trees grown primarily in farm woodlots. Like corn, wheat, or beans, trees are a crop for America's farmers. We claim no special Green, Sustainable, or Recycled in our hopes of tying our cart to the latest marketing craze. Cash flow to send a child to school or purchase a piece of equipment motivates America's farmers to apply modern forestry practices and common sense in managing this resource. Our exotic hardwoods are also "farmed", not clear-cut.  Other than a few small fasteners and the exotic wood, we use American materials and labor, most of it right in our own mill or from friends in small businesses nearby.


THE MILL

The company started out as "Konkle & Peck - Wood Rakes, Butter Bowls & Clothespins, and became "Job Cheesebrough - Wood Rakes & Specialties" in 1872. It is a mix of Early American handwork, flat belt driven machinery, and modern technology. We still have the original machines that started mechanization at the mill, and most of it is functional. Craftsmen and processor driven equipment work side by side, each doing what it does best.

THE PEOPLE

Job Cheesebrough was an English millwright who immigrated to America in 1855. He acquired land from the railroad in the area known as "Nec-O-Woods", where local folklore has it"The trees grew so thick you never saw the sun". Job moved his mill on the promise from the railroad that they would soon lay track and move his products around the world. With the forest for his mill cleared and the facility moved, Job built his equipment and filled the mill with hay rakes, one of his first products. Then the railroad went bankrupt.
According to local records, Job was a "stubborn Englishman". (He was also referred to as "The Grand Old Man" in his latter years.) He sailed to Europe, traveling on into Russia, accumulating orders. When he came home, he started his own overland freight company to transport goods through the forest to the nearest railroad some 40 miles distant. The wagons he built required wheels tall enough to allow the wagon body to clear the tree stumps in the newly cleared forest surrounding his mill.

The fact that the mill still operates might be considered, like much of history, purely accidental. Tom succeeded his father Job in 1917. Tom established a Trust at his passing, which oversaw operations from 1929 through 1969, when it was dissolved. Those "Trust Years" were critical to the survival of the mill, as most Early American Industries were dismantled during that time. The mill is one of very few of its kind left in the world, and is the oldest continuously operating manufacturer in the State of Michigan. If Job or his son Tom happened to stop in, they could right to work.

The mill has been privately owned since the Trust ended. Throughout the years, the only constant was the generations of the Fish family who were hired to clear the forest where the mill was to be built. Reuben was the first. He had walked an Indian trail from the East, and settled in the area to trap, hunt, and farm. His son Allen was next in line, followed by his son Reuben ("Bud") and then his sons. "Bud" and his sons live in the village and are a wealth of knowledge for anything concerning Cheesebrough. The current owners are the Ken Van Tol family, who became involved in the 1980's