The First Singer Sewing Machine Factory

(Picture and Text Courtesy of Dorothy Brumleve)

The first Singer factory in New York...was a room 25 x 50 feet on Centre Street, over the old New Haven depot. It is apparent that the greater part of the sewing machine construction at that time was produced by hand work at the bench, so that no two machines or the parts composing them were precisely alike, either in shape or fitting. Special tools for making each part exactly like its fellow, the "assembling" system, and the "Singer Gauge" system had not been developed at that time.

Business soon outgrew the facilities at Centre Street and, in 1858, new factories, with more modern equipment, were operated at Mott, Spring, Delancey and Broome streets, until, in 1872, all these were combined on the location of the present factory at Elizabethport, N.J. -- Singer Sewing Machine Co., 1914