Gustav Stickley

Gustav Stickley (March 9, 1858 – April 21, 1942) was a furniture manufacturer, design leader, publisher and the chief proselytizer for the American Craftsman style, an extension of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

Early life

One of eleven children of German émigrés Leopold and Barbara Schlager Stoeckel, Gustav Stickley was born Gustavus Stoeckel on March 9, 1858, in Osceola, Wisconsin. The eldest surviving son, Stickley experienced the rigors of life upon a small Midwestern farm, forgoing his formal education in 1870 to continue work in his father’s field of stonemasonry and help support his struggling family. By early 1876, Stickley’s mother and siblings moved to Brandt, Pennsylvania, where Gustav worked in his uncle’s chair factory – his first formal training in the furniture industry.

Career

His industrious nature led him and his brothers Charles and Albert to form Stickley Brothers & Company in 1883, the same year in which he married Eda Ann Simmons. Within five years, the company was dissolved and Stickley’s ambitions led him to partner with Elgin Simonds, a salesman in the furniture trade, to form the firm of Stickley & Simonds in Binghamton, New York. During the 1890s, Stickley divided his efforts between his new enterprise and, with his brother Leopold, served as a foreman of furniture operations at the Auburn State Prison. In 1898 he orchestrated the removal of his business partner and formed the Gustave* Stickley Company (*he dropped the use of the "e" in 1903).