Royal Worcester Corset 1861-1950 (564 and 566 Main Street)

This location is the second home of the Royal Worcester Corset Company, back when it was still known as Worcester Corset Company. A globally recognized brand name in the industry, Royal Worcester began as a hoop skirt manufacturer downtown where the company grew for several decades before moving to its expansive 30 Wyman Street headquarters, south of downtown near Clark University.

In true Horatio Alger fashion, David Hale Fanning, the founder of this world-famous manufacturing company, became an orphan at the age of seven and later jumped from one job to another starting at the age of fifteen, traveling from Connecticut to Massachusetts to Illinois to Ohio. He returned to New England - to Worcester - in 1861, where his attempt to enlist for Civil War service was refused due to a physical disability. That same year, he opened a business that made hoop skirts. His hoop skirt "factory" was in fact a "tiny room where I began to make hoop skirts" in downtown Worcester out of the Clark's Block building at the corner of Main and Mechanic. When the hoop skirt fell out of favor, on to the corset he went and there he stayed, and prospered, until his death in 1926, three days after retiring at the age of ninety-five.

The first corset produced by his Worcester Skirt Company was made "with his own hands" sewing together five pieces of fabric with a few "steels" (presumably these were the stays which keep a corset rigid) and eyelets. An early partnership with Worcester's wire manufacturer Washburn & Moen likely provided a steady supply of metal stays for his product. He was one of the first American manufacturers of the corset, a lady's garment that, in this country, had previously been either home-made or imported from Europe. In 1872 the business moved to the W. W. Rice building, 564 Main. Later an 1875 name change to Worcester Corset Company proclaimed the new exclusive product focus for the factory which grew and expanded into adjoining buildings on Main Street (a section of the Franklin building and in 1880 the Heywood building, located in the rear of the Rice building).

Worcester Historian Charles Washburn notes that "finding the market for its product reaching over a constantly increasing area, at length covering the entire country, the Worcester Corset Company established branch salesrooms in Chicago, Illinois, the great distributing point for the West and Northwest, and also opened an office in New York City".

In 1890, another move brought Worcester Corset to 49 Hermon Street in the Junction Shop Manufacturing District south of downtown, a neighborhood that hosted a large amount of corset production (Columbia Corset, Ivy Corset, Linehan-Conover Corset, Maynard Corset, New England Corset, Sherman Textile). The bigger move, however, happened a few years later in 1896, when the company headed to a brand new facility at 30 Wyman Street near Clark University. Before the move, approximately 600 women were working for Worcester Corset.

By 1902 the company was again ready to rebrand, this time taking the name of one of its most popular products: the Royal Worcester. As the Royal Worcester Corset Company at its new address, it became known as "the model factory in America" and was described by trade journal "Corset and Underwear Review" as a "pioneer in world-wide distribution of American made garments, its sales agencies covering every civilized country." Local historian Madeline Kearin Ryan writes about the company's work force during these years:

"The story of Royal Worcester Corset is as much about underwear as it is about the women who worked there. They were provided guidebooks on cleanliness, exercise and how to be a model employee. Over 90% of its 2,000 workers were women, making the company the largest employer of female workers in the country. Many of these workers were graduates of the David Hale Fanning Trade School, the first vocational school for women in Worcester, which was named in honor of the company’s founder."

Royal Worcester furthered its industry success by opening a training school for women who wanted to run their own corset shops. The Bon Ton School of Corsetry began sometime around 1912 as an on-location training program but, due to the advocacy of senior employee Sarah Conklin, it redirected into a correspondence school through which women around the world became certified corsetieres, hanging their Bon Ton School certificates on the walls of their retail establishments to proclaim their credentials.

By 1905, the local board of trade announced that the Royal Worcester Corset Company's facility was the largest corset plant in the world. Ten years later, "Corset and Underwear Review" declared that David Hale Fanning was the "dean of the corset industry" in the United States, during the same year when he was named honorary president of the Corset Manufacturers Association of America. Fanning died on January 22, 1926, but the company continued for decades without him. In 1950, the Worcester City Directory ran its final listing for Royal Worcester, the last appearance in that annual publication for a giant in its industry, after an impressive ninety-year run.

June 11, 1922, Worc Telegram "Active Head of Factory at Ninety-Two"

Charles Washburn, Industrial Worcester

Worc. Magazine September, p. X

1916 CAUR

A Proper Fit (working title), Anne Marie Murphy. TidePool Press 2025, www.cityofcorsets.com.