Ivy Corset, formerly Corset H (154 Front Street)

Mary Heintzelman Gifford Bowne opened a corset factory in downtown Worcester in 1904 and ran that company and its affiliated national chain of retail shops for sixty years. She was not only the only woman at the head of a manufacturing facility in the city's corset industry but also for many years the only woman running a corset factory in the United States.

Mary Heintzelman Gifford Bowne began a long and profitable corset making career in a small Ohio town in the 1880s. From there, she moved into the SoHo neighborhood of America's largest city -- New York City -- as the century turned and there she gained more skills and a wider reputation. Arriving in Worcester around 1904 with a sales job at the Royal Worcester Corset Company, within a year she opened her own factory downtown at 154 Front Street where the company flourished until moving all production to a brand new and larger facility at 40 Jackson Street in 1910. That 40 Jackson Street "Ivy Corset Building" still stands and is now home to various Worcester businesses, among them a clothing designer whose product line includes corsets.

Known at first as Corset H Company, its name changed to Ivy Corset Company in 1917 in a nod to the prominence of one of the company's most popular models: the Ivy corset, sold with the slogan: "It Clings." A frequent giveaway to those buying this model was a potted ivy plant. Corset H products gained a national following and were known as the corsets designed by a woman, a selling point that featured in many of the company's ads early in the century. One such ad in the Los Angeles Record in 1918, for example, proclaims the company's owner to be "a woman of rare experience, with a highly cultivated knowledge of corset lore -- and it is this knowledge together with her artistic skill that is brought to bear on the designing of Ivy Corsets -- to their present perfection."

On the eve of the first World War, she opened the first in a chain of stores to distribute Corset H products. Starting as Ivy Corset Shops, they became United Corset Shops and lasted as long as the factory produced, well into the 1960s. Also during those pre-war years she ended her first marriage to Worcester businessman Arthur Gifford and moved with her teenage nephew Allison (who worked at her factory) into 36 Elm Street, the downtown address she kept until 1929. She married again in 1917 to Naval officer William Bowne, a marriage that ended only with his death in 1956.

The next decade included various challenging hits to the business: an incident of arson at the factory, loss of the top floor of the building in a destructive hurricane, and a bankruptcy filing. Determined to persevere, Bowne emerged from those three strikes to lead the company for another thirty years, until her retirement in 1956. Ivy Corset's last listing in the city directories was in 1961; its founder and sixty-year owner/president/designer died a few years later.

Accessed April 3rd, 2024. ancestry.com.

Corset and Underwear Review.

Accessed April 3rd, 2024. newspapers.com.

Worcester City Directories.

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