Fellows Gear Shaper Company

The huge factory complex just north of downtown Springfield testifies to the village's status as one of Vermont's most important industrial centers and to the boom cycles brought to its industry by the twentieth century's major wars. Focused in a narrow valley adjacent to the Black River falls, Springfield village blossomed with the development of the machine-tool industry after 1888, when local entrepreneurs purchased and moved the Jones and Lamson Machine Company from Windsor and hired industrial designer James Hartness as its superintendent and then its president. In 1896 Hartness encouraged his chief draftsman, Edwin Fellows, to found an independent company to produce his gear-shaping inventions. The Fellows Gear Shaper factory evolved from a 45 × 60–foot building (incorporated indistinguishably into later construction) to extend 1,000 feet along the west bank of Black River as one of the largest industrial complexes in the state. It produced machines used to cut precision gears for thousands of mechanical devices, from electric trains to aircraft. Entrance to the buildings could be made from River Street via a Pratt through-truss bridge, constructed, along with the building unit it enters, in 1912. The most distinctive unit of the Fellows complex, this steel-framed building has broad window bays of wood-framed sash beneath concrete lintels and is capped by a decorative parapet with the company's name.

The company expanded rapidly as a result of its importance to armaments manufacture during World War I, constructing workshops and a dam and powerhouse. A two-story extension to the north of the central building is from 1940, part of a World War II–era building campaign. The three-story International Style extension, with its more planar walls and metal-framed industrial sash cantilevered over the river to the south, is from 1953. The firm constructed a new facility farther out of town in 1967, and, after a period of abandonment, its former manufacturing complex, important to the fabric of downtown Springfield, was acquired for mixed adaptive use by the Precision Valley Development Corporation.