Work has started on the 81,000 square foot addition to Feldmeier Equipment’s facility at Riverside Industrial Park in Little Falls.
by Dave Warner
The Feldmeier family and the company they founded have a strong connection to Little Falls. In fact, they can point to the spot where it began long ago, with work on the canal, and the dam by Hansen Island.
The company just recently broke ground on a building expansion in Industrial Park that will be used as manufacturing space that will add eighty-one thousand square feet onto the existing building. The project is estimated to cost $9.9 million and is on track to be completed by mid-March of 2022.
Colby Clark, Vice President at Feldmeier Equipment said, “It is crucial that we continue to invest in the communities where our employees are, including the city of Little Falls.”
He went on to say that his great grandfather worked on the canal in the early 1900s. “D. H. Burrell & Company had heard about this young crackerjack engineer that was designing the dam in Little Falls by Hansen Island.”
Bob Feldmeier said, “When the dam project was finished, someone suggest that he approach Burrell.”
Feldmeier was then hired as the Chief Engineer of the D. H. Burrell Company. “Our family has very, very deep roots with Little Falls,” Clark said.
“My grandfather died when my father was sixteen. He didn’t finish college because of World War II but went into the Marines. When he got out, he went to work for what was then Cherry Burrell as a sales engineer,” said Feldmeier.
He was transferred to Syracuse because of the strong dairy business in the area. “He developed a tubular heat exchanger and then he went into business for himself making them, which went on for a number of years,” he stated.
The rights to that exchanger were then sold and he was paid not to make that part for ten years.
Feldmeier said that during that time, he wanted to keep his employees busy, so he started making small tanks, “and the rest is history.”
“In 1952 is when he started Feldmeier Equipment in Syracuse. He would tell his friends that someday, he would come back to this town (Little Falls) and own a factory. That’s something that we’ve never forgotten,” said Clark.
“He told us…make sure you never leave Little Falls.”
The first expansion though was in Montgomery Alabama in 1994, but “In 1997, Cherry Burrell was not doing that well and was up for sale and we heard about it through the grapevine because our industry is fairly small,” stated Clark.
He said that through a back door, they were able to purchase the company. “The purchase of Cherry Burrell caused Feldmeier to grow to the size that we are today. Without that purchase, we would not be where we’re at,” he said.
They thought that the purchase would give them overlapping clients, and that they were really buying it just to increase their capacity. “Little did we know that their client base was very different, so that helped us grow.”
He said, “After that, we ended up opening a facility in Reno Nevada, purchased a company in Iowa, and then began expanding in Little Falls by building the Riverside facility in 2013. We built a brand new facility in Syracuse in 2018, and made some modifications to our old facility in Syracuse in 2019.”
“Now in 2021 we’re adding to our existing Riverside facility in Little Falls to modernize the way we build vessels to get out of the older and antiquated facility down on Mill Street,” he said.
Clark said they’re trying to make things more conducive to the way that they build tanks today. He said that both facilities in Little Falls will supplement each other.
“With our family history in Little Falls, it’s very important that we stay there and carry on that vision.”
“Obviously, we’d love to grow more in Little Falls. It’s just a matter of finding the people that want to work,” he stated.
The expansion in the Riverside Park facility will add approximately 81,000 square feet. “One of the key points of this expansion is that there will be a tower that will allow us to build larger vessels straight up in the air instead of doing them laying down. The tower will be 75 feet tall,” stated Clark.
“It’s going to be a beautiful facility and our goal is to start giving more back to the community, so making this facility state of the art and esthetically pleasing is very important to us.”
Clark stated, “The family history with Little Falls is something that I don’t think a lot of people know. It’s such a part of who we are.”
Feldmeier Equipment employs between 180 and 200 people in the City at any given time. They operate seven manufacturing plants in Alabama, Iowa, Nevada, and New York, servicing the Food, Dairy, Beverage, Beauty Care, and Pharmaceutical Industries with sanitary vessels and mixers.
For more information, visit http://feldmeier.com/.