The Thompson Manufacturing Co. started out in a small way. In 1913, A.F. Thompson began making stoves in the basement of his home. Soon, the fledgling business was so busy it outgrew its small basement quarters. So Thompson moved his company to a building all its own. But it too proved too small. So, in 1925, he moved again, this time buying a vacant factory building along the C&O tracks at Vernon Street in the Westmoreland neighborhood.
The Thompson plant produced a wide variety of heating appliances in different shapes and sizes. By the 1950s it employed 140 workers. In an assembly-line process, stacks of sheet metal entered the eastern end of the block-long plant and completed gas heating devices emerged at the building’s western end.
Carl Cecil Thompson succeeded his father as the company’s president in 1940. He served as Huntington mayor in 1953-54. Thompson Manufacturing went out of business in the early 1960s and Cecil Thompson moved to Florida, where he died in 1968.
