SALAMANCA — Last week, one of the former owners of Fancher Furniture Co. took an unusual step for a company executive.

In a letter to the editor of The Salamanca Press, L. Bruce Erickson of Lakewood in Chautauqua County gave “a hearty THANK YOU to all of those in the Salamanca area who worked so hard for the company.”

What prompted the letter was the Erickson family sale of the last of the of the parcels on Rochester Street that once made up the Fancher Furniture complex. As late as 1971, when the company’s assets were auctioned off to satisfy a debt, Fancher Furniture employed nearly 800 people.

“Unfortunately the good times for Fancher Furniture did not last, and history will soon forget that it ever existed,” Erickson wrote in the letter. “What should not be forgotten is how the people of Salamanca worked so hard and so well. The failure of Fancher had nothing to do with the efforts of its employees. The marketplace simply changed, and the management of Fancher failed to cope with those changes.”

ERICKSON IS THE son of C.L. Erickson, who started as an assistant manager at the factory in the summer of 1939 at $55 a week after the death of one of the company’s founders, Albert T. Fancher. C.L. Erickson became a director and a stockholder. He continued to purchase stock in the company, and by June 1944 he had become president.

The business continued under the elder Erickson’s leadership until 1971, when Fancher Industries was formed to re-found the company with help from Pittsburgh-DesMoines Steel Co. In 1975, the company reverted back to use of Fancher Furniture Co. The Ericksons repurchased the company from Pittsburgh-DesMoines in 1978.

Fancher Furniture Co. was formally dissolved June 9, 2003, after its assets were sold to the Philadelphia Furniture Co. The company laid off its 122 employees in January 2009.

Nearly seven years after the dissolution, on May 8, 2010, the four-story manufacturing plant at 100 Rochester St. went up in a conflagration — the biggest fire in the history of the county.

In 1976, Fancher Furniture purchased the stock in two Falconer companies, American manufacturing and Harold Furniture Co. The company was merged and renamed Fancher Chair Co. Until 2009, when he sold the company to an employee, L. Bruce Erickson was president of Fancher Chair Co. He still has an office there.

Fancher Chair Co., of Falconer, is all that remains of the original Fancher Furniture, via the Ericksons. Fancher Chair makes residential dining chairs, office chairs and specialty seating for libraries.

Contacted at his Lakewood home Monday, Erickson said that with the end of the family’s involvement in the Fancher properties, he wanted to thank the community and people who worked there over the years.

“They made world-class furniture,” Erickson said. “They should rightly be proud of the products they made.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Fancher Furniture Co. produced furniture as well as wood cabinets for televisions and radios. Suddenly televisions were being manufactured overseas and packed into metal and plastic boxes.

“The market changed, the world changed and Salamanca didn’t,” Erickson said. “That was the killer that brought the company down. I’m the last of the Ericksons that ever walked through the place.”

Fancher, Erickson said, made very expensive furniture with a very limited market.

“It didn’t take many hiccups to cause a train wreck,” he said.

ERICKSON HAS MANY pleasant memories from his days in Salamanca, from the earliest times when he would go to the factory with his father.

“As a kid, my father always went to work on Saturday mornings,” Erickson recalled. “I would go along. It was a great place to play. There were so many places to hide.”

Another of his recollections involved his father going back to the office at the factory late one night. “Everybody had to sign in with the night watchman,” Erickson said. “My father used his key and went up to his office. The night watchman was surprised to find anyone in the offices. The rule was you had to sign in. My father had to go down to the boiler room and sign in.”

He worked there a couple of summers doing sales and administrative work. There was more money working construction jobs, he admitted.

Most of all, he remembers the people of Salamanca.

“People I grew up among,” Erickson said. “That’s what prompted me to write the letter. They deserved better.

“People are more cognizant of how important people are (to a business) now. Thank you to all those people.”

(This story appears in the May 26, 2016 edition of The Salamanca Press.)