Dana Cooper Hayes nominated Vail Rubber Works for this honor. She didn’t have to reach far for material — the company has been accumulating it since 1892.
Vail Rubber Works, based in St. Joseph, custom-engineers rubber and polyurethane roll covers, steel cores, and related industrial products for the flat-rolled steel, aluminum, and paper industries across the central, southern, and eastern United States. It has operated continuously for more than 130 years, through the Great Depression, multiple recessions, and a global pandemic, and remains family-owned under a fifth-generation leadership team: President Vail Harding, Vice President of Sales and Technology Matt Hanley, and CFO Brian Nimtz.
The company’s origin story is itself a master class in adaptation. In the early 1900s, founder William A. Vail was making rubber railroad ties and horseshoes in Chicago — until the automobile started making horses obsolete. Rather than defend a dying business, he asked what the world needed next that he was uniquely positioned to build. The emerging paper industry needed rubber roll covers. Nobody was making them well. Vail could. He relocated his entire company and family to Muskegon in 1915, then moved again to St. Joseph in 1920 to get closer to his customers. That willingness to move toward the future rather than protect the past is still in the company’s DNA.
Today, Vail Rubber Works employs more than 115 people and recently completed a $16.8 million facility expansion in Royalton Township. The company is certified to ISO 9001:2015 and holds Level II Compliance certification through the Polyurethane Manufacturers Association. It was a charter founding member of the PMA in 1971.
What drives the tenure — some employees have spent nearly 20 years there, and the company counts multiple employees whose parents and grandparents worked there before them — is a culture built on genuine respect. Vail Harding himself joined as a sales engineer in 1998 and rose through the ranks over more than three decades. Promotions come from within. Hard work is noticed. And the word employees reach for most often when describing the place, Cooper Hayes says, is family — not as a figure of speech, but as a description of how people actually treat each other.
Legacy. Family. Growth. After 130 years, those aren’t aspirations. They’re the record.
