Brunswick Billiards: Historical highlights from the first 150 years, 1845 to 1995
October 28, 2008
1845 
John Moses Brunswick, after emigrating from Switzerland in 1834 and apprenticing in New York City and Philadelphia, establishes his Cincinnati Carriage Making Company. The product line is expanded beyond carriages to include cabinets, tables, and chairs. The company’s first billiard table was produced this year for a successful Cincinnati meatpacker. Word-of-mouth promotion quickly brought requests for more tables.
1848
Brunswick opens its first sales office in Chicago on State Street. This first branch soon expands to include two factories and an 8,000 square foot billiard parlor on Washington Street. Additional offices, sales rooms, and billiard parlors open in New Orleans in 1852 and St. Louis in 1859.
1873
Demand for Brunswick tables continues to increase. Brunswick merges with rival Julius Balke’s Great Western Billiard Table Manufactory to become The J. M. Brunswick and Balke Company. Pamphlets published two years after the great Chicago fire describe the company as manufacturing 700 tables annually, with 350 Brunswick tables in play in the city of Chicago, and selling from Canada to Mexico, with tables in every principal city in the west.
1884
Brunswick joins with another rival to become “The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company,” the largest billiard equipment operation in the world, larger than all its competitors combined. Expansion of the product line now includes elaborate and ornate front and back bars made of rich woods, flawless mirrors, and stained glass. Originally offered as special order items, demand from taverns grew so great that a new factory in Dubuque, Iowa manufactured and shipped the bars around the world. The bars began to gather design awards at international exhibitions. Many of them are still in use today, becoming focal points in popular bars and restaurants around the country.
1888
Brunswick is one of the most successful businesses in Chicago, operating from a five story building on State Street, with an additional factory located at Rush and Kinzie and one at Huron and Sedgwick that covered an entire city block with its factory, warehouse and lumber drying plant.
1890
Company President Moses Bensinger works to experiment and research better ways to make billiard tables and equipment. Important patents for rubber cushions are registered and other technical innovations evolve.
1906
Brunswick opens a new 100,000 square foot plant in Muskegon, Michigan. Among the many departments at the plant: billiard table assembly, billiard balls, cue manufacturing, and chalk. Company-owned boats brought cut maple from Brunswick’s lumber mill in Big Bay on Lake Huron; the lumber itself came from a thousand acres of Brunswick timberland near Lake Superior. The company owned its own slate quarries in Vermont and Pennsylvania. It was the world’s largest user of hardwood. Manufacturing over 400,000 cues a year, there was enough reserve maple in Brunswick drying kilns (the world’s largest) to make an additional 600,000 cues.
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