Sashes, blinds and caskets first.

Woodard’s story begins in Owosso, Michigan, a railway and lumber town in Shiawassee County. According to the company’s own historical timeline, Lyman E. Woodard bought a lumber-planing mill there in 1866–67, and with his three brothers formed Woodard Brothers, which made wood furniture, window and door sashes, blinds and pine-box caskets. Between 1882 and 1885, the timeline says, the brothers started a second business, the Owosso Casket Company, building a new factory for metal, hardwood and cloth-covered caskets.

The early decades were marked by fire. The company says the casket factory burned down in 1888 and was rebuilt, and that in 1898 another fire destroyed the planing mill and the furniture factory. In 1890, by the company’s account, Lyman bought out his brothers’ shares in both businesses, and his three sons and his son-in-law joined them during the 1890s. In 1902 Woodard Brothers opened a new planing mill and two factories near the Owosso railway yard.

English Wikipedia’s article on the Lee Woodard and Sons Building, which draws on a 1980 National Register of Historic Places nomination and a 2016 article in the Owosso Independent, describes a four-storey brick factory that the firm built next to its existing plant around 1900. It records that Lyman Woodard died in 1904, a loss that caused a crisis at the firm, and that his son Lee Woodard stepped in. The company’s timeline also gives 1904 for the founder’s death and says his sons and son-in-law took over the family businesses. Demand for finished wood products was falling, Wikipedia says, and the firm converted its equipment to make metal furniture. The building itself has since been turned into loft housing, Woodard Station Lofts, according to the same article.

Iron, aluminium and new owners.

The turn to outdoor furniture came in the 1930s. The company dates the switch to metal outdoor furniture to 1934, when, it says, the Great Depression and the depletion of Michigan’s hardwood and pine were taking their toll. In 1938, the timeline says, Lee Woodard and his sons started Woodard and Sons, a business making metal furniture to Lee’s own designs; it names the sons as Joseph, Russell and Lyman II. Wikipedia records that by 1942 the older Woodard Furniture Company had liquidated its assets, and that in 1942 Lee Woodard converted the factory to make components for the war effort. The company says this work covered parts for trucks, tanks and naval and aircraft equipment, and that outdoor metal furniture production resumed in 1946.

For several decades the business spread beyond Owosso. Woodard says it built a factory called Carolina Forge in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1959 for wrought iron, and opened a plant called Woodard Crafts in Maxton, North Carolina, in 1967 for extruded aluminium. In 1995, by its account, the owners built a new factory and offices in Owosso; Wikipedia also records that the company moved its factory and offices into a new building that year. Between 2001 and 2005, the timeline says, Woodard consolidated manufacturing, closing its two North Carolina plants and a plant in Ontario, California.

Ownership then moved out of the family. The company’s timeline says Craftmade, of Coppell, Texas, bought Woodard in 2008, moved its offices into Craftmade’s headquarters and re-established a showroom at the Chicago Merchandise Mart. In December 2011, the timeline continues, Litex, a Texas-based importer of ceiling fans and lighting, acquired Craftmade together with its subsidiary Woodard. Reporting on anniversary celebrations in Owosso in August 2016, Home Furnishings Business quoted Woodard’s president, John Mares, who named Jean Liu as Woodard’s majority owner and the chief executive of its parent company, Litex Industries Limited. The company also says it acquired Whitecraft, a maker of woven outdoor furniture, in 2013.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American outdoor furniture makers. Outdoor furniture brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger furniture groups, and a single name can be sold through garden shops, specialist dealers, design showrooms and hotel contracts at once.

An outdoor furniture brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single chair than by a material, a way of building and a run of named collections, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or begun sourcing parts from elsewhere since it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its frames, weaves and cushions are actually made and finished.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its furniture is made and how its collections have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Collections with long lives.

Woodard’s identity rests on named collections that stay in the catalogue for long periods. The company’s timeline dates the Orleans collection to 1940 and describes it as its longest-running design. It dates the Sculptura chair to 1956, says the design was added to the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 1994, and says the company revived the Sculptura collection in 2015 in response to renewed interest in mid-century furniture. Other named lines in the timeline include Mayfield, from 1962, and Margarita, from 1980.

The other pillar is place. On its “Made in the USA” page, as archived in December 2023, the company says its products are “handcrafted and assembled” in the United States and welcomes visitors to Owosso, Michigan. At the 2016 anniversary events, Home Furnishings Business reported, the company described Owosso as the place “where Woodard outdoor furniture is still proudly made,” and the celebrations included factory tours and a display of an early iron chair the firm made there, from around 1934. The same report described the range as outdoor furniture and accessories in iron, aluminium and all-season wicker. Woodard’s site groups its products for residential and hospitality buyers, with dealers, catalogues and a showroom. The Woodard name also survives in Owosso’s townscape, through the old factory converted to lofts.

For a design guide, Woodard shows how a maker’s name can carry a family history, a town and a material through several changes of owner. Compare Brown Jordan and Lloyd Flanders, two more American outdoor furniture makers. For this guide we use a wrought-iron black, a forge green and a verdigris with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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