Kimball R. Woodbury Collection of Textile Industry Records

Kimball R. Woodbury, a 1944 WPI graduate, former chairman of Woodbury & Co., Inc. and grandson of the company's founder, is shown with artwork he gave to Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Woodbury and Company, founded in 1879 by John C. Woodbury, WPI class of 1873. Woodbury and Company was one of Worcester's leading graphic arts companies for one hundred and twenty three years. Soon after graduation, John Woodbury found that his talent lay in making the artwork for wood cuts, and later, making large drawings of industrial plants .With his partner, and classmate. John Keyes, he built a satisfying business making wood cuts and these very popular "Bird's-Eye drawings. The only method of reproducing pictures at that time was by the halftone method, which gave a quite unsatisfactory result. John Woodbury was familiar with the process of photogravure and dreamed of reproducing these drawings using this process. This is an engraving process that produced brilliant results, but was extremely difficult and expensive to produce. In 1908 when his son John Edward Woodbury graduated from Tech, the circumstances led to the decision to place the future of the company on the production of photogravure letterheads. This involved modification of the basic process, and modifying the existing power press equipment to produce the letterheads by power. This was an extremely challenging and risky undertaking. The company became the first company anywhere to make photogravure plates and to run letterheads successfully on a power press. This was the product on which the company developed their reputation for producing the most beautiful engraved picture letterheads in the country, and this was the basis for the success of the business for the next one hundred and twenty three years. In the late 1960s, Harold Woodbury, the founder's son undertook the challenge of recording the company history in his "Notes on the History of Woodbury and Company" He added important and interesting events up though the 80s, when his son, Kimball Woodbury picked up the story and told it until the company closed in 2002.