It was only a short trip to Forest City, Iowa, Home of the Winnebago Motorhome Factory where one of the first of the major motorhome manufacturers started building the ubiquitous Winnebago. Much like “Coke” or “Frigidaire,” their name has become synonymous with motorhomes. While we have visited almost all of the manufacturers in the past, this was the last factory to be visited. Our first question was: Where did the name come from? That was easy; Forest City is in Winnebago County, an Indian name, and the factory is near the Winnebago River, ‘nuff said. The next question was whether the factory workers were affiliated with unions. The answer was no, there are no unions involved here. The Visitors Center has a large area set aside with electric hookups for visitors’ coaches to spend the night, which we did.
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| The Winnebago Visitor Center |
The Visitor Center has an extensive history museum to visit while waiting for your tour coach. The coach takes the visitors around to the many buildings that comprise this huge facility. Winnebago started building coaches in the early 1960’s and developed a philosophy of building as much of their coaches as possible. The only major components that they don’t build are the chassis; which may be from Ford for the gasoline powered rigs or Freightliner for the diesel rigs. Otherwise many of the parts are built not only for their own production but for other coaches as well. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that their insurance provisions would not allow us down on the main production floor and we were herded up to catwalks to view the work from overhead. Not as good as looking over the worker’s shoulder as we could at the Freightliner factory for instance.
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| Let's spend the night |
All in all, we think that Winnebago build quite a good motorhome and serve the medium price range quite well. Unfortunately, with the economy as it is, their workforce has shrunk from a few thousand to about a thousand and output is down from about 10,000 units per year to 5,000. They did seem to think that they were adding more workers and increasing production a bit which is good news.
From Forest City we will be off to the Danish city of Elk Horn in southwest Iowa to visit our friends the Nelsons. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Bye, folks!
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