For many decades in the 20th Century, Meadville was home to the Talon Zipper Company. Talon had many factories located throughout the city, including bustling Plant #5 on Arch Street.  Meadville had a deserving nickname.

"All during the 30s and 40s, it was The Zipper City. That's all they did here was make zippers. Everybody worked at Talon,” says Lon Sippy.

Sippy founded and operates the Sippy Historical Machine Shop, a new museum that tells the history of manufacturing in Crawford County.  He says in the 1930s, 9,000 people had a job in Meadville. 5,500 of them worked at Talon.  The hiring boom began after the company developed an automated machine that could make zippers more efficiently.

"They finally developed the chain machine which is a zero waste operation.  It forms the wire, splits it into a "Y" shape, puts the scoops on it and crimps it onto a tape in one operation,” says Sippy.

Keep in mind, the 1930s was the period of The Great Depression. A quote from a 1941 edition of the

New York Times hangs in the museum.  It states that ‘Meadville has lived a charmed life thanks to Talon's spectacular growth.  It scarcely felt the depression of the 30s.’ Another newspaper said Meadville was a ‘depression proof city’ and it's streets were ‘paved with gold.’

"The sales started picking up and it just went crazy,” says Sippy.

The good life at Talon eventually came to an end.  The company could not protect its patents and zippers began to be made by international companies post-World War II.  By the 1980's, zipper manufacturing in Meadville was finished.  Meadville is now called ‘The Tool City.’  However, a lot of those precision machinery shops you now see were founded by former Talon employees. That's Talon's legacy.

The Sippy Historical Machine Shop is located near Saegertown on Route 198, one half mile east of the I-79 Interchange.