The story of the "Lipe Shop" first began with its original building located at 208 South Geddes Street in Syracuse, which had been known as the Lynch Building. In 1861, the two-story, brick building with 20,000 square feet of floor space was commissioned by Patrick Lynch to service the salt industry (wikipedia). However, salt production had been in decline since the Civil War and was no longer the driving force of the local economy. Fortunately, Syracuse was booming in other industries, manufacturing countless goods that it would later become nationally recognized for such as typewriters, gears, steel, steam engines, and telephones to name a few (Syracuse Boom). In the late 1860s adn 1870s, the Lynch building was used to manufacture various farming implements by three different companies over time until it was put up for sale again in 1879 and purchased by Charles E. Lipe, becoming the C. E. Lipe Machine Shop in 1880 (wikipedia). Franklin Chase, author of the 1924 history "Syracuse and Its Environs", wrote, "Syracuse manufactured more different articles numerically than even New York City itelf" (Syracuse Boom) and the Lipe Shop came to symbolize the intense ingenuity and invention taking place at the time.

​

Charles E. Lipe graduated from Cornell University in 1873 as a mechanical engineer and worked for several employers until he could afford his own business. When he set up shop in 1880 in the existing building, he hoped to manufacture some of the machines he had invented such as a corn planter he designed as a teenager. His work required less than the 20,000 square foot space, so he rented out the rest of it to other inventors ("Lipe Shop"). Consequently, the mingling of creative minds led to a flood of new ideas as teh various entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, etc. occupying the building benefited from each other's genius. It became notorious as a "haven for inventors and an incubator of industries" (Syracuse Boom).

​

C. E. Lipe adn Alexander T. Brown devised a "two-speed Hy-Lo Bi-Gear" for bicycles in 1894 that actually found a lucrative market in the automobile industry and they established the Brown-Lipe Gear Company in 1895 (wikipedia). After Lipe's untimely death also in 1895, his brother Willard took his place in the company which had by then begun producing three-speed transmissions.

​

While the shop came to supply automobile manufacturers, it also sparked the foundations of one of the nation's first automobile makers, the H.H. Franklin Manufacturing Company which had its original office in the Lipe Shop. It was by chance that the company's founders Herbert Franklin and John Wilkinson met at the Lipe Shop where the first had come to cast parts and the second to work on an engine; the two joined forces and were supplied with Brown and Lipe's gears and transmissions to establish a very successful car company. The first car model produced in 1902, used Wilkinson's air-cooled engine, and was a wood-bodied car "weighing 900 pounds and traveling up to twelve miles per hour" (Syracuse Boom). By 1906, they had become the third largest car manufacturers in the country and the company grew to occupy eighteen buildings, covering 34 acres of floor area on the current site of Fowler High School, right next-door to the Lipe Shop. At its peak in the mid-1920s H.H. Franklin was producing 15,000 cars per year and employed 3,500 people, enough to make it the leading company in Syracuse at the time. However, eventually with the onset of the Great Depression, they couldn't compete with cheaper car models compared with their more expensive luxury brand (Syracuse Boom).

​

As Brown and Lipe were making the gears, transmissions, and transfer cases for the Franklin Motor Company, they did so in a new building constructed in 1906 and designed by architect Albert Kahn. The building, directly next the the old one on the corner of South Geddes and West Fayette streets, became the first reinforced concrete building in Syracuse (Warehouse District). It was even reported that "Henry Ford visited the Lipe Shop to oversee the construction of parts for his automobile, the Model T" (wikipedia). The Syracuse Herald reported: "One of the largest factory buildings built within recent years in Syracuse is nearing completion...the new plant of the Brown & Lipe Gear Company, which will cost with machinery about $100,000." In 1910, Brown, W. Lipe, and Winifield Chapin formed Brown-Lipe-Chapin to build automobile differentials, transmission gears, and clutches (wikipedia). The area around that corner factory became known as the "Cradle of Industry" boasting hundreds of patents and the Brown-Lipe Gear Company became the largest distributor of automobile gears in the world (Warehouse District).