Business profile: Chatfield NAPA goes back 120 years

R. R. Branstrom | Daily Press
Employee Pat Miller crimps a fitting onto the end of a hydraulic hose at Chatfield NAPA in Escanaba.

EDITOR NOTE: The Daily Press will be featuring a series of articles on local businesses, highlighting their history and what makes them unique. The series will run on a regular basis in the Daily Press.

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ESCANABA — Chatfield NAPA, the only locally-owned auto parts store in Escanaba, began as a fabrication shop over 120 years ago. Founded by Oliver Chatfield in 1903, Chatfield Machine Company was originally focused on metalworking. The business still does have a steel department that cuts pieces to specification, but sales of retail auto parts became the larger element as time went on.

“Up until 1976, there was a full-blown machine shop here,” said Pat Miller, who began working at Chatfield in ’77, when he was in high school. “It was the place to go in Central Upper Michigan… Lot of engine rebuilding, lot of machine shop work. As a store, it was a lot more industrial.”

Miller said that the store sold a lot of welding equipment back then, and that the company had owned a semi that made weekly trips to Milwaukee to pick up supplies like steel and oxygen and acetylene (welding gases).

Miller also recalled seeing relics of the early days of the business. Even when he worked there in the late ’70s, there were Model A and Model T parts lying around. A customer came in once with an old trailer from the ’30s, and then-owner Frank Shepeck went upstairs and found a part for him, Miller reported.

“I was told they used to build logging trailers back in the ’30s. They sold tractors… They did a little bit of everything,” Miller said.

The Shepeck family bought the operation from Chatfield in the 1920s and ran it until selling the auto parts portion to NAPA corporate in 2006.

Business evolved based on need and changing industry. Joshua King, the current owner, explained that there used to be foundry on-site that worked with brass as well as steel, but that demands have shifted. Instead of being somewhat universal and designed to last, engines are built of a lower quality by third parties and not made to be repaired, so “small engine machine shops are a thing of the past,” King said.

General Manager Nick Kallio and Miller estimated that around the year 2000, engine rebuilds really took a downward plunge.

Dave Shepeck continued to run the steel shop until King purchased the building in 2015 and soon after bought out the store’s stock from NAPA.

The steel shop is still an important part of Chatfield; even if it isn’t in as high demand as it used to be, people — individuals and machine shops — still rely on the service.

“If, say, a customer is working on their trailer and they … need a replacement piece of angle iron — Jimmy pulls (a sheet) off the rack and cuts whatever they want,” Kallio said.

Another service that’s popular is the reproduction of hydraulics hoses to fit farming equipment, logging trucks, excavators and other heavy machinery. Chatfield has rolls of hoses of a variety of diameters that can be cut to size, and then a machine is used to crimp the necessary fittings onto either end.

One thing that’s changed in auto retail is how many different versions of a specific part there are. Years ago, one alternator could have worked in a large number of different vehicles; today, two vehicles of the same make and model might take different parts because one was manufactured six months before the other.

While the store carries mostly NAPA parts, the fact that it’s now owned locally instead of by the corporation means that they are able to carry a wider selection of items, which Kallio said has been a benefit.