Company

50+ Years of Quality

Our History

Woodbine Manufacturing Company was founded in 1965, in Woodbine, Iowa by Delbert “Bus” Brown. Working alone, Bus designed and constructed the original Tommy Gate Hydraulic Lift, which he named after his son.

Early stories often recount Bus loading his pickup trailer with up to five liftgates at a time and driving off into the neighboring counties (where he would sell and install them himself), only to return once that trailer was empty.

This was Woodbine Manufacturing Company in its earliest days: a grassroots liftgate manufacturer that was created to ease the work of the local farmers.

Today, the Woodbine factory stands at over 200,000 square feet on the same piece of ground where every Tommy Gate liftgate has been manufactured and assembled for over 50 years. It is a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant that embraces a combination of modern technology fused with old-fashioned, hands-on welding and tooling.

Very much alive and well in the twenty-first century, Tommy Gate liftgates are sold by over 1000 distributors in every corner of the world.

Woodbine Manufacturing Company is one-hundred percent family-owned and operated, and has been since its inception. The company takes great pleasure in the praiseworthy work ethic, history, and honored traditions of its employees and strives to continue providing jobs and opportunities to the community it calls home.

It is a testament to the spirit of American manufacturing that Tommy Gate began with a single man, in a small, brick machine shop in rural Iowa.