Hubbardton Forge

Hubbardton Forge began in 1974 as two men, George Chandler and Reed Hampton, working metal in a barn in the town of Hubbardton. It moved to a plant on Route 30 in Castleton in 1988, and the founders sold it to a private equity firm in 2007. Today it makes forged steel light fixtures in Castleton: chandeliers, pendants, sconces, floor and table lamps, and outdoor lights. About 240 people work there. The company says it designs, forges, welds, finishes, assembles and ships them all under one roof. Most of the range is sold through independent lighting showrooms rather than online.

The metalwork is not in doubt. The brand’s pages, a 2019 Vermont Business Magazine profile of the 120,000-square-foot plant and the firm’s own investors all put production in Vermont, and dozens of product descriptions say the pieces are made by Vermont artisans. Some lines go further: the Ardesia pendant’s slate is quarried within 30 miles of the forge, and the Shard sconces use glass poured in Vermont.

The second mark is for everything else in a light fixture. Many glass shades are described only as hand-blown, with no origin, and nothing the company publishes says where its sockets, drivers or LED modules are made. A Hubbardton fixture is forged, finished and assembled in Vermont, and that is what this mark says.

This is not a split line, and it was checked. The catalogue was searched in full on 2026-09-20 — through the storefront’s own data, because the pages are drawn by JavaScript — for “imported” and for “China”, and both return nothing. The one foreign origin stated anywhere is a material: the Mika pendants use “handmade glass from Italy” in a hand-forged Vermont frame, which is the difference between the first and second marks rather than a split line. The plated bath-fixture line a 2019 Vermont Business Magazine profile reported as made overseas, HF Reflections, is not in the catalogue any more; a search for it returns replacement glass and stem kits and nothing else. It would sit below this mark if it came back.