Oklahoma City was once known as the Horse Show Capital of the World and Chickasha, Okla., was the Horse Trailer Capital of the World. From big operations to one man shops in a backyard garage, there was someone on every corner welding horse trailers in Chickasha in the 1960s and 70s. Only a handful are in operation today.

Jackson Trailers is one of the success stories. Started with nothing but a dream and determination, the family-owned business will celebrate 50 years Feb. 23, 2012 with a come-and-go reception.

Mike Jackson, father of four daughters, was a salesman for Oklahoma City’s Capitol Steel, selling raw material to the trailer manufacturers in Chickasha. In 1962, he told his wife June he wanted to start his own company. She backed him in anything he did, but this one made her pause. Mike was smart but he wasn’t “handy.” He had no patience to fix or make anything, and he was heading for a market that appeared to be saturated.

“That was my first question,” June said. “Why would you go down there when there are so many? He said, ‘Well, when people go to Chickasha to see a trailer, they’ll look at mine, too.’”

June was 32 and Mike 33 when he set out on his own, renting a quonset hut amid old pecan trees on what would become a main road through Chickasha. Perhaps Mike couldn’t build a trailer, but knowledgeable hands were easy to come by. A guy could be fired from one manufacturing company at 11 a.m. and have a job at a different company before he finished lunch. Mike hired two men, one of whom could build trailers. They cut out the pieces for their first two-horse bumper pull with a cutting torch. When two trailers were finished, Mike loaded one onto the back of a six cylinder, 1957 Chevy truck and hitched the other to the bumper. He pulled out of town not knowing where he would find a buyer. Each week for months, Mike would leave with trailers and he wouldn’t come home until they were sold.
June said there were days when he would sleep in the shop so he could keep working. In 1964, they sold the house in Oklahoma City and moved to Chickasha.

“That meant, to Michael, that we were going to make it,” June said.

June’s brother, Johnnie Rogers, started working summers for the fledgling company when he was still in high school. He delivered trailers across the country on the weekends while he put himself through college. He got a suit-and-tie job after graduation, but when the company tried to transfer him to California, he came back to build trailers on a temporary basis. He never left.

By 1965, Mike and June bought a barn a few miles away and set up shop again. When June’s sister, Roberta Eskew, couldn’t find a barber shop to buy, she came to work as Mike’s secretary, also on a temporary basis that lasted more than 29 years. 

In it’s heyday, Jackson Trailers employed no more than 50 people and turned out 40 to 50 trailers a month, small numbers in comparison to the big manufacturing plants. Mike kept it that way by choice. He preferred to work with several small dealers and keep the size of the company manageable. He was also the driving force behind the organization of the National Association of Trailer Manufacturers, hoping the group could become a buying cooperative.

The horse trailer business has dwindled one by one in Chickasha over the past five decades. People with construction skills moved on to other markets and opened businesses closer to the demand. Jacksons is the oldest of the surviving companies. Johnnie said custom building is the key to the company’s longevity.
“We were never an assembly line,” he said. “We’ve always built a custom trailer. Even our plain janes - two people build that trailer from start to finish. You know you have a lot more pride in something if you build it all. That’s how they build a Rolls Royce car; they’re individually built and our trailers are individually built.”

The company has four basic models, but each one is modified to customer specifications. Jackson Trailers makes horse trailers with sleeping quarters, hog trailers, trailers for hauling ostriches and monkeys and mobile custom kitchens. They once built a series of camel trailers that were shipped to Saudi Arabia. And then there was the time in the early 1990s that NASA showed up.

“They contacted us directly,” Johnnie said. “They didn’t go through a dealer. They sent a man down here who spent a week with me building this trailer to their exact specifications. It was NASA white and they were used in connection with the space shuttle. I really don’t know exactly what they were used for, but I know a bunch of computers went into them because we had to build all these raceways for wires.”

Jacksons has seen the best of times for the industry and weathered calamities that would have folded other operations. On March 2, 1973, June and Mike went to the city to pick up their oldest daughter. On the way home, they could see an orange glow on the horizon. When they rounded the corner on old Highway 81, Jackson Trailers was engulfed and uninsured. The next morning, they did the only thing they could do: buy new welders, rent some buildings and start over.

“He said to me the two things that hindered him the most were no catalogues to order his parts from and the telephone company couldn’t get it situated so people could call us,” June said. “Those are the two things that got the best of him.”

Another fire took the paint building a few years later. In 2004, Johnnie said the price of steel tripled in months. Jackson’s already had more than 35 trailers promised at the original price.

“When you’re a small company, you can see what that would do to you,” he said. “You’re selling all of those trailers at a major loss. We could have done like some other companies, gone bankrupt and opened under a new name, but we didn’t do that. We made a verbal commitment to people to deliver for a set price and that’s what we did even thought it nearly broke us.”

There were years when the business dried up from fall to spring. Mike said he just needed someone to buy horse trailers in the winter. Two men showed up shortly thereafter who were only interested in purchasing trailers in the winter. One bleak moment in the early years, Mike remarked on his way out the door that he didn’t know how he would make payroll. A check came in the mail that afternoon from a man who decided to prepay for his trailer.

The biggest heartbreak and test for the company came when Mike died suddenly in 1993. He loved Jackson Trailers and was loyal to his employees. It was apparent they were loyal as well. Everyone came back to work the next Monday, with Johnnie as the foreman. For 18 years trailers have continued to roll out the door.

“We’ve been up against the wall many times - had absolutely no orders and down to the nitty gritty. And miraculously we would get orders,” Johnnie said. “When your dealers can’t sell a trailer, they don’t want to buy one. They don’t want to set it out there for the winter. Through the years when we thought it was the end, the light would shine on us again.”