Homer Iron Works is Made in Cortland

Matt Brooks: Matt Brooks here on X101 Always Classic, in for another edition of Made in Cortland. And with me in the studio in this month’s edition, it’s Mike Park, President of Homer Iron Works. Now first off, Mike, thank you for joining me today.

Mike Park: Thank you very much for having me. Looking forward to it.

Matt Brooks: Well, we have a whole lot to talk about—Homer Iron Works. First off, Homer Iron Works is a staple of the local landscape, often associated with craftsmanship and durability. Could you share the story of how the business started and how it’s evolved over the years?

Mike Park: Okay. Well, I started in 1976 right out of high school. It was just me and a pickup truck and it was called Mike’s Custom Welding. So a lot of my customers still know me as Mike’s Custom Welding. Been in business—as you can imagine—50 years now. We just celebrated our 50th year anniversary.

Matt Brooks: Congratulations.

Mike Park: Thank you. So we grew. I grew from just myself, we approximately got about 38 to 40 employees now consistently year-round. We changed our name in—I’d say—the mid-90s as the company grew and we were taking on more commercial and bigger projects, we changed our name to Homer Iron Works. That’s how we ended up.

Matt Brooks: And that’s been for decades now, you said, mid-90s?

Mike Park: Yes. Yes.

Matt Brooks: But there’s so much more than just iron that you deal with—from structural beams to custom pieces of ironwork. Homer Iron Works, what defines excellence for your company?

Mike Park: Well, we’re very unique, we’re very diversified. We’ll do everything. We fabricate the steel for structural buildings. We’ve put up schools, we put up hospitals, we put up pre-engineered metal buildings. We did a huge sports complex in Limerick, Pennsylvania—was one of the largest projects that… it is the largest building that we put up. It’s comparable to the sports complex in Binghamton that blew down, only ours didn’t blow down.

Matt Brooks: Wow.

Mike Park: It was a… it was a big undertaking. We did up to Syracuse—the burn plant up there—we put up five buildings at Rock Cut where they do the… the county’s trash that comes in there. We did buildings there. So we’ve done buildings, you know, SUNY Cortland, Binghamton… just about every college and we work for about every school you can imagine.

Matt Brooks: Yeah, tell me more about that because you said the largest project was the sports complex, but it sounds like you might be called Homer Iron Works, but you’re all over the place.

Mike Park: Right. We can’t—because this business grew, we do more commercial work—we can’t survive just on Cortland. So we go from the—we work in Northern Pennsylvania all the way to the Canadian border. I’ve gone into New York—the outskirts of New York City, I try to stay away from there. We’ve gone all the way to Buffalo and done jobs pretty consistently. So we work all over the state, Northern Pennsylvania, and that’s how we grew our business and continue to grow.

Matt Brooks: Now, I guess I should ask this then, I mean, you’ve grown and you went from being a business being mainly local to mainly statewide. What keeps you in the Homer-Cortland area specifically if you’re working around the entire state?

Mike Park: Well, I grew up in Tully and in Homer. This is my home, our… I consider our hometown. I have family here, my kids are here, and I just love the area and I have no desire to leave the area and, you know, as you know, I’m the Town Supervisor also. So we put time into the town, very committed to… to this area. And we employ people here, most of our employees are local. They also support families, so we’re just big on that. I think it’s very important.

Matt Brooks: And I think that’s one of the key things that… especially with a business like Homer Iron Works that got your start here back in the 70s, that even though the projects have grown, your scope has grown, that you’re still in the hometown, you’re still helping everyone local while you’re—even if your workday consists of going across the state or even across the state border. Now, you’ve been around for over 50 years and what kind of changes in technologies and evolution of ironwork has occurred—how has the work changed over the years?

Mike Park: Well, for my company, I mean, it started with just me and of course that was just repair work and stuff. But as we were growing, we brought on… we got our own CAD designer in-house where we do our own CAD drawings and for designing the projects. We brought in more management positions, more CNC machines to help cut the steel and process steel, more trucks, more people, training people. In the early years I used to teach welding at BOCES. I know how to teach people, so we bring in young guys and we’ll train them the way we want to train them.

Matt Brooks: So, speaking of that, when you talk about training, what can you say—if you had to give some advice—to the next generation of welders, fabricators, those who are looking to enter the industry, what kind of mindset and skills do you value most, especially as President of Homer Iron Works?

Mike Park: When we interview young… younger people or anybody, we look at their—what their work ethic is, what their history is. If they’re coming out of BOCES—we hire a lot of young people out of BOCES. Pay attention, get the basics, and take math. You need… you need math. Basic math. Be able to read a ruler, be able to add in your head.

Matt Brooks: You don’t have to be like quantum mechanics, but I mean…

Mike Park: Right. You know, read a ruler. You gotta know what an eighth inch, you gotta know what a sixteenth is on your ruler and it’s, unfortunately, a lot of the younger—all ages, I’m not picking on younger people—a lot of people don’t know how to read a ruler today. They can’t even read an analog clock. They’re just not teaching it, but that’s very important to our trade. Just the bare basics, be able to comprehend what you’re reading. You don’t have to have a diploma out of college, but you gotta have the basics. Very important.

Matt Brooks: Yeah. Like, you need to have the drive and also just that basic bed of knowledge. You don’t want to be referring to your phone when you need to add a couple numbers together or trying to convert something. I mean, gosh, with the amount of dimensions and stuff you have to deal with with a project—

Mike Park: Absolutely. 

Matt Brooks: You need… you need to know how to convert from inches to feet to yards and then the whole metric system, too. At least that’s base ten.

Matt Brooks: Yep.

Mike Park: No, we do some metric…Also, the thing to understand in our type of work—we’re not a factory setting where you’re not sitting in a chair doing the same weld over and over. Our shop welders will work on anything from aluminum, to brass, to tin, to steel, to cast iron, stainless steel—we do it all. We do miles of handrails that could be in aluminum, it can be in brass, it can be in copper, whatever the customer calls for. So we cross-train, we teach people. You’ve got to be willing to get dirty. It’s hard work. It’s… you’re lifting heavy weights, you know. We’ve got overhead cranes, we’ve got forklifts, but you still—it’s still hard work. You’re going to get dirty at the end of the day.

Matt Brooks: So, with that mindset where you say, “Hey, you need to have that basic bed of knowledge of basic arithmetic and being adaptable and ready to learn,” what would you say to a person looking to get into the industry? How would you get your foot into the door in 2026?

Mike Park: Well, if you’re a young guy and you’re still in high school, I’d say go through your BOCES program. They’ve got some great programs over there that will teach you the basics. If you’ve already graduated school, BOCES has some adult education welding. I’d get some courses and learn the basics. It’s very hard for me to train somebody without any basics. If you come in and you’ve got some basics in stick welding, MIG welding, and TIG welding, it gives me a foundation to work with. We can start training you. It’s awful hard to train—and I have—if the person has a mechanical aptitude. You really got to want to do it, you’ve got to want to work. If you get on our road crews—I mean, that’s even more strenuous—you’re climbing, you’re up high, you could even be working underground. You’re lifting heavy beams, you’re bolting…

Matt Brooks: You could be really anywhere!

Mike Park: Yeah, yeah. You could be doing anything. And you’re welding basically in the field—we’re doing 7018s, it’s all structural, it’s all X-rayed and inspected work, so you’ve got to be a very good quality welder. Just the basics—you’ve got to learn the basics and you’ve got to start someplace. But get some schooling if you can. That goes, I think, for any industry, whether you’re looking at us or like Forkey’s down there—I know they hire a lot of quality people. They need some training too.

Matt Brooks: Yeah. Get that base in because, I mean, everything can be trained upon that, but you need to start somewhere. Now, we are running a little out of time, but I want to make sure that we wrap around with Homer Iron Works. So, if people are driving by, they see your sign—if there’s one thing, whether it’s a hidden fact or a specific value, that you want people to associate with Homer Iron Works as they drive by, what would that be?

Mike Park: Well, I tell everybody, you know, we’ll fix everything from the chair that you sit in to doing structural steel work. We build turbines that get shipped all over the world.

Matt Brooks: Wow.

Mike Park: We’ve got a mechanic shop, we have our own tractor-trailers, we haul our materials, we own 90% of all our own equipment. We are just very diverse. We do a ton of car frames, truck frames… if it has to do with steel or metal, it’s almost… we’ll tackle it.

Matt Brooks: Yeah, and with how wide your scope is, if you went to school, if you attended a game, there’s a good chance that Homer Iron Works had something to do with something in or around it.

Mike Park: Right. There’s—like I was saying earlier—we do work for over 63 different municipalities in Central New York, New York State. They bring from schools… just not a school in Central New York that we haven’t done something. Like the Cortland High School, we raised their auditorium up so they could have a higher auditorium. We do work at the Homer school, McGraw school, Moravia, Tully… we touch all the schools and all the colleges. Binghamton College, we won an award for—that went nationwide—on some of the specialty handrails that we did in there. There’s pictures, we’re in architectural magazines that went worldwide because of the quality and the uniqueness of it.

Matt Brooks: Well, it’s something special to have Homer Iron Works in our community. Thank you, Mike, for stopping by, just shedding a bit of light on everything that you do, because it’s not just pumping iron.

Mike Park: That’s right. You know, and one of our in Homer—one of our proudest projects is at The Exchange. All the railings that we did in front of The Exchange and around his patio area that we built them for Dan McNeil, and very proud of that project.

Matt Brooks: So much. And I can’t thank you enough for just keeping local businesses local, even if your reach is reaching to national, to state borders. So, thank you, Mike, again for coming in today, talking about Homer Iron Works, and hope you have a great rest of your 2026. Hope you have a lot of fun projects to tackle.

Mike Park: Well, great. Thank you very much for having me.Matt Brooks: This is X101 Always Classic. I’m Matt Brooks.