Heritage

In the late 1800s, Orville Gibson arrived in Kalamazoo and began designing his own range of mandolins. Over time his company grew to become one of the world’s premier musical instrument manufacturers. Some of the world's finest guitars were built at 225 Parsons Street from 1917 to 1984.

Some of the former senior employees wanted to continue the tradition of handcrafting beautiful, high quality electric guitars in Kalamazoo. In the spring of 1985, they bought space at the iconic factory, much of the original guitar-making equipment, and the rest is history.

Jim Deurloo, Marv Lamb, and JP Moats (the founders of Heritage) had a combined total of 84 years of guitar-building experience when the company began. In time, Bill Paige and Mike Korpak joined as co-owners. Today, Jim, Marv, and Bill are still active in the daily business and their wealth of knowledge continues to live through our next generation of luthiers.

Heritage introduced our first Heritage guitar, the H-140 solid body single cutaway electric guitar, at the 1985 NAMM show in New Orleans. Over the years, they have built a small array of various instruments and now focus exclusively on making the world’s greatest hollow, semi-hollow, and solid body electric guitars.