B&W Trailer Hitches
Gooseneck and fifth-wheel hitches built by 390 employee-owners in Humboldt, Kansas.
🇺🇸 Made in USA
Our assessment
Company details
Where B&W Trailer Hitches products are made
A town of a few thousand people in south-east Kansas holds a plant of nearly half a million square feet. B&W did not move the work to a coast or a border; it grew the plant where the two founders started, and the fabrication, welding and finishing happen there.
The company is specific about the input, not just the assembly: steel comes from mills in the American Heartland that B&W says it knows and trusts. For a load-bearing product rated to tow tens of thousands of pounds, that traceability is the argument.
Since 2007 the company has been employee-owned. That structure is unusually well matched to domestic manufacturing — the owners are the same people whose jobs would move if the work did.
The 1987 founding, the Humboldt, Kansas facility, the American-sourced steel and the employee ownership are all published by B&W on bwtrailerhitches.com.
The story
In 1987 Roger Baker was a classic-car restorer running out of work and Joe Works had come off several hard years on the family farm. In Humboldt, Kansas, they started building custom truck beds together under the name B&W.
The idea that made the company came from an annoyance. A gooseneck ball welded permanently into a truck bed ruins the bed for everything else. Baker and Works designed a hitch whose hardware sat underneath and whose ball turned over and stowed flush. The Turnoverball worked so well that, as the company puts it, nearly every gooseneck manufacturer now uses the same approach.
A few years later they applied the same under-bed mounting to fifth-wheel hitches, producing the Companion — a single-point attachment that comes out when you are not towing. Roger retired in 1999. In 2007 Joe Works began handing the company to its employees.
Today the product line covers gooseneck, fifth-wheel, weight-distribution and receiver hitches, plus tongue-weight scales and pin locks, all made in the Humboldt plant.
Why they matter
Towing hardware is a category where the offshore option is always available and always cheaper. B&W says plainly that its competitors took it. Being one of the last hitch makers manufacturing in America is not a marketing line here; it is a description of what happened to the category.
The failure mode of a hitch is not a scratched finish. It is a trailer coming off a truck at highway speed. A company that buys its steel from named domestic mills and welds it in a plant it owns can answer for that chain in a way an importer cannot.
And the ownership structure closes the loop. When the people who would lose the jobs are the people who decide whether to move them, the decision tends to come out differently.
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Frequently asked questions
Are B&W trailer hitches made in the USA?
Yes. B&W states on its own website that its products are manufactured in its facility in Humboldt, Kansas, from steel sourced from American mills.
Where is B&W Trailer Hitches located?
1216 Hawaii Road, Humboldt, Kansas — the same town where the company was founded in 1987.
Who owns B&W Trailer Hitches?
Its employees. Co-founder Joe Works began transferring ownership to the workforce in 2007, and the company is now held by roughly 390 employee-owners.
What is the Turnoverball?
B&W’s original gooseneck hitch, with mounting hardware under the truck bed and a ball that turns over and stows flush so the bed stays usable. The design became the industry standard.