16 Small U.S. Towns Tied to Some of America’s Biggest Companies

Some of America’s biggest business names have histories that run far beyond New York and Los Angeles. Their stories pass through garages, pharmacies, factories, and smaller communities across the country. In some cases, the company was founded there. In others, the place became an early headquarters, a manufacturing base, or an important part of the founder’s story.

The connections are not all the same, but each community has a real link to a major brand. Keep reading for 16 U.S. towns and cities tied to famous companies through their founding, early growth, headquarters, or the people who shaped them.

• Kohler Co. is so closely associated with Kohler, Wisconsin, that the village and company share a name. John Michael Kohler founded the business in Sheboygan in 1873, and the company moved its operations to Riverside, about four miles west, in 1899. That community became the Village of Kohler, which remains home to Kohler Co.’s headquarters.
• Walter J. Kohler helped shape the village as a garden and industrial community, working with the Olmsted Brothers on its long-term plan. The village describes itself as one of the nation’s early planned communities. Today, Kohler’s presence includes the Kohler Design Center and Destination Kohler resort properties.

• Walter Elias “Walt” Disney spent some of his most formative childhood years in Marceline, Missouri, and the small town left a lasting mark on his imagination.
• The Disney family moved from Chicago to Marceline in 1906. Walt Disney later spoke warmly about those years, and the Walt Disney Family Museum says his time on the family farm helped nurture his interest in drawing and his lifelong fascination with trains.
• Marceline’s influence is especially visible in Main Street, U.S.A. Disney says the Disneyland setting was inspired by Walt’s memories of his boyhood hometown, while Disney historians note that other American towns also influenced the final design. Marceline continues to celebrate its connection to Walt and the company he later built.

• Roseland, New Jersey, has a major corporate resident: ADP, the global payroll and human capital management company.
• ADP’s story began nearby in Paterson in 1949, when Henry Taub founded Automatic Payrolls, Inc. to process payroll for local businesses. The company later became Automatic Data Processing and expanded from manual payroll work into payroll, HR, benefits, tax, time-management, and other workforce technology and services.
• Today, ADP’s corporate headquarters remains at One ADP Boulevard in Roseland, making the borough an important part of the company’s present-day identity.

• This small suburb of Atlanta has a direct place in Chick-fil-A history. In 1946, Truett Cathy and his brother Ben opened the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville. The restaurant was later renamed the Dwarf House and became the testing ground for the chicken sandwich that would define Chick-fil-A.
• Truett Cathy perfected the Original Chicken Sandwich in 1964. The first Chick-fil-A-branded restaurant opened in Atlanta’s Greenbriar Mall in 1967, and the company opened its first stand-alone restaurant on North Druid Hills Road in Atlanta in 1986.
• Hapeville’s original Dwarf House keeps the city tied to the earliest chapter of the Chick-fil-A story, long before the chain expanded across the country.

• Netflix was founded in 1997, and Scotts Valley, California, was its headquarters when the company introduced its first online DVD business.
• On April 14, 1998, Netflix.com opened as an online store that rented and sold DVDs. In December 1999, the company launched a subscription program that eliminated due dates and late fees, helping establish the model that made Netflix a major force in home entertainment long before streaming became its main business.
• Scotts Valley’s role in that story was brief compared with Netflix’s later growth, but the company’s own 1998 launch announcement identifies the city as its headquarters at the time.

• Few American communities are as closely identified with a company as Hershey, Pennsylvania, is with chocolate.
• Milton S. Hershey founded the Lancaster Caramel Company in 1886 and established the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894. He sold the caramel business in 1900 to focus on chocolate, then began building a new factory in the Derry Township area in 1903. The factory was completed in 1905, and the community of Hershey grew around it.
• Chocolate still shapes the community today. The Hershey Company maintains corporate operations there, while Hersheypark, The Hotel Hershey, Hershey Lodge, Milton Hershey School, and other institutions continue the legacy Milton Hershey built around the factory town.

• Hormel Foods has one of the clearest small-city origin stories on the list. George A. Hormel founded Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in Austin, Minnesota, in 1891. The company later developed the world’s first canned ham in 1926 and introduced the SPAM® brand in 1937. More than a century after its founding, Hormel Foods still has its world headquarters in Austin.
• Hormel’s presence remains woven into the city, from its corporate and manufacturing operations to the SPAM® Museum and the Hormel Historic Home, the former home of George A. Hormel.

• Tesla traces its beginnings to San Carlos, California, where the electric-vehicle company was founded in 2003. Tesla’s own history describes a group of engineers setting out to prove that electric vehicles could compete with gasoline-powered cars, and early company materials identify San Carlos as the company’s founding location.
• Today, San Carlos is part of the San Francisco Bay Area and continues to use the nickname City of Good Living. Tesla eventually outgrew its early San Carlos footprint, but the city remains part of the company’s origin story.

• New Bern’s famous business story begins with Pepsi-Cola. Pharmacist Caleb Bradham created the drink at his New Bern pharmacy and renamed it Pepsi-Cola on August 28, 1898. He formed the Pepsi-Cola Company in 1902, and the Pepsi-Cola trademark was registered in 1903. The much larger PepsiCo came later, in 1965, when Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay.
• New Bern still celebrates that history. The Birthplace of Pepsi attraction operates at the historic site, where visitors can learn about Bradham’s early business, buy merchandise, and order a fountain Pepsi.

• Google’s story began at Stanford University, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine in the 1990s. In 1998, after Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote them a $100,000 check and Google Inc. was incorporated, the young company moved into its first office: a garage in Menlo Park, California.
• The garage belonged to Susan Wojcicki, who later became Google employee No. 16 and eventually CEO of YouTube. Google says the small team grew while working out of the house before it eventually outgrew the space.
• The Menlo Park garage remains one of Silicon Valley’s best-known startup locations. For Google’s 20th anniversary in 2018, the company created a virtual version of the garage that recreated the cluttered computers, bright carpet, and makeshift workspace of its early days.

• Anthropologie opened its first store in Wayne, Pennsylvania, in 1992. URBN says the location was a former automobile shop, transformed into a new retail concept aimed at customers looking for a more artful mix of clothing, accessories, gifts, and home décor.
• The brand has expanded far beyond that first Wayne storefront. Anthropologie is now part of the URBN portfolio and operates stores across North America and Europe.

• Holyoke enters the Yankee Candle story during the company’s early growth. The business began at Christmas in 1969, when 16-year-old Mike Kittredge melted crayons to make a candle for his mother because he could not afford to buy her a gift. A neighbor wanted one too, giving him the money that helped turn the homemade present into a business.
• By 1973, Yankee Candle had 12 employees, and the company moved into an old paper mill in Holyoke. The following year it introduced its scented apothecary candle jars, and the brand continued expanding from there.
• Yankee Candle later established its headquarters in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, but the Holyoke paper-mill years remain an important part of the company’s history.

• CVS Health’s retail roots began with a simple health-and-beauty store before pharmacies became the center of the business.
• The first Consumer Value Store opened in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1963, and the name was shortened to CVS a year later. CVS introduced pharmacies inside its stores in Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1967 and was sold to Melville Corporation in 1969. After further expansion, the company broke ground on its Store Support Center in Woonsocket in 1981.
• Woonsocket remains CVS Health’s corporate headquarters today. The company lists its headquarters at One CVS Drive, Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

• Battle Creek’s connection to breakfast cereal reaches back to experiments with flaked grains at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the late nineteenth century.
• W.K. Kellogg and his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, were involved in the development of flaked grain cereals during the 1890s. W.K. later commercialized Corn Flakes and founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, turning the product into a national breakfast brand.
• Battle Creek remains central to the cereal business today. After Kellogg Company separated its North American cereal operation as WK Kellogg Co in 2023, that business was headquartered in Battle Creek. Ferrero completed its acquisition of WK Kellogg Co on September 26, 2025. The companies had said Battle Creek would remain a core location and serve as Ferrero’s headquarters for North America cereal after the transaction.

• Walmart’s corporate home is Bentonville, Arkansas, even though the first Walmart store opened a few miles away in Rogers.
• Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers on July 2, 1962. By 1967, the Walton family owned 24 stores with $12.7 million in sales. Walmart became publicly traded in 1970, with its first shares sold at $16.50 apiece, and in 1971 the company opened its first distribution center and Home Office in Bentonville.
• Bentonville remains the center of Walmart’s corporate world. The renovated Walmart Museum is open downtown, and the company continues to build its future around its new home office campus.

• Marietta sits in metro Atlanta, the region where The Home Depot built its business. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were fired from Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers in 1978, and The Home Depot was incorporated on June 29 of that year. Its first two stores opened in Atlanta on June 22, 1979, on Memorial Drive and Buford Highway.
• Today, Marietta remains part of the same metro area where Home Depot grew from those first stores into a major home-improvement retailer. The company’s Store Support Center, its corporate headquarters, remains in Atlanta.