Bird & Son Inc

Bird & Son, Inc. was a Massachusetts-based building products manufacturer that produced asbestos-containing materials including roofing, flooring, siding, and insulation products through much of the 20th century. The company is named in many asbestos personal injury and wrongful death claims because workers and homeowners were exposed to asbestos when installing, cutting, or removing its products.

Origin

Bird & Son traces its roots to 1795, when George Bird established a paper mill in East Walpole, Massachusetts, making it one of the oldest continuously operating manufacturers in the United States. Over the 1800s and 1900s it expanded from paper into asphalt roofing, resilient flooring (including asbestos-containing vinyl-asbestos tile), and other building products. The company was later acquired and its product lines passed through several corporate successors.

Significance in Asbestos Context

Bird & Son products (particularly its vinyl-asbestos floor tiles, asphalt roofing, and roll roofing) were widely sold to builders, contractors, and homeowners from roughly the 1920s through the 1970s. Construction workers, roofers, flooring installers, remodelers, and do-it-yourself homeowners who sawed, scraped, sanded, or tore out these materials may have inhaled asbestos fibers released during the work. Patients with mesothelioma, lung cancer, or asbestosis who worked with Bird products, or who lived in homes where these materials were installed or removed, may have a viable claim against Bird's corporate successors or related trusts. Identifying the specific Bird product, the era it was used, and the type of work performed is central to building such a claim.

Related Terms

Vinyl-Asbestos Tile, Asphalt Roofing, Product Identification, Successor Liability, Occupational Exposure, Take-Home Exposure

Notes

• If you or a family member worked with Bird & Son flooring or roofing, try to document product names, package labels, job sites, dates, and co-workers who can confirm the exposure.
• Check old home renovation records, receipts, contractor invoices, and even photographs of original flooring or roofing patterns. Product identification is often the hardest part of a case.
• Ask your legal team to investigate Bird's corporate succession, including any acquiring companies and whether claims should be filed against an asbestos trust or a successor entity.
• Preserve any physical samples of suspected Bird products removed during renovation; do not disturb them yourself, but a qualified abatement contractor can collect samples for later analytical testing.
• This company is most often relevant to mesothelioma and lung cancer cases involving residential construction, remodeling trades, and roofing or flooring installers.

Asbestos products

7 products our documents name Bird & Son Inc as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Bird Metal Gravel Stops Type Gs-2 (Bird & Son)
• Buca Adhesive (Bird & Son)
• Climatite (Bird & Son)
• Pacific Spec. C-2-15A-AC (Bird & Son)
• Pacific Spec. C-2-Bb-ac (Bird & Son)
• Pacific Spec. W2-Bb-ac (Bird & Son)
• Plantation Stone (Bird & Son)

In our library

3 documents in our library name Bird & Son Inc, by collection.

Other library documents (3)

• Label: BUCA Adhesive (Bird & Son) (publisher)
• Label: CLIMATITE (BIRD & SON) (publisher)
• Label: Climatite Asphalt Roof Coating (Bird & Son) (publisher)

In the Union Carbide documents

Bird & Son Inc is named in 2 Union Carbide documents dated 1973 (2 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• Users of Asbestos Fibers: Directory of Manufacturers by Product Category (1973) UC-935 (mentioned)
• Users of Asbestos Fibres: Directory of Companies by Product Category (1973) UC-2648 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Bird & Son Inc, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: Bird & Son.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Bird & Son Inc, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.