In 1923, Frank “The Chief” Corrigan left Montreal, Canada for Dearborn, Michigan. Just a few years prior, Henry Ford revolutionized the auto industry by announcing a $5 per day wage and an 8-hour workday in his factories. This more than doubled the standard pay at that time and Frank was lured in by this opportunity. Ford eventually learned that Frank had grown up on a farm, and wanted to put him to work on the Ford farms instead. This turned into Frank doing odd jobs for the Ford family and chauffeuring Henry Ford around instead of him working the assembly line.
Frank was hungry for more than just working a day job, so in his spare time when he wasn’t assisting the Ford family, he started delivering ice to families around Dearborn. The ice route did well enough that he recruited his brothers to move from Montreal to Dearborn as well, and three Corrigan brothers were soon delivering ice together. Then, in 1929, right before the stock market crashed, he told his brothers to keep the ice business running and he shifted his focus to moving furniture as well. That's the year Corrigan Moving Systems marks its founding.
The company limped along for years as a small local mover, neither thriving nor failing. Paul Corrigan was born in 1925, just before the pivot into moving. When World War II arrived, Paul enlisted, and while he was gone, Frank suffered a nervous breakdown from the stresses of running the business during the Great Depression and the war, which left the business dangerously exposed. Paul came home hoping to go to college, he instead went to work to save the company his father had built. He came to find out that he was quite the gifted business leader.
He joined United Van Lines in just its second year of operation and took Corrigan from a local mover into an interstate carrier. Over time, he grew Corrigan significantly and turned it into a continued family operation. Paul’s son David grew up in the business. He was working in Corrigan's trucks at 13 years old. He would get picked up by his grandfather on Catholic school holy days to do the jobs nobody else wanted, like climbing under a sandblasted scale to dig out sand and haul it out by hand. David grew up to run the business himself eventually.
Of David’s four children, one daughter worked at the company for a significant period of time, and two others chose to build careers inside Corrigan: Kevin and Nathan. Nathan now runs the company as CEO. Nathan didn't step into the President's chair; he started as a summer helper at Corrigan in 1995 and spent nearly three decades working his way up, managing divisions, opening new offices, and pushing the company's technology forward before formally taking the role in 2024. It's the same lesson David learned under the sandblasted scale, applied a generation later.
At one point, Paul became president and then chairman of United Van Lines, and later joined the board of Unigroup after it acquired Mayflower. Paul ended up sitting on the United Van Lines board at the same time as David before eventually becoming chairman emeritus while David took the chairman's seat himself. David stepped down from the Unigroup board in 2024, and his own son, Nathan, now holds the family's seat. Three generations of Corrigans have now sat on the board of United Van Lines and four generations have worked in and run the company.
Under David, Corrigan expanded to five states, 600+ employees and 18 owned branches including Corrigan's Mayflower agency, Premier. Today, Corrigan has a logistics division made up of everything the company does that isn't household goods moving which has grown larger than the core moving business itself.
Corrigan's philosophy starts and ends with one idea: hire good people, and teach them the business. The business, he says, is the easy part to teach. Character is what's hard to find, and Corrigan has been extremely successful at finding it and retaining it. Employees stay for decades. Even to this day, David regularly has lunch with retirees who spent their entire careers there. As he puts it, "we treat them right, and they treat the customer right, that's our mantra."
Part of what makes that culture stick is that the Corrigan family and team never stopped loving the work themselves. "Either you hate it or you love it," David says of the industry, "and I've met both in ownership too." He's seen peers forced into running a company they never wanted. He wasn't one of them, a passion he traces straight back to his grandfather teaching him the ropes.
Corrigan's bench involves more than just family. Kevin Corrigan, David's other son, serves as Regional VP overseeing operations across the network. Ashley Walsh, Director of Marketing, joined 15 years ago in sales, and came in with no moving industry background at all. David admits he was nervous she'd be too sharp to stick around long, and she’s still going strong. Kirk Hensler, Chief Operating Officer, runs the pieces of the business that now span moving, logistics, and everything in between. This reflects the same hiring instinct David describes: bring in good people, whether or not they were born into the business, and give them room to grow into it.
Asked what outsiders miss about running a moving company, David doesn't point to trucks or freight. "It's a people business," he says. "It really is a managing people business." The heart to serve people and be family-centered shows even at home. David's father, Paul, turned 102 in June and David still goes out to dinner every night, splitting his time between Charlevoix, Michigan, in the summer and Sanibel, Florida, in the winter. David is the oldest of six siblings who each take a turn caring for him for a week at a time, on a six-week rotation.
Follow a Corrigan crew for a day, and quality is the first thing you'd notice, because it's the metric David has built the entire company around. Corrigan has won United Van Lines' President's Quality Award, the single award given to one United agent and one Mayflower agent each year, on both sides, more times than any other agent in the entire United Van Lines and Mayflower network.
Ashley, who reviews every Google review that comes in, says what strikes her most isn't the praise for careful handling or fast timelines, it's how often customers specifically call out kindness. Movers who shake a customer's hand when they arrive and shake it again on the way out to make sure nothing else is needed. Crews who clean up after themselves without being asked. That standard is built deliberately: new hires go through Corrigan Academy, hands-on training that includes a full studio apartment built out for practice moves, with as much attention paid to how a mover represents themselves personally as how they wrap a couch.
That same standard shows up in Corrigan's logistics arm, where the company runs white-glove delivery work for a luxury retail brand, handling high-value seasonal shipments to individual customers anywhere they need to go. Corrigan sends its own uniforms ahead to whichever van line agent is delivering at the destination, so the customer's experience carries the same Corrigan standard end to end.
Ask David whether Corrigan is trying to get bigger or get better, and his answer is both, because in his view they aren't separable. "Without growth, we're going to die just like any company," he says, but bigger to Corrigan means higher volume and deeper service in the markets it's already in, not just adding pins to a map. That's the thinking behind Corrigan's logistics expansion, its Corrigan Air & Sea Cargo division moving heavy machinery internationally (including, notably, a tank built in Michigan and shipped to Saudi Arabia), and Signature Relocation, a relocation services company Corrigan built because national accounts increasingly expect more than a truck and a crew.
The two biggest decisions of David's career both involved protecting that long-term thinking. The first came at the Unigroup board level, when a proposal surfaced to sell Unigroup to a private equity firm. David fought relentlessly against it, arguing that board members are elected to make hard calls themselves, not pass them along. The board ultimately voted 11 to 1 against the sale, with only the chairman in favor. Had it gone the other way, David says Corrigan would have left Unigroup and gone independent rather than be owned by private equity.
The second was succession. Having watched loyal lieutenants leave when he first took over from his own father, convinced a 22-year-old wasn't ready, David planned Nathan's transition into the CEO role years in advance and made sure the leadership team understood the direction early. The result: no exodus, a leadership bench that's stayed intact, and David with enough free time to run special projects he cares about, including "Lightning Local," an effort led with Ashley to reverse Corrigan's old habit of turning away small, last-minute local jobs behind a four-hour minimum.
Corrigan's community work runs through its individual branches as much as through the corporate office. The company has a long-running partnership with the Girl Scouts, receiving and distributing all of their cookie inventory each year starting in late January, an operation Ashley says the whole team looks forward to.
In Rochester, Corrigan works closely with the Pirate Toy Fund, warehousing and distributing toy donations back out into the community. When hurricanes and flooding hit the southeast a couple of years ago, Corrigan sent a truck loaded with donations to Bristol Motor Speedway to support relief efforts.
Locally, individual branches run their own giving programs, in Ann Arbor, customers cleaning out a pantry during a move are connected directly to Food Gatherers, the local food bank, rather than a national program, because Ashley and the team would rather see the impact land close to home.
Corrigan's involvement extends into industry leadership as well. David served as president of the Michigan movers association, and both of his sons have since held that same role. The company stays active across state and national moving associations, including the American Trucking Associations' household goods movers segment and international moving bodies, reflecting the reach of Corrigan Air & Sea Cargo's global work.
FOUNDED
1929, Dearborn, Michigan
Leadership
David Corrigan, CEO (3rd generation); Nathan Corrigan, President (4th generation); Paul Corrigan, Chairman Emeritus, age 102 (2nd generation)
Locations
600 employees working across 18 owned branches across 5 states, including Bay City, Buffalo, Ann Arbor, and Chicago, plus Premier Mayflower locations mirrored in every market
Van Lines
United Van Lines (agent since its 2nd year of operation) & Mayflower (Premier Mayflower agency)
Business Lines
Household goods moving; Logistics (now larger than the moving division); Corrigan Air & Sea Cargo (international freight & heavy machinery); Signature Relocation
AWARDS
United Van Lines President's Quality Award — won on both the United and Mayflower sides more times than any other agent in the network
Generations in Leadership
4, with a 5th (Jesse, Nathan's oldest son) already working summers in the warehouse
Community
Girl Scout cookie distribution; Pirate Toy Fund (Rochester); disaster relief drives; local food bank partnerships (including Food Gatherers, Ann Arbor); leadership in Michigan movers' and national/international moving associations
