History |
The following is based on my text in A Field Guide to American Residential Doors:
The Cincinnati Sash & Door Company (CSDC) was one of two large millwork companies operating out of Cincinnati in the first seven decades of the twentieth century. Allen B. Peters founded the company in 1903 and served as its president until he retired in 1952 (Cincinnati Enquirer, 1/8/1956, p. 6).
Early in its history, it became the primary producer of Beaver board, a wood fiber wall board that was the forerunner of plaster board. The company constructed a large multi-story building that suffered two fires. The first came in 1921 in the planing mill section at the rear of the property, which caused the rear wall to fall onto the property of a competitor. The fire caused more damage to the competitor but large damage to both. The second fire came in 1952 when over a million dollars worth of millwork was lost in one of the largest fires in the city's history (Cincinnati Enquirer, 1/30/1952, p. 14). The fire was later remembered as having been one of the most difficult for firefighters, who attended to the fire for 12 hours in sub-zero temperatures, with the water poured onto the fire freezing in mid-air into water pellets (Cincinnati Enquirer, 4/4/1976, p. 14). CSDC was purchased by Zaring & Co., a Cincinnati-based building contractor, in 1970, but it went bankrupt in 1973 and its assets were auctioned (Cincinnati Enquirer, 6/6/1974, p. 46).
CSDC published catalogs at a remarkably rapid rate. The 1,000th number was issued in 1942, suggesting that the company published catalogs every two weeks. By the time the 1942 catalog was published, CSDC had already discontinued its millwork operations and was acting as a distributor for Morgan doors, Andersen windows, and Johns-Manville insulation. The 1942 catalog was one of several examples using thumb tabs. In 1956 when CSDC issued its 5,600th catalog, the company was still a distributor of the products of other companies (Morgan doors, Andersen and Malta windows, and E-Z Set Door Units). The 1956 catalog was actually a three-ring binder that included saddle-stitched signatures from various companies; this type of catalog was one of the earliest such composite catalogs of the mid-twentieth century.
Millwork catalogs at archive.org:
1942,
1956
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