History |
Curtis, a millwork firm operating out of Clinton, Iowa, for a century, was one of the most innovative millwork firms in the nation in the early twentieth century, particularly during the years 1915 to 1930.
The company was founded in 1866. Charles F. Curtis (1846-1915) moved to Clinton, Iowa in the summer of 1866 and opened a grocery with W.G. Hemingway. A small planing mill on the riverfront at Seventh and Front Streets operating under the name of Clawson, Thornburg, & Smith fell on economic hard times, and at the end of 1866 Curtis and Hemingway purchased the interests of Clawson and Thornburg. At the beginning, the new firm of Smith, Hemingway, & Curtis had three employees: a superintendent, engineer, and planing operator, and they specialized in the dressing of lumber. Then in 1867 Curtis’s brother George M. Curtis purchased the interest of Smith, bringing his marketing skills to the company, and later in the year the Curtis brothers purchased Hemingway’s interest in the company. At this time, the company operated as G.M. Curtis & Brother. George Curtis (1844-1921) served two terms in the U.S. House in the 1890s. In 1868, Judson E. Carpenter, an uncle of the Curtis brothers, replaced Hemingway, and the firm was re-named Curtis Brothers & Company. Curtis expanded in 1869 when it purchased a competing business, the C.H. Toll and Ankeny factory at 13th Avenue and Second Street, at which time the company selected the Toll factory’s site as its primary location. In the early 1870s, Curtis had 50 employees who produced 75 doors and 250 windows daily. The firm in 1877 constructed a brick warehouse in Clinton. By 1879, the company had expanded to 180 employees (Patrick B. Wolfe, Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, Iowa [Indianapolis: B.F. Bowen, 1911], pp. 382, 695).
Curtis expanded its capacity further in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1881, the firm took Fowler Stone, S.M. Yale, and Cornelius S. Curtis into the partnership, after which the Curtis Brothers and Company was incorporated. In 1881, the first satellite branch factory was opened in Wausau, Wisconsin under Cornelius Curtis’s management; this facility and a third factory in Minneapolis were organized as the Curtis & Yale Company in 1890. Satellite warehouses in other locations also took new names, including the Rib Lake Lumber Company in Rib Lake, Wisconsin; Curtis & Vanberg in Lincoln, Nebraska; Curtis Sash and Door in Sioux City and Oklahoma City; and Curtis Door and Sash Company in Chicago. In 1910, Curtis employed 375 men who produced 1,000 doors and 2,500 windows daily (Wolfe 1911:382).
The middle phase of the company’s history extended from 1911 until 1953. The various Curtis branches were organized under a holding company in 1911 under the name the Curtis Companies. Curtis was one of the earliest millwork companies to offer benefits to its employees, including a pension plan and insurance. The middle phase of the Curtis history represented its most innovative and creative period. Its earliest extant millwork catalog is dated 1917. Millwork catalogs produced by the Curtis Companies stand among the most innovative and creative of the early twentieth century. In 1917, Curtis published Woodwork: The Permanent Furniture of Your Home. This catalog, a hardbound book of 374 pages, was a landmark for several reasons. Curtis introduced title pages for each category of millwork, with a color graphic announcing the type of millwork on the following pages. These graphics sometimes showed the item being demonstrated in conjunction with associated millwork from the company. For the 1920 catalog, Curtis contracted with the New York City architectural firm of Trowbridge and Ackerman to design a line of millwork that was intended to be sold as a package. The resulting Architectural Interior and Exterior Woodwork Standardized (1920) offered four lines of millwork: Colonial, Southern, English, and Western. The catalog again included color pages showing rooms built using ensembles of the millwork lines. In the 1920s, Curtis twice published books on interior doors, and its other catalogs such as 1926 and 1932 were less innovative. In the latter years of the Depression, Curtis contracted with architect Dwight J. Baum to design a new line of millwork. The resulting catalog included the new line of Curtis windows named Silentite, which was called "the first major improvement in window construction in nearly 300 years" (Wausau Daily Herald, 3/13/1939, p. 54). Curtis produced its final millwork catalogs in 1946 and 1953.
The third phase of the history of the Curtis Companies extended from 1953 to 1966. The company suffered severe economic losses in the early 1960s. Then in 1965, Clinton, Iowa, flooded. When the company announced that it was closing the Clinton plant in 1966, the company reported that it had lost over $2 million in the previous seven years.
Millwork catalogs at archive.org:
1917,
1920,
Exterior Doors 1923,
Interior Doors 1923,
Stairs 1923,
Interior Woodwork 1923,
1926,
Exterior Doors 1927,
Exterior Woodwork 1927,
Interior Doors 1927,
Windows 1927,
Moldings 1927,
Cabinets and Stairs 1927,
Exterior Woodwork 1927,
1932,
Woodwork #1 1940,
Woodwork #2 1940,
Silentite Windows 1940,
1946
|