History |
The following history is based on the text in my book A Field Guide to American Residential Doors, pp. 204-205.
The Morgan Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was one of the most innovative millwork companies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The company was founded by brothers Richard Morgan and John Morgan in 1855. The Morgan brothers purchased a factory building for $200 and began to produce high-quality millwork. The company, operating under the name Morgan Sash & Door Company, was able to weather the Civil War and subsequent economic downturns, temporarily becoming the largest Oshkosh millwork company by 1870. The factory burned several times in the late nineteenth century and was rebuilt, including the Great Fire of 1875 that began in a Morgan building and spread onward to destroy most of the commercial area of Oshkosh. The company took the name the Morgan Company in 1889. Once the Carlton Foster & Co. failed, Morgan purchased its property and began to operate out of its former buildings (Oshkosh Northwestern, 2/14/1939).
J. Earl Morgan, a grandson of one of the founders, became company president in 1903 and served until 1939, and his vision for the company brought it to national prominence (Oshkosh Northwestern, 2/14/1939). These three decades represent the second phase of the company's history. In 1908, Morgan produced a millwork catalog that only advertised doors, which was perhaps the very first specifically door catalog; the publication had the name The Door Beautiful. The catalog began with illustrations of company factories, the Morgan Company factory in Oshkosh and the Morgan Sash & Door Company in Chicago. The catalog showcased the veneered doors produced by Morgan and reminded the readers that all Morgan doors were stamped with the company logo. Soon thereafter, Morgan opened a plant in Baltimore that operated under the name Morgan Millwork Company. Morgan then produced a new door catalog in 1916 named Adding Distinction to the Home, which showed the line of veneered doors offered at that point, and it re-issued and updated The Door Beautiful in 1917. Morgan's general catalogs first appeared in the 1890s, with two catalog types issued simultaneously (the Red Star book and the Blue Book that were originally pocket-sized catalogs that were enlarged when the company merged the two in the 1910s. The company originally published new catalogs with some frequency to adjust prices, but by the late 1920s, Morgan began publishing price supplements as a pocket-sized update that reduced costs. In 1929, Morgan inaugurated its line of period woodwork and re-named its catalog Morgan Authentic Woodwork. Architects Royal B. Wills and Ted Kautzky designed Morgan's four new lines of millwork. The fall of Paine during the Depression was something of a boost to Morgan. By 1938, Morgan's catalog had a full-color cover that was published with space for its local distributors to add their own names.
The third phase of the history of the Morgan Company lasted from the retirement of J. Earl Morgan in 1939 until the company ceased to exist. By the mid-twentieth century, Morgan had expanded into the void created by the contraction of Paine, and in many cases its materials appeared in the catalogs of other companies. Its own catalogs continued in production into the 1950s, and in the 1960s Morgan began to produce small catalogs for specific types of millwork. In late 1972, Morgan merged with a Connecticut firm, then changed hands several times. The firm Jeld-Wen purchased Morgan in 1998 and closed the Oshkosh plant in 2009 (Oshkosh Northwestern, 3/16/2013).
Millwork catalogs at archive.org:
Door Beautiful 1908,
Door Beautiful circa 1910,
Morgan Flush Doors circa 1912,
Building with Assurance 1922,
1936 |