Abandoned Furniture Factory in MI

Central Furniture Company-H.E. Shaw Furniture Factory, Grand Rapids Michigan

Date added: December 05, 2024

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The Central Furniture Company and its successors represent the medium-sized furniture companies that consistently produced moderately priced household furniture for the rising middle class during the peak years of the Grand Rapids residential furniture industry. The companies located here produced household furniture for forty years. While a small number of firms were leaders in the Grand Rapids furniture industry at any given time, the medium-sized companies such as the succession of firms that occupied this complex were the backbone of the city's furniture industry. Following the demise of the H. E. Shaw Furniture Company, the last of the successor firms to Central Furniture which had begun development of the complex, the complex continued to be associated with the city's furniture industry until the turn of the twenty-first century. The 1920s buildings; B3, B4, and the south addition to B4, embody "slow-burning" or "mill construction" commonly used for factories constructed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The H. E. Shaw Furniture Company, which occupied this complex until 1933, was the last in the line of successor companies to the Grand Rapids Folding Chair and Table Company, established in 1881, which had its factory at Ionia Avenue SW and Wealthy Street. Although various types of folding chairs have been used for centuries, following the Civil War mass-produced folding furniture became highly popular. As its name implies, the Folding Chair and Table Company specialized in the manufacture of folding tables and chairs. The company's products were "Eastlake" in style and made in maple, oak, and ash, including in a faux bamboo style. The company also produced bookcases and secretaries.

In the early morning of November 22^nd, 1892, the company's three-story, frame factory at Ionia Avenue and Wealthy Street was "well nigh totally destroyed by fire." As was all too typical, the building and its contents were grossly under insured ("Goes Up in Smoke"). The company moved its operations to a building at the corner of Pearl and Front Street on the west side of the city, where it carried on operations until April 1895, Reporting on the closing of the business, the April 3^rd, 1895, The Michigan Tradesman observed that the company never recovered from the loss incurred by the lack of adequate fire insurance.

In 1893 Charles Snyder founded the Central Furniture Company, which manufactured bookcases, ladies desks, music cabinets, and buffets in a factory located at 102 Prescott Street SW. When the Folding Chair and Table Company closed, Snyder purchased its property on Tonia's east side between Wealthy and McConnell located one block north of his plant on Prescott Street. The 1895 Sanborn map shows the north part of the property occupied by "Ruins of Factory," the site of the destroyed Folding Chair and Table factory, the south end by a then vacant three-story building that now forms part of building B2. Whether this was built for the Folding Chair and Table Company is not clear.

The Central Furniture Company was incorporated with a capital stock of $25,000 in 1896. Officers were John G. Kalmbach, president; Fred Freuh, vice president; and Charles Snyder, secretary-treasurer. Kalmbach founded and was the president of the Rindge-Kalmbach-Logie Company, wholesalers of boots and shoes. Snyder began his career in the furniture business as an apprentice in one of the early furniture factories in 1870. No information about Fred Freuh has been found.

The Central Furniture Company soon added to the factory a brick wing (building B1) extending north from the earlier building's east end. The original three-story building fronting on McConnell was also enlarged with a fourth story during 1903 ("Hum of the Business World"). The company's work force of forty manufactured a medium and high class line of bookcases, ladies desks, music cabinets and buffets in a variety of styles.

John R. Shelton purchased an interest in the company in 1899 and replaced Freuh as vice-president. From 1905 to 1910 the company was known as the Shelton & Snyder Furniture Company and continued to manufacture bookcases, desks, and music cabinets. At this time, period revival dining room suites in oak and mahogany were added to the company line. An ad in the March 1909 Grand Rapids Furniture Record informed potential customers that the company then had a product line of over 400 items. A brief note in the Michigan Artisan in November 1905 reported that Shelton & Snyder "have commenced the erection of a large addition to their factory." This was likely the northern half of building B2 fronting on Ionia north of the long and rectangular southern part showing in the 1895 map. The 1912 Sanborn map shows this extension in place.

Shelton was born in Michigan, but went west as a young man to make his fortune. According to the 1903 "The Men Who Are Making Grand Rapids" feature about him in the Grand Rapids Press, he made and lost a large fortune dealing in real estate in Nebraska and Kansas before becoming successful in the retail furniture trade. He came to Grand Rapids about 1893 to work for the Sligh Furniture Company as a salesman. He later acquired an interest in the Maddox Table Company of Jamestown, New York, and became its eastern manager, with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Shelton left the company and the city in 1910.

The company was then once again reorganized as the Snyder Furniture Company, with the original officers of the Central Furniture Company. At this time the company began to specialize in dining room suites both in the Mission style as well as in period revival styles. Charles Snyder retired in 1917 after a reported forty-seven years in the furniture manufacturing industry. In August of that year, he sold his business to Harry E. Shaw and Peter Van Dommelen, and it became the Shaw Furniture Company, with Shaw as president, Van Dommelen as vice-president, and Edward Post as secretary-treasurer. A year later, the company became the H. E. Shaw Furniture Company. The new owners increased the capital stock from $25,000 to $86,750, which enabled further building expansion.

In 1921-22 and 1924 large additions to the original factory more than doubled its size to 28,000 square feet. These included the entire north half of the plant, buildings B3, B4, and the southern extension of B4. Some and perhaps all the 1921-24 expansions were designed by Grand Rapids architect James Price and constructed by the Barnes Brothers Construction Company. A May 1922 Herald story notes plans being made by Price for another addition, presumably building B4, and Barnes Brothers completing work on what seems to be building B3.

James Price had offices in Holland and Grand Rapids and designed commercial, residential, and industrial buildings. No personal information about Price was found. In the early 1920s, Barnes Brothers was a relatively new company. The two brothers divided the company in the early 1950s, and both successor companies continue in business today as CD Barnes Associates and the Barnes Construction Company.

Both Harry Shaw and Peter Van Dommelen had extensive experience in the furniture business. Shaw began at the Kent Furniture Company in 1892 and later worked for the John Widdicomb Company. He spent twelve years with the Charles P. Limbert Company of Holland, where he was secretary-treasurer at the time he resigned to start his own company. Van Dommelen worked for the Michigan Chair Company, Stickley Brothers, the Grand Rapids Table Company, the Phoenix Furniture Company, and the Charles P. Limbert Company.

Continuing the product line of the Central Furniture Company and its successors, H. E. Shaw manufactured oak, walnut, and mahogany desks, secretaries, and dining room furniture in Colonial and European Revival styles, which was marketed to the middle class. A company specialty was the "Vandome Desk Table," "Combining a well designed [writing] desk with a davenport table." Another company offering, the "Spinet Desk," followed a trend of disguising furniture to appear as an antique form to fit into the style of a particular period. Designed to be used in living rooms, the desk had a form and style modeled on a spinet piano and was produced in a variety of period revival styles.

Like many other Grand Rapids companies, Shaw expanded its manufacturing capacity in the early 1920s. Once the stock market crashed in 1929, business dwindled. The H. E. Shaw Furniture Company fell victim to the Depression and closed its doors in 1933. In 1935 Shaw became the manager of the Furniture Manufacturers Warehouse, from which position he retired in 1950. He died in Grand Rapids in 1954.

After 1933 the complex continued to be associated with the furniture industry until it became vacant in 2000. The Schoonbeck Company manufactured upholstered furniture in the northeast section of the complex from 1934 until 1968. When Schoonbeck moved, its space became the Klingman Furniture Company warehouse until 1999. In 1940 the Luce Furniture Company occupied part of the building in its unsuccessful effort to reorganize after bankruptcy.

Subsequent tenants included the Robinson Furniture Company, which manufactured the "Converta-sofa," the SFS Corporation, which made chairs and custom millwork on contract for other Grand Rapids household and office furniture companies, including Steelcase, Stow & Davis, John Widdicomb, Baker, and Kindel. The building has been vacant since 2000.

Architecture

The complex's buildings represent standard forms of timber-frame masonry-wall loft factory design and construction of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and most of the buildings retain their historic construction in a high state of integrity. The building exteriors and fire walls are constructed of machine-pressed brick, the standard factory wall material since about 1860 because of its resistance to high temperatures and greater fire resistance than stone.

The construction of the 1920s buildings, B3, B4, and B4's southern extension, forms textbook examples of the "slow-burning" or "mill construction" that was in common use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These construction techniques saw their rise particularly in New England textile mills in the later nineteenth century and began to become more widely disseminated in the 1880s through general construction manuals and special publications on mill design.

Slow burning or mill construction built upon already widely used "fire-resistive construction" techniques designed to make it more difficult for fire in one area to spread beyond it and to reduce or eliminate the losses to other parts of the building or complex and contents not only from the fire but from fire-fighting activities. Fire-resistive construction included dividing interior spaces with solid brick walls and metal-clad fire doors, separating stories with watertight floors so that water from fire-fighting actions would pool on the affected floor and not soak through, resulting in additional damage below, and eliminating hollow partitions, attics, and other hidden spaces where fire could go on undetected.

Slow-burning or mill construction went a step beyond in using heavier timber to retard the early progress of any fire that took place until fire-fighters could arrive and reduce the damage to structure and contents caused by fire-related structural failures. Slow-burning or mill construction required large-dimension single timbers (rather than built-up members formed of multiple planks placed side by side) for posts, beams spanning between them, and as widely spaced floor joists in place of planks on edge spaced a foot or two apart and also required thick plank flooring laid directly on these larger-dimension and more widely spaced joists. The framing was also to be designed so that damaged wood framing members would fall away from the brick exterior walls rather than harming them (it is not clear whether this feature is present in the complex's 1920s buildings). This heavy post, beam, and joist framing, even though the outer edges of framing members were badly charred, was more likely to retain enough strength to support the structure than types of construction using lighter-weight wood members or a combination of iron posts and wood members.

Experts such as Frank C. Moore, by the early 1900s a twenty-five-year veteran analyst, from the fire insurance industry perspective, of the risks associated with commercial and industrial properties, felt that the structural timbers should be at least twelve by twelve inches and 'that flooring be double, with wood planking totaling at least three inches in depth, with a subfloor of thick tongue-and-groove planks topped by a layer of waterproof paper (tin or sheet iron even better) and then capped with an upper surface of at least seven-eighths-inch depth flooring laid diagonally.

The Central-Shaw complex's buildings utilize solid pressed brick exterior and fire walls. The buildings employ various different wooden structural systems, much using large-scale single timber posts and beams, but parts use posts and beams formed of planks nailed together or conventional smaller wooden joists between heavy beams spanning between the posts. The 1920s parts use the slow-burning mill construction of more widely spaced heavy timber joists between the massive beams spanning between the posts. All parts appear to have double floors with thick planks beneath and thinner diagonal planking above.

James Price

Grand Rapids architect James Price designed one of the additions to the building complex, according to a brief story, "Another Addition to Shaw Factory Planned," in the May 14^th, 1922 Grand Rapids Herald. From the date when the addition was being planned, it seems likely this was Building 4. This was the only reference to Price found in relation to the factory complex, but it seems possible if not likely that Price may have designed the other similar 1921-24 work comprising the complex's north half. Price's architectural work is not a well known today, but Dr. Richard Harms has assembled a short list of his work in the Holland-Grand Haven area built in the 1900-30 period. This work includes commercial and industrial buildings in Grand Rapids and Holland, including the 1926 Bestman & DeMeester Warehouse, 316-18 Grandville Avenue, Grand Rapids, and work for the Scott Luger Lumber Co. and Franken Dye Co. in Holland; houses, including the 1914 R. E. Shannahan summer house at Ottawa Beach near Holland; public school buildings in Holland and Zeeland; and the 1925 St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids. These commissions suggest a general practice rather than a specialty in one or a few types of buildings, but this is hard to know for sure.

Price (1860-1935) was born in England and migrated to Canada in 1881 and later to the United States, working in Chicago before coming to the Holland-Grand Rapids area of Michigan. Price was practicing in Holland by 1895, the 1895 state gazetteer is the first to list him there, and until 1913. The 1901 and 1903 gazetteers list him as Holland city surveyor as well. Price moved to Grand Rapids in 1913 or 1914, the 1913 gazetteer lists him in Holland, and the 1914 Grand Rapids directory is the first to list him as a resident and architect in that city. The 1916 city directory lists him as "Architect, Civil Engineer and Surveyor," while most later directories through 1935 list him simply as architect. Judging from the directory entries, Price remained in practice until or nearly until his death in 1935, The H. E. Shaw Furniture work, even if it included just building B4, would likely have constituted a substantial project in Price's career. If, as seems possible, Price designed all the 1921-24 part of the plant, this would presumably have been a major if not key part of his work.

The Grand Rapids Furniture Industry

The Grand Rapids furniture industry began to develop even before Grand Rapids' incorporation as a city in 1850, A number of early settlers, largely from New England, had training as cabinetmakers. Since travel was difficult and transport of household goods expensive, the market for locally produced furniture grew along with the population. It did not take long for entrepreneurs to see the possibilities. By 1849 Ebenezer M. Ball and William T. Powers were shipping lumber and chairs west across Lake Michigan and east into upstate New York. Theirs was likely the first Grand Rapids company to use power machinery to make furniture and to sell in markets beyond the local area.

Grand Rapids furniture gained a national reputation beginning in 1876, when the Berkey & Gay Company, Nelson, Matter & Company, and the Phoenix Furniture Company displayed exhibits of their top-of-the-line products at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. All three companies won medals and their furniture was well received by the public. Prior to this time, machine production had been limited to the manufacture of low to medium-quality furniture. The Grand Rapids manufacturers applied an advancing technology to the mechanical production of high-quality furniture. This application of technologically advanced machine production, combined with a keen business sense, an available pool of labor, accessible raw materials from the region's still abundant hardwoods, and aggressive marketing changed the industry.

In 1878 local manufacturers staged the first Grand Rapids Furniture Market, a trade show that became a fixture of the industry and continued until 1964. Although other markets were later held in New York and Chicago, the Grand Rapids market, held in January and July, was the earliest and, for a time, one of the largest furniture trade shows.

The industry grew steadily and was solidly established by the turn of the twentieth century. A number of new companies were organized in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1900 there were thirty-four companies employing 6,236 workers. The number had grown to seventy-two companies by 1929, employing nearly 12,000 workers, Although there were companies that specialized in high end, hand-crafted furniture, the majority produced well-designed, well-made, reasonably priced goods in a variety of styles to the middle-class market. In 1910 the Bureau of the Census described Grand Rapids as the "recognized center of the furniture industry in the United States." The furniture industry additionally supported a number of ancillary businesses which supplied its needs, veneer manufacturers, wood ornament manufacturers, caster manufacturers, excelsior producers, tool makers, glue makers, brass fixture manufacturers, printers, etc.

The growing national prosperity of the first two decades of the twentieth century fueled an expanding middle class with disposable incomes. A major purchase for many was a house and furniture to fill it. The local housing boom reflected the national trend and furniture sales rose rapidly during the 1910s and early 1920s, leading many Grand Rapids and other manufacturers to expand their factories and to increase output. An unforeseen consequence was that the increased production in the city and nationally created a glut on the market and intense competition began to force furniture prices downward by mid-decade. At the same time the depletion of Michigan's once vast hardwood forests also contributed to a decline in the city's household furniture industry, with much of the industry moving to the southern Appalachian region, particularly North Carolina, where hardwoods were still abundant.

Once the stock market crashed in 1929, new furniture was not on the list of necessities for the average American. Finding themselves deeply in debt due to expansion in the 1920s, many Grand Rapids firms eventually became insolvent. Of the seventy-two furniture companies in operation when the crash came, only forty-seven remained in business ten years later.

While the residential furniture industry struggled with new competition and shifted toward smaller-scale production and more expensive furniture, the business and institutional furniture segment (known as the contract industry) expanded. Further, the metal and plastic technology that developed during World War II fueled the growth of contract furniture manufacturing locally. Grand Rapids' furniture industry has evolved over the years, but Grand Rapids continues to be well-known for business and institutional furniture.

Building Description

The Central Furniture Company-H. E. Shaw Furniture Company Factory occupies a rectangular tract on the east side of Ionia Avenue between Wealthy Street at the north and McConnell Street at the south, with a vacated alley between it and the property to the east in the same block. This irregularly shaped, flat-roofed, brick factory complex sets on a concrete base. Due to the topography of the site, the complex is three stories high on the east elevations and four stories on the west elevation. The plant has load-bearing brick walls and a timber structural system throughout. In some buildings, the timber construction exemplifies show-burning mill construction. Built in sections between 1885 and 1924, the factory exhibits the utilitarian design of manufacturing plants of its time. Despite their neglected condition, the buildings have been only minimally altered from their 1920s appearance. The factory is located to the south of downtown Grand Rapids in an industrial area that developed along an extensive system of rail lines, which were located one block west of the site. The former railroad right-of-way is now occupied by the US-131 Expressway. The area contains other older factory buildings, some now rehabilitated for new uses, and some vacant land where factories and other buildings have been demolished. Long neglected, this area has entered into a renaissance in recent years as part of an ongoing revitalization of Grand Rapids' downtown area. A city market recently was constructed across from the factory on the west side of Ionia Avenue and the former Century Furniture Company factory a block to the south has been converted into housing, an indication of the economic revitalization going on in the area.

Standing on a rectangular plot roughly half again as long, north to south, as wide, east to west, the factory complex's four-story buildings form a solid face along Ionia's east side and along Wealthy's south side on the property, but line only the west half of the frontage along McConnell. From the east end of the buildings fronting on Wealthy, a nearly square-plan extension projects southward, and from the east end of the building fronting on McConnell a much longer extension, actually the oldest building in the complex, projects northward. The complex's buildings surround an irregular courtyard area partly infilled with ground-story brick and concrete block structures that contained heating equipment and fuel and other storage. From the south end of the square-plan projection behind the Wealthy buildings' east end along the property's east side, a low concrete block garage/storage addition extends southward toward McConnell Street.

The second oldest section of the complex (Building B1), constructed in 1897, has red brick, load-bearing walls. It is four stories in height, but, because of the raising of the grade along the east side, now reads as three stories tall over a basement. It is four bays wide and ten bays long. Each bay contains a large, segmental-arch-head window opening.

Building B2 does not show in the 1885 Sanborn map, but its southern narrow rectangular footprint part fronting on McConnell, shows as a three-story building in the 1895 map. It is now a four-story, L-shaped structure located at the corner of Ionia Avenue and McConnell Street, with broad flanks facing both streets. The fourth floor was added to the previously three-story tall B2 structure in 1903. The 1912 Sanborn map shows this four-story B2 building expanded northward along the west, Ionia side, giving it the present L-shaped footprint. Thus in 1912 the factory occupied the south half of today's site. This four-story, L-shaped B2 building was later updated with multi-light steel sash windows, most likely in 1927 as part of remodeling for which the city issued a building permit March 18^th 1927. This remodeling may have included refacing the B2 building, at least the pre-1895 part, in new brick to match later parts of the complex.

The next part of the complex, a four-story, L-shaped building (B3), extended the complex north to the Ionia Avenue/Wealthy Street corner and includes the western half of the Wealthy front. It was built in 1921-22. A May 14^th, 1922, newspaper article reports its completion was then about two weeks away. The same article reports plans underway for another addition (B4). This four-story structure matches B3 in its exterior and basic construction and is located directly east of B3 fronting north on Wealthy Street east to the alley. The matching four-story square-plan southern extension of B4 fronting on the vacated alley and with its east front aligned with the east end of B4, was likely the last part of the complex built. A city building permit dated November 9^th, 1923, was likely for this section. The B4 building, and perhaps the rest of the 1921-24 work, was designed by local architect James Price, and the B3 building, and perhaps the rest of the 1921-24 work, was constructed by the Barnes Brothers Construction Company.

The factory complex runs seventeen bays along Ionia Avenue, eleven bays along Wealthy Street, and six bays on McConnell Street, each bay containing two large, multi-pane, steel-sash windows per floor. Many of the concrete sills are missing or damaged. Each bay is defined by piers rising from the concrete base to the top of the fourth-story windows. Within each bay a brick stringcourse indicates the floor level. At the northwest and southwest corners, the piers rise slightly above the parapet wall. On the second floor at the northwest comer of the west elevation, four bays of double-hung, wood windows indicate where company offices once were located.

The west elevation has three overhead door openings, now boarded in, and a pedestrian door. The north elevation has a pedestrian door at each end - at the west is a metal door with boarded transom, at the east a half-glazed wood door with sidelights. There is a centrally located, paneled, wood overhead door.

At the south end of the east exterior elevation is a loading dock with two metal, overhead doors and a smaller wood door. The third and fourth floor each have a small, metal door flanked by a large multi-pane, steel-sash window. The remainder of this elevation is comprised of the 1897 building. Due to the raising of nearby Division Avenue (to the east) in the 1930s, and the subsequent upward-sloping-to-the-east grades of McConnell and Wealthy Streets, the first floor of the east elevation has been nearly covered by fill, leaving only the tops of the windows remain visible.

The building sections frame a central courtyard area, and the elevations facing the courtyard are finished in common brick with multi-pane, steel-sash windows in a pattern reflecting that of the street-facing elevations.

The interior spaces of the buildings mostly remain as when used for furniture production - open, with regularly spaced, wood columns, ceilings open to beams and joists, and diagonally laid wood floors with a subfloor of planks running at right angles to the floor joists. At the northwest corner of the second floor where offices were once located, more recent office space has been created by the addition of drywall partitions. Ceiling tiles (now badly deteriorated) have been installed in places over the joists at the upper floors in buildings B3 and B4.

The interior framing of the 1897 building (B1) utilizes squared timber posts to support beams formed of large side-by-side planks. The beams rest on metal plate cushions atop the posts. In each story two timber posts near the midpoint of the central row are more widely spaced than the rest and support a large metal J-beam between them. In all stories, these beams carry side-by-side two-inch wide planks as floor supports in place of spaced joists. The floors consist of tongue-and-groove plank subflooring below diagonal planking. The roof of this section is framed in the same way, with side-by-side planks.

The B2 section, part built by 1895, the rest probably in 1905-06, has solid timber posts supporting beams formed of side-by-side planks, five in the lower stories and four in the top story. The floors rest on conventionally spaced joists, with cross-bracing between. In each story a south-side row of posts in the c. 1885-95 part is different from the rest, spaced at different intervals, so they don't align with the rest, and formed of smaller-dimension four-plank or timber posts supporting multi-plank beams. It is unclear whether this different south-side framing was original construction or a later alteration and why this was done. In the fourth story the same types of framing support the roof rafters.

The early 1920s additions (B3, B4, and B5) have load-bearing brick walls with heavy timber construction exemplifying slow-burning or mill construction using widely spaced 6 x 12 joists, 12 x 16 beams and 8 to 12 inch square timber posts. Windows and doors have structural steel lintels, and window sills are of cast-in-place concrete.