History |
The E.L. Roberts & Company was one of the largest lumber yards and millwork firms in the nation, operating from Chicago from 1880 to 1912. The company continued as Roberts Sash & Door Company from 1912 until the 1960s. Roberts has a degree of familiarity with architectural historians today due to the 1988 reprinting of its millwork catalog of 1903.
Edward L. Roberts
Edward L. Roberts (1849-1918) founded the company in 1880. Born in Wales, his family immigrated to the United States in 1852. His brother U.N. Roberts opened a sash and door company in Davenport, Iowa in 1866, which gave E.L. Roberts his first experience in the industry. From 1869 to 1871, E.L. Roberts worked in the Burdick & Roberts firm in Muscatine, Iowa, where he learned about the manufacture and distribution of lumber. During the 1870s, Roberts worked for a retail lumber yard in Kansas.
In 1880, Roberts founded E.L. Roberts Co. in Chicago, apparently against the advice of his brother who still owned the company in Davenport. The new company was the first wholesale sash and door company and was based on Lumber Street. In 1884, Roberts purchased the inventory and stock of the Wisconsin Sash Door and Blind Company's Chicago warehouse. Roberts expanded the business in 1890 by taking William L. Sharp (formerly of Huttig) as partner, with the business renamed E.L. Roberts & Co. The company became a corporation in 1904.
Illustration of the E.L. Roberts factory, adapted from the company millwork catalog of 1900.
Three different millwork catalogs of E.L. Roberts & Co. survive. Two are posted at Archive.org (1900 and 1908), and the catalog of 1903 was republished in 1988. The Roberts catalogs were typical of catalogs of the years 1890 to 1905, with hundreds of pages of illustrations of millwork available for sale. The illustrations did not represent the highest quality (such as the illustrations in the Foster Munger or Paine catalogs), but they were comparable to the above average catalogs of the time.
Edward L. Roberts began making plans to move permanently to Pasadena, California, in 1911. He offered the business for sale, and a group of investors formed the company Roberts Sash & Door Company that purchased E.L. Roberts in early 1912. The new company then purchased Foster Munger and merged the firms. Roberts Sash & Door published a millwork catalog in 1938 that is posted at Archive.org (although it is labelled there as 1920); the catalog was comparable in quality to the CMSC catalogs of the 1920s. Roberts continued in operation into the 1960s.
Sources: American Lumberman (magazine), 2/3/1912; American Lumbermen (book published by the magazine American Lumberman in 1906), pp. 172-176; Oshkosh Northwestern, 9/2/1884; Muscatine News-Tribune, 6/20/1905.
Millwork catalogs at archive.org:
1900,
1920,
1934
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