History |
The Pennsylvania Door & Sash Company was perhaps the largest millwork company in the state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The business opened circa 1871 and remained in operation until 1932. It had branches in Philadelphia, Ohio, and New York.
The Pennsylvania Door & Sash Company (PDS) was founded in Pittsburgh circa 1871 (Pittsburgh Press, 10/3/1901). Its Ohio branch opened in Cleveland in 1892 (Hamilton Evening Journal, 8/19/1892). The president of PDS at the time was A.R. Teachout, who lived in Cleveland (Pittsburgh Press, 10/3/1901).
In 1895, the company purchased a vacant lot 100 feet square in an emerging area of Pittsburgh near the new Tenth Street Bridge to build a new warehouse that had the address 900-908 Second Avenue. The lot extended from Second Avenue to the B&O Railroad. The six-story warehouse was ready for occupancy in the spring of 1896 (Pittsburgh Daily Post, 11/10/1895). A rail spur accessed the warehouse (Pittsburgh Daily Post, 12/5/1895). The company then built a two-story brick addition onto the warehouse in early 1898 (Pittsburgh Daily Post, 11/10/1897). The main section of the warehouse burned in 1901, and the entire building would have been lost had it not been constructed with a central brick fire wall (Pittsburgh Daily Post, 10/3/1901). In 1906, a subsidiary named the Pennsylvania Paint & Glass Company constructed a factory on an adjacent lot (Pittsburgh Daily Post, 4/6/1906). In 1907, the PDS warehouse and the Pittsburgh Paint & Glass factory both burned. The damage was so severe that a large portion of the front wall crumbled down onto Second Street (Pittsburgh Press, 3/14/1907).
PDS opened a branch at 2500 Callowhill Street in Philadelphia by 1910, when it had a staff of 30 (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/15/1910).
Existing PDS catalogs date from 1913 to 1926. The cover remained mostly static throughout this time (see below).
Interesting "Colonial Entrance" on page 87 of the 1913 PDS catalog, a type of entrance not actually found on colonial houses.
After World War I, PDS became a producer of combination doors. These doors had a removable section called a panel, with one insert containing screening for use during the warmer months and one insert containing lights to be used in cooler months (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/22/1918).
PDS collapsed during the Depression. In 1932, the company leased its Pittsburgh facilities to the Adelman Lumber Company, and four years later PDS sold the property to them (Pittsburgh Sun-Telegram, 10/14/1936). Operations in the Philadelphia buildings ended in 1928 (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/13/1939) and the property was leased and then sold to Kohler in 1938 (Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/31/1938).
Millwork catalog at archive.org:
1925
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