History |
The following is based on my text in A Field Guide to American Residential Doors, pages 203-204:
Huttig is possibly the oldest large millwork firm in the United States. Charles Frederick Huttig and his brother William Huttig moved from Jena, Saxony to Muscatine, Iowa in the mid-1850s and opened a grocery store. After observing the volume of logs travelling down the Mississippi River, they opened a lumber yard in 1859 (Muscatine Journal and News-Tribune, 5/31/1940). The Huttigs constructed their first sawmill in Muscatine in 1866, even though the city already had two sawmills, three sash and door plants, and seven other lumber yards (Muscatine Journal and News-Tribune, 12/29/1962). The company then constructed a plant on Second Street, Muscatine, in 1881 just off a rail line and began operating under the name "Huttig Brothers Manufacturing Company." This plant was expanded and updated several times, and by 1968 workers there had produced 15 million doors, 20 million windows, and thousands of other pieces of millwork (Muscatine Journal and News-Tribune, 12/30/1968).
In the 1880s, Huttig established warehouses in Kansas City and St. Louis, and these two branches later became independent companies. The St. Louis warehouse, which opened in 1885, is the branch that survives today. Huttig expanded its operations by constructing warehouses throughout the nation in the early twentieth century, but most of these new warehouses closed during the Depression. The company continued to be competitive in the late twentieth century by investing in new equipment and by purchasing competing millwork companies such as the Palmer G. Lewis Company in 1988 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7/18/1988).
The first Huttig millwork catalogs were produced in the late nineteenth century. The Huttig catalog of 1900, produced for its Muscatine plant, exhibits a line of millwork that rivalled that of the largest companies in the nation. Its 1900 catalog was one of the first to use halftone images of doors to provide a better sense of the workmanship. The St. Louis Huttig branch began to produce its own catalogs in the early twentieth century with the title Huttig's Handy Helper; the 124th printing was produced in 1920 and included the company's tagline "Smooth as a Smile." The catalog includes interior vignettes showing rooms built with multiple pieces of Huttig millwork. The Handy Helper continued in publication; its 740th number was published in 1954, which features the new doors of that time plus doors that had been in production for two decades at that time. The catalog did not include the usual line of slab doors found in most other catalogs of the 1950s.
Millwork catalogs at archive.org:
St. Louis 1900,
Muscatine 1900,
1920,
1954
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