Rex Windmill Building

An air of absent minded forgetfulness comes to the old timer when asked about the Rex Windmill company that erected the factory building later used by the Syracuse Screen and Grill company, later still by the Henckel Furniture and Miller wood working plant. About 1886 Fred Baker, an inventive genius and an uncle of W. G. Hatfield, patented a windmill using an eccentric action in the gearing. A company was formed to manufacture it, the names of many of the old time residents of North Manchester being listed among the stockholders. The building was soon up, the mills were getting out into the wind and all seemed to be going well for a time. Things in fact seemed to be going so well that, according to scanty memories unearthed here and there, too many of the stockholders looked for good paying jobs that called for little effort.

But it seems that in the end it was largely Michigan business that decisively put the company on the down grade. A hard working and valuable salesman went into the Wolverine State, finding a ready market among the farmers who were tired of pumping water. He collected enough cash to pay his commission, taking notes for the balance. It was these notes that proved the undoing of the company. Hard times of 1892 and '93 came on, the notes were almost worthless.

The windmill company had endorsed the notes, discounted them at various banks and spent the money. Cash on hand was soon exhausted and the windmill business was Gone with the Wind, a long time before Margaret Mitchell had thought of using that as a title for another dream that had blown away.

As financial clouds began to appear there was a scurry on the part of some of the ones on the inside to get out from under and to unload their stock on the unsuspecting. If later stories are true there may have been a number of rather unethical doings that left sore spots still tender for fifty years or more. Mahlon Butterbaugh whose death occurred in the late 1940s at the Second Street bridge was one of the unfortunates. He had sold his sawmill at Rose Hill to the Douglass interests and had also sold a farm. Most of that money went into the windmill business to be blown away with the investments of others.

Contrary to many ideas, the name Rex as applied to the windmill was in no way connected with Orlando Rex of telephone fame, or infamy, depending on who does the remembering. Gus Frame remembered the windmill but little of the doings of the company. His father, David Frame, used one of the mills to pump water for his residential water system on the lot where Gus lived, later. During a windstorm the gearing intended to hold the wheel broke loose and the wheel started to run away. It fell to Gus to climb the tower and lasso the wheel.

In 1900 the Syracuse Screen and Grill company headed by D. C. Lamb moved from Syracuse occupying the building that had been erected for the Rex Windmill company . The output was quickly popular. Soon no well regulated household was thought complete without a big cloth covered screen in the living room to hide something or other and ornamental wooden grills across two or three doorways, all long since relegated to the attic. Differences among the managers followed, there was a strike in which the thirty employees walked up the Main street in support of one side or the other. J. A. Browne came into the factory and later J. W. Caswell and Win Runyan. More differences followed. Caswell and Runyan leased the vacated Dunbar Heading buildings, but before the move was completed a change was made to Huntington where radio cabinets soon

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took the place of screen and grills.

Those of the younger generation may wonder what these screens and grills were like. The screens, usually of three panels, had frames of three-quarter inch curtain rods, and were fitted with cloth of varying degrees of brilliance or quality depending on the price. The top of the center section was ornamented with a complicated piece of wooden scroll work. The grills were wooden frames filled with an assortment of spindles, balls and wooden doodads, all finished in the flossiest of Grand Rapids varnish.

When the Warner Brooder business outgrew their original quarters, they purchased the Syracuse Screen and Grill building and were there until 1943 when they purchased the Northfield Furniture building. The next occupant was a dairy business for a brief period. The building was sold to Mr. Henckel who had been general manager of the Northfield Furniture Company and on December 2, 1943 he started the A. F. Henckel Upholstered Furniture Company with the slogan Good Upholstered Furniture and the Trustworthy Line. This company needed wooden frames and in July 1945 Earl Miller opened a wood working shop in a part of the Syracuse building. In addition to making furniture frames he did a large variety of other wood work.

About 1925 Max Drefkoff brought the Syracuse Cabinet company from Syracuse to North Manchester, oddly enough to occupy the Syracuse Screen & Grill building. That company had come from Syracuse nearly thirty years before. At Syracuse Drefkoff was short of working capital, and friends interested him in coming to North Manchester where local people endorsed notes to provide this needed capital. Cedar chests were the principal product, at one time nine of the ten chests listed by Sears, Roebuck being made in North Manchester. But the moth scare wore off, people changed their tastes, or had less clothing to store, so in its latter days the business of the company was not good.

Drefkoff was of Russian descent, originally was educated as a rabbi, later for the law, and diversified business experience equipped him with words to talk himself out of many a deep hole so he was able to talk his sponsors into renewal of the notes. As the high wave of 1920 to 1929 artificial prosperity subsided the chest business waned

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to the closing point, Drefkoff moved to Warsaw where more tribulations were to follow. It was not long until he was in Washington on a government job, last heard of being connected with Indian affairs.

There is a story that on one occasion during his factory life here he so far forgot his rabbinical training as to begin swearing at one of his workmen, who very promptly slapped him down. Jumping to his feet, Drefkoff yelled: "For what you do that? Why didn't you cuss back?"

One summer Mrs. Drefkoff spent considerable time in North Manchester. She was a Russian writer of some repute, was very active in her literary work while here, causing some speculation as to the real purpose of her visit and her work.