CARADCO

CARADCO. Caradco was a manufacturing company of over thirty million doors and fifty-five million windows. Once one of the nation's premier millwork companies, Caradco products were used in the White House in Washington, D.C.; West Point Military Academy in New York; Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; and the University of Iowa. In 1966 company officials estimated nearly half of Dubuque's downtown buildings displayed Caradco products.

In 1856 the company began as a business merger between William Carr, from New York state, and W.M. Austin, an experienced woodworker. The Carr and Austin Company quickly grew from a two-man operation on South Main between Jones and Railroad Avenue into a thriving enterprise employing twenty-five skilled carriage and cabinet makers. Ready access to rafts of timber on the MISSISSIPPI RIVER profited the company which was one of the region's first consumers of pine. Early catalogues advertised dozens of products including doors, brackets, blinds, window and door frames, flooring and specialty work.

The company suffered disastrous FIRES in 1871 and 1879. Eight years after the last fire, a new partnership was formed and a firm known as Carr, Ryder and Wheeler Company was founded. The company moved into new headquarters at Jackson Street between Ninth and Tenth STREETS.

By 1895 the company's quality craftsmanship was on display as far from Iowa as the courthouse in Fort Worth, Texas. As wood supplied along the Mississippi dwindled, the position of the company on the Illinois Central Railroad maintained its access to raw material and new consumers. Over the years, the company was known by many different names. It was successively known as Carr Ryder and Engler Company (1890); Carr, Ryder and Adams (1897); and CARR, ADAMS AND COLLIER COMPANY(1938). The name Caradco was adopted in 1958 from the letters of its immediate predecessor.

In July 1960, the FARLEY AND LOETSCHER MANUFACTURING COMPANY announced that it would sell its plastic sheet manufacturing facilities to Durel, Inc., a subsidiary of Caradco. The facilities included the buildings bordered by Eighth, White and Ninth streets. Durel also rented ten thousand square feet of floor space in an adjacent building.

By 1966 Caradco covered one million feet of floor space, twenty times the size of the original Carr and Austin plant. While the company name had changed over the years, the ownership remained principally within the families of John Taylor ADAMS, who joined the firm in 1881, and James Currie COLLIER who entered the business in 1895.

In 1968 Caradco was purchased by Scovill Manufacturing Company. Scovill announced in 1976 that the window-manufacturing production would be moved from Dubuque to Rantoul, Illinois, due to the obsolete condition of the Dubuque plant. On October 7, 1978, spokesmen for the company announced that the door manufacturing production would be discontinued on October 21, an action leading to unemployment for the last eighty-four employees of the company in Dubuque.