Not too many people in Windham today are familiar with the area of town referred to as Great Falls. Located just past the rotary on Windham Center Road, it is now a small neighborhood of lovely 19th century homes, but two centuries ago, it was a small business hub.
There had been sawmills in this area since the 1780s when Zebulon Trickey erected his on the Great Falls. By the 1800s, the Presumpscot River had been bridged and there were mills on either side. The river flows parallel to Great Falls Road and this is where local businessman Enoch White built a large sawmill of his own. White was one of the first mill owners to enlist a “gang of saws” in lumber production and this smart business move amassed him a considerable fortune.
Walter Corey chairs can still be found in antique stores today.
In 1842, another Maine entrepreneur brought his business to the small industrial village of Great Falls. Portland furniture maker Walter Corey opened a chair factory in the village that was destined to prosper.
Corey had moved to Portland in 1836 at the age of 37 and purchased a furniture manufacturing business on Exchange Street. A one-horse powered treadmill operated the factory. He was turning out less than 300 chairs per week. Then Corey hired Jonathan O. Bancroft, a local engineer and furniture maker, and asked him to consider designing equipment that would mass-produce chair parts. Together, these two men were to revolutionize the process of furniture making.
In the 1830s and 1840s, handmade chairs were selling for $20 each. Corey hoped to reduce the price of his chairs by using interchangeable mass-produced parts. Bancroft saw the wisdom in his plan and quickly went to work designing the equipment he hoped would get the job done.
When Corey bought water rights on the Presumpcot River in Windham, he and Bancroft had perfected the process. His Windham facility was designed to saw and shape prefabricated parts and combine them with fine artistic finishing and seat caning that was done on the Exchange Street location. When the labor-saving inventions that Bancroft created were coupled with the skilled decorations and creative painting techniques of master brushmen, simple maple and rosewood furniture could be magically transformed into mahogany. Corey’s popular stencil patterns were often added for additional color and sophistication. And the beauty of it all was that the chairs were still of exceptional quality making them extremely popular with the general population and they became known up and down the Eastern seaboard as the “people’s chairs.”
By the 1860s, Corey was manufacturing more than 20,000 chairs per year and was selling $75,000 worth of furniture annually. To put this into perspective, $75,000 in the 1860s was equivalent to $2,800,000 today. He was turning out twice as many chairs as many of his competitors and selling them at half the price.
Haley Pal, a Windham resident and active member of the Windham Historical Society, can be contacted at haleypal@aol.com.
Then, on July 4, 1866, tragedy struck. Corey’s Exchange Street operation was consumed by Portland’s Great Fire. He decided to stop furniture production in 1870 and turned his new Free Street showroom into an outlet for up-and-coming furniture makers.
He died in 1889 at the age of 80. His obituary in the Portland Daily Press read, “Mr. Walter Corey, for many years prominent in mercantile circles in this city and founder of the firm Walter Corey and Company, died at a late hour after being sick for some weeks with a complication of troubles.” Heart disease was thought to be his cause of death.
From the 1840s to the 1870s, Corey was a glowing example of Maine entrepreneurship at its finest. He created his own unique brand by employing traditional Maine values. He believed in quality, beauty, integrity and affordability, and with some forward-thinking ideas, became Maine’s and Windham’s own master of mass production.
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