Walking through the abandoned screen door factory on Carleton Road — that old brick giant sitting next to Family Video — is about as close as you can get to meeting the people who lived, worked, spoke, and breathed in Hillsdale 150 years ago. You walk the same floorboards they walked, you touch the same brick they touched, you open the same doors they opened, and you sneeze the same dust they sneezed.
Who said time travel doesn’t exist?
They’re like weird time capsules. You walk inside, and you’re experiencing the same building people experienced more than a hundred years ago.
The very first screen door factory in the United States is one of the coolest “time capsules” I’ve ever seen. I walked past it one Thursday and happened upon some construction workers putting on a new door. I asked them who owned the building — which turned out to be the H.J. Gelzer & Sons Inc. — and promptly called the Gelzer & Sons Hardware to talk to someone about the old factory.
Employee Andrew Gelzer agreed to let me inside the building. On a Tuesday evening, senior Dakota Michael and I met Gelzer at the factory with a camera, a notepad, and irrepressible curiosity and excitement. He unlocked the door, let us in, and had trouble getting us back out.
Every floor had to be explored. Every door had to be opened. Michael — as the official photographer — used the camera, but that didn’t stop me from snapping as many photos as I could on my phone. We climbed the first staircase through a door with a hole beaten through it, laughed at the graffiti on the exposed brick walls, and strolled through huge dark rooms with thick wooden columns, and broken windows. We peered up the huge wooden elevator shaft, examined the rotting conveyor belts, and dodged the cords and pipes hanging crookedly from the ceilings.
Four staircases later, I found the top floor and a ladder leaning against the rafters. It trembled as I climbed it, and when I reached the top I pushed on the wooden board covering the skylight, but it wouldn’t give. So much for a view from the roof.
After answering Gelzer’s query of “think you’ve got enough?” nearly a dozen times with “yeah, in a minute,” we’d sated our curiosity, and left the factory.
Believed to have been built in 1879, the building was a chair and upholstery factory belonging to Albertus E. Palmer, according to the 1888 Portrait and Biographical Album of Hillsdale County. When the William T. Buchanan & Sons Screen Door Works building burned down in 1891, the business moved to Palmer’s building in 1895, the Hillsdale Herald reported in a front-page article.
In 1900, the business now known as the Hillsdale Screen Company changed ownership to Corvis M. Barre, the Hillsdale Daily News reported.
“Its advance was only temporarily retarded by a disastrous fire, which destroyed the whole plant and proved to have been of incendiary origin, set for the purpose of hiding the murder of Joe Cawsey, the night-watchman,” the Hillsdale Daily News reported in the 1929 article “Screen Door Factory Dates Back To Early History of Hillsdale, Always Important Cog in Local Industry,” referring to the fire of 1903 and the Cawsey murder trials which followed in 1906.
“Really the first screen doors ever made in the United States and put on the market were made in Hillsdale, and this is the plant that made them,” reads the 1915 Hillsdale in History Yearbook. “The business has grown to such an extent that the Hillsdale Screen Company sells its product at wholesale to retail dealers in 10 different states.”
Although Gelzer & Sons bought the building in 2011, Gelzer said there aren’t any plans to renovate it right now.
“If I had my way, I’d make the downstairs parking and maybe some businesses, and make the upstairs loft apartments,” Gelzer said. “We just don’t have the funds.”
Gelzer & Sons CEO Grant Baker said the building is currently “a work in progress.”
“My interest in it is commercial,” Baker said. “I was interested because it was vacant.”
Baker said Gelzer & Sons still maintains the building — they had the roof fixed in 2013 and still upkeep small things, like installing a new door and fixing leaks.
Even though it is unused, the old screen door factory reminds residents of Hillsdale’s importance in industry and commerce during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on the brick structure and spaciousness of the facility, the factory still possesses the potential to be a force for economic good in the city of Hillsdale. It is corporations like Gelzer & Sons that can give it the chance to benefit Hillsdale someday in the future.