March 2026.
The Jeffrey, formerly the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company Office Building, is a rather bare Beaux-Arts building and normally one of dubious architectural importance. However, its historical significance is much more prominent, as the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company was a very important local business that fueled Ohio’s coal mines, and the office building is one of only a few remaining structures on the formerly massive site.
The Jeffrey itself is located at 224 East 1st Avenue in the Italian Village neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. It is bordered by a parking lot to the north, 1st Avenue and an apartment building to the south, 6th Street to the east, and 4th Street to the west. At its greatest extent, the entirety of the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company’s site was bordered by 2nd Avenue to the north, I-670 to the south, the railroad to the east, and 4th Street to the west.
History
Jeffrey Manufacturing was a prominent company in Columbus that manufactured coal mining equipment. It was founded in 1876 by businessman Joseph A. Jeffrey, who provided funding for the development of German Village resident Francis J. Lechner’s new coal mining machine. The United States relied on coal for power and southeastern Ohio had many coal mines, but mining had to be done by hand. Lechner’s machine would have partially mechanized this process, particularly the very slow work of undercutting a coal seam, and Columbus’s proximity to Hocking County (a major coal mining area) made it a desirable location to manufacture mining equipment. Jeffrey and his business partner Francis Sessions acquired a controlling interest in the patent and established the company as the Lechner Mining Machine Company. Lechner himself was hired as general manager.
A model of Lechner’s mining machine. (Jeffrey Co website)
Lechner’s machine was sent to New Straitsville for testing in a mine that Jeffrey owned, since the compressed air motor it used couldn’t be powered in Columbus. The machine’s tester recalled raising the air pressure to no avail, before it made a single revolution and flew off the railway truck it was mounted on. It was sent back to Columbus, but the machine was eventually refined and worked properly by the 1880s.
The 1880s were a tumultuous decade for the newly founded company. Jeffrey became president in 1880, succeeding Sessions who resigned due to the struggles in making Lechner’s machine viable, and the company began leasing its first factory on State Street near the Scioto River. Additionally, Lechner resigned in 1882, and the company began to flounder financially in the mid-1880s, with all of its tools and machinery under mortgage. In 1887, business had improved enough for Jeffrey to buy out the remaining shareholders, and he renamed the company to its current name.
One of the company’s electric locomotives. (Jeffrey Co website)
The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company began to build on their present site in 1888. These early buildings were located on the south side of 1st Avenue adjacent to the railroad tracks. That year, the company began manufacturing electric-powered coal cutters (the first such use of an electric motor on a mining machine), as well as an electric locomotive to haul coal cars, the latter eventually becoming their second-most popular product. With ever-increasing demand from the coal-hungry power plants and rising productivity in the mines, Jeffrey Manufacturing continued to expand its product line. These new machines included elevators and the first cable conveyor, the first commercially successful coal loading machine, washing and crushing machines, electric and air drills, and the first integrated mining and loading machine, among several others. Additionally, several components for these machines were developed in-house, since suitable parts were not available elsewhere.
1892 view of the factory. (Wikimedia)
As a result of this aggressive expansion and development, by the turn of the 20th century, the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company was the only such company to manufacture machines used in every part of the mining process, from extracting coal to moving and cleaning it. These machines were also applicable to other uses besides mining, leading to demand from other industries. By 1901, the manufacturing buildings covered 13 acres, and 800 people were employed by the company.
Photograph of the buildings in 1901. (Columbus Metropolitan Library)
In 1904, Jeffrey Manufacturing acquired the Ohio Malleable Iron Company for its products that could be used in chains for the mining equipment. Their market had expanded greatly across the United States and even to South Africa and Australia, making it the largest such manufacturer in the entire country. The company continued to expand its factory buildings through the following decade, and by 1919, they directly employed over 2,500 workers (3,300 counting Ohio Malleable Iron). The surrounding Italian Village was being settled by immigrants who worked at factories such as Jeffrey Manufacturing, and the company was very desirable as a workplace due to its progressive (for the time) amenities for employees, inspired by Jeffrey and his wife Celia's discussions with First Congregational priest Washington Gladden. These included an infirmary for sick or injured workers, a cooperative store, a cafeteria (served by a nearby bakery), and even the Jeffrey Building & Loan Association to help employees purchase homes. Actually, that last one would probably be considered progressive today, with how much the cost of living and housing has risen without wages matching.
The office building’s lobby in 1947. (Ohio History Connection)
Despite all this growth, the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company still used a small wooden-frame office building on the south side of 1st Avenue built circa 1890. When Joseph A. Jeffrey retired in 1922 at the age of 88, his son Robert H. Jeffrey succeeded him, and he presumably wanted to build a modern headquarters for the company right away. The existing Jeffrey Manufacturing Company Office Building was designed in 1923 by the Stone & Webster Company, a Boston engineering firm. With a concrete frame and brick exterior, it is an example of Beaux-Arts architecture, and it was completed in 1924. The central portion was used as offices, while the wings were left as open space originally. At the time, the office building was considered state-of-the-art with its fireproof construction. It was built with many amenities for the staff, including lockers, phone booths, an elevator, a soundproof ceiling in the stenography office, and a vault for blueprints on each floor. This was the last new building that Jeffrey Manufacturing itself built before World War II, though they expanded through other means such as purchasing an assembly building from Kilbourne & Jacobs in the late 1920s and the acquisition of the Galion Iron Works & Manufacturing Company, which made road rollers and graders.
Overhead view of the plant looking northeast. The office building can be seen at top left. (The Jeffrey website)
World War II, fueled by the fine-tuned machine that was American industry at the time (long since squandered with outsourcing and deindustrialization), was another profitable time for Jeffrey Manufacturing. The military considered its products essential to the war effort, and the company made chains for ammunition hoists on Navy destroyers and cruisers. This won them five “E” awards (an award given by the military for excellence). Another important invention around this time, albeit before World War II, was the first universal cutting machine, which could cut the top, side, and bottom of a coal seam.
2001 photo of the demolished drafting room. (NRHP listing)
The Research Development & Test Building, immediately north of the office building and connected to it by a stilted bridge, was built in 1946. It has a steel and concrete frame with brick curtain walls. The western end of the building was used as more office space for the researchers, and the eastern half is double-height and was where testing on the company’s products took place. Its construction reflects the post-war productivity of the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company. The final major expansion of the plant was the acquisition of Kilbourne & Jacobs’ former buildings, which had closed in 1953. Small ones such as a drafting room onto the north end of the R&D building were still built.
The Jeffrey COLMOL. (Jeffrey Co website)
After World War II, Jeffrey Manufacturing’s chokehold on the mining industry began to weaken. A company called Joy Manufacturing from Pittsburgh (founded by former employee Joe Joy, who left after management ignored his proposals for wheeled machines) became the new industry leader, while Jeffrey fell to fourth- or fifth-largest. This was due to two decisions made by the company that backfired. First, continuous mining machines (which did cutting, drilling, and loading all in one) were becoming standard. Jeffrey’s design, known as the COLMOL, was a bulky, tank-like design that only was successful in very particular conditions. Joy and another company built a more flexible machine that could be more widely applied. Second, Jeffrey’s success had led them to become complacent, and they did not realize that machines that ran on railroad track (which had to be constantly laid as the mine expanded) would be supplanted by newer models on wheels or crawlers.
The Jeffrey Heliminer. (Jeffrey Co website)
Its industrial operations (chains, conveyors, crushers, etc., things outside of mining) were moved to new plants in Woodruff, South Carolina and Morristown, Tennessee from 1961 to 1962. This led the original Jeffrey Manufacturing to become the Jeffrey Mining Machinery Company. A new continuous miner called the Heliminer was introduced in the late 1960s, returning the company to second in the industry. Though its design became standard, the patent did not hold up in court, but it was enough to make the company profitable again. Still, by this time, mining machinery was the smallest and least profitable of Jeffrey’s three divisions.
After the oil crisis began in 1973, industry believed coal might be the answer to the dwindling supply of gasoline. Dresser Industries, an oil company from Dallas, was interested in acquiring Jeffrey Manufacturing. Additionally, Joseph A. Jeffrey’s descendants had spread out across the country, and the company’s stock was locked up in a trust created in 1914, meaning individual family members could not sell out. Dresser acquired the company in 1974, and the entirety of the family’s role thereafter was managing the stock they received as part of the deal.
Dresser continued business as usual for the first five years or so, but they began to question their extensive diversification in the early 1980s. This eventually resulted in the loss of 1,800 jobs after they were eliminated in 1982. The remaining manufacturing processes were then consolidated in the buildings north of 1st Avenue, and those south of it were demolished in 1987. In 1985, Jeffrey and the other companies like it that Dresser owned were offloaded to a new conglomerate called Indresco (later Global Industrial Technologies).
Global Industrial Technologies sold Jeffrey Manufacturing in 1995, which had continued to decline in its size and employment, to a Cleveland company called Jeffrey Mining Products. (Are you confused with how many “Jeffreys” there are yet?) They intermittently built miners that were sold across the world, but not enough to viably support the company, and the final machine made in Columbus was built in 1999. At that point, the company employed just 36 people, down from its peak of 7,500. Whatever remnants of the company were sold one last time to competitor Long-Airdox, and the remaining employees (about 12) moved to an office near the airport as of 2002 and seem to have been selling a few machines made elsewhere.
The former office building in 2001. (NRHP listing)
The site south of 1st Avenue remained vacant for about three decades, until a large apartment development known as Jeffrey Park was built starting in the mid-2010s. The manufacturing buildings north of it were renovated for the State Library of Ohio, while the office building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and the Columbus Register of Historic Properties in 2015. The office building was converted to an apartment complex known as The Jeffrey between 2009 and 2011. Most recently, the State Library of Ohio vacated the former industrial buildings for a downtown location (35 East Chestnut Street) in April 2026.
Photos
Labeled map of the site. (NRHP listing)
The above map shows the remaining buildings of the formerly massive Jeffrey Manufacturing Company complex. A and B are featured in this post, A being the office building and B being the Research Development & Test Building. C was a 1960s drafting room that was standing at the time of the NRHP listing in 2001 but demolished prior to 2007. D and E are two large manufacturing buildings built in 1906 and 1907, which appear to currently be used by the State Library of Ohio. They have been heavily altered and I did not take pictures of them.
An oblique view of the office building from 4th Street:
South facade of the building:
There really isn’t much as of architectural interest here. The entrance projects slightly from the wall and has a small concrete portal around the doors, but it is otherwise brick as is the rest of the building. The building has a concrete cornice and a decorative datestone above.
The entrance:
You can tell that this cornice is concrete due to its cracking, which reveals the rebar underneath:
Honestly, the datestone is the one interesting part of the building, and even that isn’t saying much.
The wings are three bays in width:
The window pattern is very regular, and no columns or pilasters break up the monotony of the flat wall plane. There aren’t even lintels above the windows.
Eastern wing and the R&D Building behind:
Straight-on view of the west wing:
The bridge leading to the R&D Building from the office is on deceptively skinny steel stilts, and it matches the even barer industrial style of the 1940s construction.
A nice zoomed-in view:
If nothing else, I love my tectonics.
A wider view of the two buildings:
I hate cases such as this one where the history outnumbers my own photos. Granted, that’s partially because the vast majority of this plant has been demolished, but I wish I had taken pictures of the modern apartments on the site of the factory or of the former State Library buildings, and that I had gotten more of the R&D Building.
Sources:
https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_OH/01000379.pdf
https://www.jeffreyco.com/docs/Short_History.pdf
https://digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org/digital/collection/ohio/id/1152/rec/28
https://library.ohio.gov/about/history/history-of-the-jeffrey-mining-corporate-center/
https://library.ohio.gov/residents/using-the-library/0move-to-new-location
https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll32/id/10338/rec/55
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Manufacturing_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Manufacturing_Company_Office_Building