[Ed. note: The material below refers to Dashwood Planing Mill as at one time being in the “house building” business. This may confuse those readers who primarily think of the company as exclusively manufacturers of windows. These references reflect the fact that at various stages in its corporate development; especially in the 1930’s and 40’s, the mill diversified the products it offered as a company; including implementing the planning and construction of entire homes under the auspices of Thomas Klumpp’s eldest son Maurice’s designs.]
(below) “Maurice as they dismantled the flywheel powered by Ament’s steam engine and boiler. Donated to the National Museum of Science and Technology [in Ottawa] in 1961.” Click on image for larger version.
(below) Former Maurice and Selma Klumpp residence.
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(below) “Maurice Klumpp married the former Selma Rader in 1935 and built a new home in Dashwood. His wife helped him by allowing him to use their new house as a display centre for his drawings. This helped to boost sales in the building business. Later Maurice could use Dashwood Planing Mill designed and finished homes as a selling point.”
“Competition from established surrounding mills, and two or three in London, made it difficult for Dashwood Planing Mill to get its foot in the door of the house building market. Just into the depression thirties, the Dashwood mill was losing so much money that Thomas Klumpp talked to his [eldest] son, Maurice, about getting into some other line of work. The two of them decided it might be a good idea to send Maurice back to school to take a course in woodworking. This they did, and Maurice enrolled in a six month course at H.B. Beal Technical School in London during the fall of 1931. His father borrowed the money for his son’s room and board, while he stayed in Dashwood and kept the mill going. The move was to pay lasting dividends.
While at school Maurice befriended his woodworking teacher, Ernie Geary, of Geary Lumber, who had a very large mill in London at the time. He convinced Maurice to take an architectural course at night on top of his daily woodworking classes.
Maurice recalled the discussion:
Ernie said:’Why don’t you take the architecture? Even if you are familiar with woodworking you must be qualified to read blueprints and take-off millwork lists.’
So Maurice took up the challenge and, after his six months were up, returned to his father at Dashwood in 1932. He was about sixteen years old at the time and his father’s most experienced employee, who was about eighty years old, tendered his resignation and announced his retirement. ‘My dad said to me, “what are we going to do now? Did you learn enough about millwork at school that you can manufacture some windows?” Maurice said, ‘yes’. ‘Well, you go upstairs and make a window this morning’, replied Thomas. ‘I made one four-light window’, Maurice said, ‘which was a pretty crude looking job. I found out that I was running the tennoner backwards and grinding the wood off with the back of the knife, but I did get a window. It didn’t take me long, however, to find out that I was doing everything wrong, and within a few months I was starting to find out some of the problems in the millwork business’.
extracted from “A Look At Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Our First Millennium”, published by Dashwood Industries Limited; 1978
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[Ed. note: Thomas H. Klumpp passed away in early 1964 and later that year, Dashwood Planing Mill moved its production facilities from the Village of Dashwood to a location near Centralia Ontario, in order to obtain enough real estate to physically expand the plant. The company name was changed to Dashwood Industries Limited in 1966.]
“In 1968 the Centralia plant began a major expansion program to keep pace with Dashwood Industries Limited’s impressive sales growth. At this point in time the Klumpp brothers chose to sell their remaining one-quarter interest in the company to Allpak, giving them one hundred percent ownership. Allpak wanted to keep the Klumpp family involved so Maurice was made Chairman of the Board and asked to stay with the company until retirement. Howard Klumpp retired in 1973, but Maurice remains with the company today [1978] as Honorary Chairman of the Board.”
extracted from “A Look At Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Our First Millennium”, published by Dashwood Industries Limited; 1978