Moment in Time (January 6, 2022)

The W.E. Lamneck Company was established in Columbus just before the turn of the century by William Edmund Lamneck, originally from Port Washington in Tuscarawas County. Lamneck started his business in a small building in the King-Lincoln district on the east side of Columbus. The company originally specialized in the sale of cornices, skylights, tile, slate, metal, asphalt, composition roofing, and warm air furnaces. As time passed, they focused on their specialty area of furnaces, pipes, and other sheet metal units related to heating applications. Lamneck had a number of patents for product and component designs that the company specialized in. (One of the patents was for the first clothes dryer, a 6-foot tall and 6-foot wide sheet metal cabinet. Clothes were hung from a series of horizontal rods and gas fired heating elements heated up the air in the cabinet to dry the clothes.)

The new manufacturing plant of the W.E. Lamneck Company on West Fifth near the Olentangy River is shown in this 1918 engraving. It was a prominent Columbus industrial operation from the turn of the century until the death of its founder in 1932. A train on the Hocking Valley tracks can be seen in the background.

Over the next several decades, Lamneck opened a number of plants and storefronts to accommodate his expanding manufacturing business and to sell related appliances. At one point in the mid-1910s he partnered with the brother of his wife Maggie, Adolph Munkel, in a business called Munkel-Lamneck, and opened a storefront on High Street near campus. This company focused on gas and coal furnaces. At various times it operated under the names Munkel-Lamneck Company, Superior Heating Company, and Munkel Heating Company.

Lamneck was joined in Columbus by several of his brothers (he was the eldest of a family of 8 boys and a girl - one boy and the girl died in infancy.) Arthur, four years younger, started working for the railroad before joining William in 1907 as Vice President and one of the stockholders of W.E. Lamneck Co. Frank worked as an installer for the company before starting his own independent heating business. George became a Deputy Sheriff of Tuscarawas County and later worked as a salesman for W. E. Lamneck. He also was a deputy claims director for the Industrial Commission of Ohio. (Their youngest brother, John Howard Lamneck, became the youngest probate judge in the state when he won election to the Tuscarawas County Probate and Juvenile Court. In 1944, he won a six-year term as County Court of Common Pleas judge, resigning in 1949 when Governor Lausche named him Director of Public Welfare. He held this position until 1953, when Lausche appointed him to the Ohio Supreme Court, according to his 1961 autobiography, From Lamplight to Satellite.)

Arthur Lamneck became interested in politics and became a member of Columbus City Council in 1913, serving until 1921. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1924 and ran and was elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-second U.S. Congress in 1931. He was re-elected 3 more times. He was unsuccessful in his fifth bid for Congress and was also unsuccessful as the candidate for nomination for mayor of Columbus in 1943. William Lamneck was attending one of Arthur's political events at the Deshler Hotel in downtown Columbus when he fell down some stairs, fracturing his skull, resulting in his death in 1932. After his brother's death, the company closed, and Arthur founded Cardinal Fuel & Supply Company, a wholesale coal business. He ran this company until his death in his personal Victory Garden near his brother Frank's home in 1944.

The last Lamneck plant was located at 416 Dublin Avenue in what is now called the Arena District, just west of the new Crew Stadium. The four-story, 130,000 square foot plant opened on January 1, 1923. The plant had what Lamneck called "immense storage capacity" in order to provide customers timely delivery of their purchases. Dublin Avenue, which no longer exists, ran west from Neil Avenue, crossing the Scioto River just north of what is now Spring Street, connecting with Sandusky Avenue. The large metal pilings in the river that supported the old Dublin Avenue bridge are still visible looking north from Spring Street.

The above photo is of an engraving made by the Terry Engraving Company of Columbus showing another (then new) Lamneck manufacturing plant near Grandview. The photo was included in the March 1918 Norwester magazine, published from 1917 to 1922 as a chronicle of life in Grandview, Marble Cliff, and Upper Arlington. The facility, located on two acres on Fifth Avenue at the Olentangy River, was known as the "Daylight Plant" because of the floor to ceiling windows around the outside of the building. The 30,000 square foot factory was designed with a U-shaped production line. Raw materials were unloaded from train cars on a Hocking Valley Railroad siding, moved through the manufacturing presses and other machinery, ending up at a dock on the siding where up to five railroad cars could be loaded with the final product at the same time. The docks were at the same level as the railroad cars, eliminating the need for hoists. Finished products could also be loaded on trucks that arrived and departed along the central driveway, or could be temporarily stored in another part of the plant.