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present site of the Tredway Tower, for “the makeing of tables, chares, and cabinets in the style of England and of the best qualities.” The shop was carried on by his son, George, and during the early years of the nineteenth century was one of dozens of little one-man furniture shops in Millburgh, a natural outgrowth of the fact that many of the men John Mills had brought from England for his wagon works were cabinetmakers. From 1788 forward, various Tredways were continuously listed as “cabinetmakers” on Millburgh assessment rolls. The designation of “factory owner” does not appear until after Oliver Tredway’s name in 1874.
    Aided by the depression of values brought on by the panic of 1873, Oliver Tredway managed to acquire one of the old stone warehouses that had been built more than a hundred years before by John Mills, equipped it with discarded machinery from one of the old sawmills, and gathered a complement of skilled woodworkers from the bread lines that formed daily on South Front Street. The company prospered and by 1910, when Orrin Tredway became its head, it was Millburgh’s largest industry, a distinction that it had acquired not only through its own expansion but also from the default of its rivals. The panic of 1907 closed the Mills Carriage Works. Shortly afterward the cotton mill owners uprooted their machinery and transplated it to North Carolina. Only the Krautz Steel Company—the former Mills Iron Foundry—remained and its days were numbered. In an attempt to compete with the Pittsburgh steelmakers, George Krautz had kept wages low and fought the unionization of his employees with the same unyielding independence that had kept him from selling out to one of the big steel combines. The eventual result was a strike that dragged on and on, frequently flaring into violence. One morning after a man had been killed in a picket-line brawl, old George Krautz climbed to the roof of the office building and shouted to the mob of men below that unless they went back to work that very day he would close the mills forever. The announcement was greeted with derisive catcalls. George Krautz was a man of his word. The mill never opened again. The machinery was moved away and the ghostly skeletons of the buildings, eaten away by the red cancer of rust, slowly dropped their sheet-iron skins into the weeds of the yard.
    The Tredway Furniture Company that Orrin Tredway inherited from his father, Oliver, was a sound and substantial concern. In the 1910 edition of Whittaker’s Index it was ranked eighteenth in size among the furniture factories of the nation. If there had been a listing based upon profits, its rank would have been higher. Oliver Tredway had something of a genius for extracting gold from wood. Few men have made fortunes from furniture manufacturing. Oliver Tredway was one of the few. Much of his success was attributable to his mechanical ingenuity. During most of the first quarter-century of the company’s existence, furniture of the rococo Turkish and French styles was in vogue and Oliver Tredway invented machine after machine to reduce the cost of the elaborate carving, turning, and scrollwork. When the buying public finally revolted against overdecoration and turned to the severely plain Mission style, Oliver Tredway mechanized manufacture to an extent never before seen in the industry, reducing his labor costs so drastically that a number of other factories bought from him because, even after Oliver Tredway added a generous profit, his selling prices were still under their own production costs. In common with many of the industrialists of the period, Oliver Tredway’s prime interests were centered in the factory. His office was seldom used. He spent most of his working day wandering through the factory, frequently removing his frock coat and yellow doeskin gloves to lend a hand at tinkering some new piece of machinery into production. The gloves were a