The Kroehler Works

For most of the twentieth century Naperville was a furniture town. The business was founded as the Naperville Lounge Company on 9 March 1893, and in 1896, after the death of J. L. Nichols, an employee named Peter Kroehler became one of four full partners in it. By 1 April 1915 the firm was running four factories under different names and unified them under one, Kroehler Manufacturing Company. What drove the growth was a patent. In 1909 Kroehler invented and patented a davenport bed, a folding bed section with a removable mattress housed under the seat of a sofa, in versions that pulled out lengthwise and widthwise, and plants followed at Kankakee in 1910 and Toronto from 1915. By the mid 1940s it was the second largest furniture maker in the United States, and in 1954 the Chicago Tribune called it America's largest producer of upholstered furniture. It was furniture for ordinary houses rather than for showrooms, which is why the name turns up on the underside of so much mid century American furniture and almost never in a design history. In the 1960s revenues passed a hundred million dollars a year and the company employed more than eight thousand people across eighteen plants in the United States and Canada. Losses set in during the 1970s, the original Naperville factory closed in 1978, and in 1981 the Artra Group of Northbrook took control, sold off the remaining factories and sold the name, which passed through other hands and was last used by a firm in Conover, North Carolina that shut in December 2025. The 1897 main building beside the Burlington tracks was sold to a developer in 1983 and converted, and it stands.