It was one afternoon in 1876 that Joseph Andrew Jeffrey came across a most curious curious machine displayed in a storefront on High Street in Columbus, Ohio. The device — a model of a chain driven air-powered mining tool poised to revolutionize the manual-labor driven coal mining industry. The inventor — Francis M. Lechner, an inventor looking for an investor. Jeffrey, owning some coal property himself, saw the device was intrigued.

A few savy sales pitches by Mr. Jeffrey and the concept of Mr. Lechner's mining machine received the merit it needed. In no time at all and with the money from a number of investors, The Lechner Mining Machine Company was formed as a partnership on November 20, 1876.

Overcoming adversity and persevering through the trials and tribulations of a start-up company, Joseph Jeffrey, president of the company at this point, eventually bought out a number of minor stakeholders in 1887 and changed the name to The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company. In 1888, the first 4 acres of what today is the Jeffrey Place site at East First Avenue and Fourth Street, were purchased and used to house the first of the buildings that would manufacture the blossoming companies' mining equipment machines. 

From a coal-powered nation to electricity driven nation, The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company innovated a number of technologies within the mining industry that eventually found there ways into other unrelated markets. It was this diversification, and some of these other technologies that brought in revenue for the company that in some years exceded the income from their core mining machines.

By the turn of the century The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company was a recognized leader in its industry and an important factor in the Columbus economy. By 1908, Jeffrey sales had risen to $3.9 million with 30% coming from the so-called chain and materials handling divisions. The company continued to prosper during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

In 1889, only two years after J. A. Jeffrey gained control of the company, he established one of the first industrial infirmaries in the country. In 1905, the employees, with the support of management, founded a cooperative store. In 1912 an employee cafeteria commenced, and in the same year the Jeffrey Building & Loan Association was formed to assist employees in buying their own homes. In that day the word around Columbus was, and continued to be for many years, that "Jeffrey is a good place to work."

In 1926, just fifty years after the Company was founded, operating responsibility was turned over for the first time, except for the first few years when Mr. Lechner was general manager, to someone who was not a member of the Jeffrey family.

On August 27, 1928 Joseph Andrew Jeffrey died at the age of ninety-two. The factory was closed so that the employees could attend the funeral services at the First Congregational Church.

Seeing aquistion as another path to grow, the Company acquired The Diamond Coal Cutter Company Limited of Wakefield, England in 1926, and renamed it British Jeffrey-Diamond Limited, thus combining two of the oldest names in the mining machinery industry. Eventually, with the increasing popularity of automobiles and the need for new and better roads, The Galion Iron Works and Manufacturing Company, a small manufacturer of road rollers and graders in Galion, Ohio, seemed like a good candidate as another aquistion. The business was acquired in January of 1929 for nearly two million dollars.

Jeffrey Manufacturing won five Navy Es (Excellence) for supplying the chain used for the ammunition hoists on a majority of American destroyers and cruisers build after 1942.

In the middle 1940s, the streetcar tracks on North Fourth Street alongside the Jeffrey plant in Columbus were torn up, and the quaint and noisy trolley cars were replaced by electric rubber-tired buses. It would be the fact that The Jeffrey Manufacturing Company did not embrace rubber tires, amongst other issues, that would permenantly cost them their high ranking in the industry.

Jeffrey's industrial division eventually benefited from the transfer in 1961-62 of most of its manufacturing from the old Columbus plant to three highly efficient new operations in South Carolina and Tennessee.

In its heyday, Jeffrey employed over 7500 people worldwide. Through the 1950's through the 1970's, Jeffrey lost its competitive advantage, and was sold in 1974 to a Dallas based company. In 1987, thirty-two buildings were demolished and the property has been vacant ever since.

A large majority of this content was taken directly from "A Short History of the Jeffrey Compnay" written by Robert H. Jeffrey II in 1975. We thank Mr. Jeffrey, who served as president of The Jeffrey Company through its final days prior to the sale to Dresser Industires, for taking the time to to preserve the history of such an iconic company in Columbus' history.