PARK RIDGE—By Industry We Flourish. Those four words appear on Park Ridge’s borough crest, but the motto didn’t just come out of nowhere. These days it’s mostly history-minded people who have heard of Mittag & Volger, but at one time the factory put little Park Ridge on the map as a center for manufacturing.
The photograph above, from the Pascack Historical Society’s collection, was taken outside the Mittag & Volger factory on a winter day of the early 20th century. The factory faced Park Avenue and stretched back along the train tracks parallel to Broadway. The main building that you see stood about where Veterans Park is now, nearly opposite the train station.
Founded by Frank Mittag and Theodore Volger in 1887, the factory made carbon paper and typewriter ribbons and sold them throughout the world. The company had offices in New York, Chicago, Paris, and London, but its headquarters remained in Park Ridge. For decades Mittag & Volger was a major employer of people in the Pascack area.
A group of Mittag & Volger employees pose for the camera on the right side of the frame. Do you recognize the item they are standing around (and on)? This wooden frame with a large ring inside was an early fire alarm made from the metal tire of a train wheel. In the early 20th century it was common for worn out railroad tires to be repurposed in this way. The metal ring would be struck with a hammer to create a resounding “clang” that signaled a fire.
It was a fire in the winter of 1903, 120 years ago this week, that inspired the factory to install this alarm just outside the front door.
Local newspapers reported that early on the morning of Monday, Feb. 9, 1903, the factory narrowly escaped destruction after an employee was careless in emptying hot ashes in the rear of the building. The embers ignited a haystack, and the morning’s strong winds whipped it into a fierce blaze.
With many residential homes located near the factory, Park Ridge’s firemen worked feverishly to prevent the flames from spreading. Their hard work kept the fire contained to the haystack and a shed on the property, which was the only building destroyed.
This was not the company’s first brush with fire. Seven years earlier, the Mittag & Volger factory was destroyed in a massive conflagration in September 1897. That blaze had done $25,000 worth of damage and only the office safe and a few fixtures were able to be saved. Mittag & Volger was entirely rebuilt.
That fire was so destructive that it prompted the formation of Park Ridge’s first fire department, in 1898. Frank Mittag was a founding member.
At the end of February 1903, it was reported in the newspapers that a fire alarm, “one of the regulation railroad tires,” had just been placed outside the factory.
In 1949 Mittag & Volger merged with the larger Burroughs Adding Machine Company, but as carbon paper and typewriters were replaced with copy machines and computers, the mighty Park Ridge factory was closed in 1986.
— Kristin Beuscher is president of Pascack Historical Society