By JEANETTE FLECK
WSU Intern
Eighty-eight years.
That’s how long the company formerly known as Old Colony Envelope has operated in the city of Westfield, eventually becoming a factory employing 200 workers.
For most of those years, their factory was located at 94 North Elm Street, originally built for a whip company – the Independent Whip Company – in 1894. The whip manufacturers vacated the premises before 1920 – a few years before the large-scale decline of whip production – and the startup Old Colony Envelope manufacturers moved in a few years later, to remain on those premises for over 70 years.
At one point, the International Paper Company became the owners of Old Colony Envelope, but the name of the company remained the same. International Paper also has offices in Westfield, but nothing to do with the envelope company, as it sold Old Colony to National Envelope, a Long Island based company, in late 1994. This time, the name associated with the product did change.
Around 1997, National Envelope decided to move the premises to Turnpike Industrial Road, a location hidden between Westfield High School and the turnpike entrance. The company was going strong at this point, even expanding their new facilities by over 130,000 square feet – more than doubling its previous size – for $6 million, a project completed in 2000.
The North Elm factory has, in its turn, been extensively renovated, and from the outside, it now passes as a brand new office building. The Westwood Restaurant and Pub, though, which opened there in 2002, re-used some of the old materials in the design of their pub section, trying to keep the location’s historic atmosphere. Westfield’s city officials used the office space while City Hall was under renovations, and the building overall is still a landmark.
Everything started going downhill in the New Millennium, as the advent of the Internet did much the same thing as the invention of the automobile did to the horse-and-buggy. By 2010, the nationwide National Envelope company had already been bankrupt and saved. By 2013, they filed again, this time to be purchased by Cenveo on September 17th. Cenveo, one of National Envelope’s competitors, is based in Connecticut, was incorporated in 1994, and springs from a company established in Colorado in 1919. The National Envelope brand name was retired after the sale, and Westfield’s factory was a footnote until just 8 months later – this month. Cenveo, driven by decreased demand, is shutting down several factories across the U.S., and the Westfield factory is on the list.
RIP Old Colony Envelope. 1922-2014.
