Return to About Hart & Cooley

Howard Stanley Hart was a turn-of-the-century entrepreneur, inventor, industrialist, and builder.  In 1892, in partnership with Norman P. Cooley, he established the Hart & Cooley Manufacturing Company in Chicago, the first cold-rolled steel plant west of Pittsburgh.  One of Hart's many inventions of the next few years was a steel heating register that proved superior to traditional heavy cast-iron models.

In 1901 the two sold their Chicago plant and organized the Hart & Cooley Company in New Britain, Connecticut.  It became the first in the nation to manufacture warm-air registers from stamped steel, a product line that gained almost instant success.

 Howard Stanley Hart

The Roaring Twenties saw Hart & Cooley expand their register business to Holland, Michigan, where they formed the Federal Manufacturing Company.  In 1928 they moved their Connecticut operations to Holland, merging with Federal under the name Hart & Cooley Company, Inc.  Warm-air products made in Holland, Michigan, quickly found their way to customers nationwide.  Despite the Great Depression, by the early 1930s the company had become the world's largest producer of warm-air registers.

By June 1942, the Holland plant had grown to 238,750 square feet of floor space with "unmatched facilities for research and manufacturing."  During the war, however, register production took a backseat to national defense needs.  During these years Hart & Cooley worked three shifts on a 24-hour basis to produce watertight shipboard electrical boxes and 60-millimeter mortar shells.

During the 1950s, when forced-air heating became widespread, the company added many new products to its residential and commercial lines of registers, grilles, and diffusers.  It introduced the Metlvent gas vent for gas-fired appliances in 1959, a product that won Michigan's Achievement of the Year honors in 1962.  Hart & Cooley introduced the Metlvent all-fuel chimney system that same year.

Hart & Cooley Inc. was acquired by Tomkins plc in 2000 to compliment their existing air distribution product companies.

The following year, in June of 2001, Hart & Cooley Inc. celebrated its 100th anniversary of producing HVAC products for commercial and residential markets.

In November 2001, Tomkins purchased American Metals Products a manufacturer of residential grilles, registers and diffusers, vent and chimney products and integrated it into Hart & Cooley Inc.

Ward Industries, a manufacturer of duct system components for commercial and industrial applications was purchased in September 2002.

In January 2005, Tomkins plc acquired Milcor Inc., a multi-brand manufacturer of building products, including Milcor, Lima Register, Leigh, Portals Plus and RPS (Roof Products Systems).  These brands have been integrated into Hart & Cooley Inc. with Lima Register assigned to the American Metal Products Group and the other brands to the newly created Commercial Products Group.  The Ward brand also became part of the Commercial Products Group.

Hart & Cooley Inc. continues to be a major supplier to the HVAC industry and has grown to the point that it has manufacturing locations across North America as well as China.  Howard Stanley Hart and Norman P. Cooley would be proud to see that the business they started over a century ago is still thriving today.

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