The only office-elevator manufacturer in Iowa

DENVER, IOWA - In Denver, Iowa, one family is running the only Iowa-based office-elevator manufacturing company in the state.

William and Bertha Schumacher founded Schumacher Elevator Co. in Denver, in Bremer County, in 1936, where it's kept its roots ever since.

Now, William's grandson Marvin, and his wife Helen Schumacher, run the business and make commercial and residential elevators, personnel lifts and item lifts - ranging from $10,000 up to $5 million or more.

Marvin Schumacher said working from Denver gives the company a leg-up on rural elevators over other manufacturers.

'We cover the rural (area) much, much more than the other companies,” he said.

Schumacher said the company, with 200 employees, makes roughly 95 percent of the personnel lifts that go in grain elevators in the farming market, but yet that remains a small segment of the company's overall manufacturing.

'We bought a company from Omaha and they were going broke,” he said. 'One year they sold 68 elevators and the next year they sold eight. And that was their whole business.

'It's so dependent on the farm economy. You can't really run a business on that.”

Helen Schumacher said for many years, people assumed the company only produced grain elevators because of their Iowa location. But it has developed a stronger company identity - from the expansion of the company into its new location.

In 2000, Schumacher Elevator built a 55,000-square-foot building, which put the plant and office in one location. Before, the company owned five different buildings in town.

'We're not afraid to bring customers who are going to buy an expensive product in here anymore,” Helen Schumacher said, who recalls meeting with potential customers in their home before buying the building.

Since that move, the company's sales grew 425 percent from 2000 to 2013, but Marvin Schumacher preferred not to publish specific numbers.

Steve Emerson, owner of Aspect Architecture in Cedar Rapids, has purchased five elevators from Schumacher since 1999 and uses Schumacher for restoration, renovation and maintenance work.

'They're extremely easy to work with,” he said. 'I use them religiously now.”

He added that flooding in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City boosted repair business over the past few years. Many of those elevators, he said, had to have 70 percent of more of the parts replaced because of water damage to much of the cab and base of the elevator.

'In those two cities we had to do a lot of replacements of units, and some of that is just now getting done,” he said in reference to damage from the floods of 2008.

Schumacher said the best way to prevent major damage is to run all the elevator cabs to the top floor before flooding, so water only damages the machinery at the base of the elevator rather than nearly the entire system.