Featured Business of the Week: Marvin Windows and Doors

Preface: 1904, George G. Marvin arrived in tiny Warroad, Minnesota, to take a job managing a grain elevator. The area was a booming lumber center, providing pulpwood for paper mills. Recognizing an opportunity, George Marvin established the Marvin Lumber & Cedar Company in 1912.

Honest and hard-working, George earned respect across the northern woodlands. He believed in the sanctity of a handshake and often loaned money to farmers and lumbermen who needed to get through the winter when work was scarce. The only record of the transaction would be a penciled note in George’s black pocket notebook. The need for year-round employment in sparsely populated northern Minnesota would become a recurring theme in the Marvin company history.

During the Depression, George Marvin quietly helped his community. He provided Christmas trees for every family in Warroad. He delivered 100-pound bags of flour to needy families. One year, when crops were poor and farm families were near starvation, George arranged for each family to sell a truckload of pulpwood to a local paper company. Years after the Depression ended, stories began quietly circulating about George Marvin’s most magnificent gesture to his neighbors – one he never sought to take credit for during his lifetime.

A local bank had failed. All the farm mortgages would come due immediately. Without the cash to pay off their mortgages, dozens of farmers would lose their land. George bought the bank, held the mortgages and the farmers paid him back over time.

But George Marvin also was a shrewd businessman. Seeking a way to keep his lumberyard workers busy during the slow winter months, he designed a machine that turned scrap lumber into wooden stakes. Marvin sold the stakes to the state highway department.

George Marvin set an example of hard work, ingenuity and integrity. But it was his oldest son who would provide the visionary leadership that transformed Marvin into a world leader in the building industry.