Morse’s soap distributorship was just becoming established when gasoline rationing during the war years hampered his requisite trips to New York City for supplies. Ever enterprising, Morse leased a gasoline service station on Academy Avenue in Middletown in 1943. Enlisting the help of this wife and children, he was able to pump gas, service cars, and continue to sell his soap products on the side. At the end of World War II, Morse relinquished the gas station to purchase an 800 square foot building on the other side of town. Though vastly extended, it is still the site of E. A. Morse & Co., Inc. today.
The decade of the 1950’s saw the Morse Company expand its product line to include paper and packaging materials, such as paper towels, toilet tissue, dispenser cups, twine, and tape. Its service area also outstretched to fill the soap and paper product needs of private businesses, restaurants and schools within an approximate 40-mile radius. Emerson Morse II joined the family enterprise upon his return from military service. The company’s first full time employee was added to the payroll.
In 1958 an incident involving two drums of oil-based wax changed the course of E. A. Morse & Co., Inc. and brought the business to an unprecedented level of profitability. Morse distributed the wax to a school system in Saugerties, with instructions to mix it with kerosene before applying it to the wooden floors of the school. Inadvertently, turpentine was mixed, producing a gooey mess that the Morse Company undertook to remove. The venture was to mark the family’s initiation into the industrial cleaning supply business.
While all facets of the distributorship continued to prosper, E. A. Morse & Co., incorporated in 1960, was building its business literally, as well. In 1966 Johanne and Candace, Emerson Morse Sr.’s two daughters then entered into this growing business. The Morse family and its small band of employees expanded the original Middletown warehouse space by hand and sweat of brow. Salesmen would pour concrete in the early morning, change into suits, then go on the road. After hours, all Morse workers would unload merchandise from railroad cars parked on tracks adjacent to the Morse building.
From the corporation’s inception, Morse employees are also stockholders. As such, they not only work for E. A. Morse & Co., Inc., but the greater part of it is their own.
In 1984 the Morse Company purchased Charles M. Dagwell Co., a modest distributorship of custodial equipment, located in Hudson, New York. Emerson A. Morse III is General Manager of that company. Charles M. Dagwell Co., the wholly owned subsidiary of E. A. Morse & Co., Inc. reached in excess of one million dollars in sales in 1990. Combined annual sales of both businesses climbed above $7 million.
Presently, the Morse Company’s Orange County facility spans some 60,000 square feet of warehouse and office space. It employs 43 people and serves as distributor of paper, chemical specialties and maintenance equipment for numerous suppliers, some whose products Emerson first sold in 1938.
Emerson A. Morse Sr. died in September 1989. Winifred Morse retired after many years in the family business. Emerson Morse II retired from the business in 1994 and past away on April 28, 1998. Johanne Morse Cortright, former president, retired in 1998 after working at the family company for 32 years. Candace Morse Depew, current president of E. A. Morse & Co., Inc., carries on the business her father founded. It is a legacy they will pass to the grandchildren, Emerson A. Morse III, General Manager and Treasurer of Charles M. Dagwell Co.; Carl Morse, Vice-President; Tom Morse, Secretary and Sales Manager; Kelly Buchman, Sales Consultant; Heidi Walters, Customer Service; Adam Morse, driver; and Emerson Morse IV, warehouse/delivery whom are at the Hudson and Middletown locations. It is a legacy of hard work and resourcefulness, handed down from a man who grasped opportunity more than half a century ago for Morse generations yet to come.