Woolley Home Solutions began as Woolley Coal and Ice back in 1924.
The company has adapted and changed over the years, moving from horse drawn ice and coal wagons to trucks delivering heating oil and now to a home solutions company that has biofuel and is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2050.
The company has been family owned and in the same location for all of those 100 years. The property where biofuel and propane are now dispensed once had an enormous coal silo alongside railroad tracks that connected to the Rahway Valley Line and the rest of the world. Trains brought in the coal and ice and horse drawn wagons brought it into homes in and around Maplewood.
The property was a bankrupt coal yard when it was purchased by current owner Norman Woolley’s great grandfather, Nephi Woolley. Nephi and his son, also Norman Woolley, and another son of Nephi, were the original operators.
The first Norman Woolley was just 17 when his father purchased the property. The family still has records of those early years, including details about the horses that pulled the ice and coal wagons.
Things got a little dicey during The Depression in the 1930s so Woolley also dug out basements for new home constructions but the business remained active and began to switch to oil delivery in the 1940s as people made the switch from coal to oil and from ice boxes to refrigerators.
It was also around this time that the last horse was retired and trucks became the norm and the company altered the name to Woolley Fuel Oil.
“My father didn’t want to lose that rail yard,” Norman E. Woolley said. “But that was it for coal. Most people converted from coal to oil.”
The tracks were eventually removed and the line shut down.
That wasn’t the end of the changes. The company continued to adapt with the times and eventually changed the name to Woolley Home Solutions in 2015. In addition to oil delivery, they now offer HVAC service and installation, service agreements, air quality products, oil and gas conversions, plumbing services, propane and biodiesel dispensed from a pump on site.
Woolley has an active online and social media presence and recently held an ugly boiler contest with the winner receiving a new boiler.
Maplewood Township Historian Susan Newberry said that Woolley’s peers in terms of age in Maplewood are the Maplewood Awning and Shade Co, which appears to have begun as an upholstery shop on Baker Street around 1921, the Maplewood Country Club, which began as a small field club in 1903 and Winchester Gardens.
Winchester Gardens is the result of Marcus Ward Jr., who died in 1920, willing his fortune to building a home overseen by a board of trustees. In 1927, the Marcus L. Ward Home for Aged and Respectable Bachelors and Widowers, designed by noted architect John Russell Pope, on 49 acres of land in Maplewood, landscaped by the Olmsted Brothers, opened its doors, Newberry said.
The oldest continually operating family business in the world is the Kongo Gumi construction company in Osaka, Japan, according to Family Business magazine, which said it was founded in 578 and is currently run by the 40th generation of the family.
Woolley Home Solutions currently has 18 employees including two drivers who are the sons of men who drove for the company. Woolley recently purchased Reel Strong, a Cranford based company that offered similar services and has been around since 1925.
“We have the first biodiesel station in New Jersey,” Norman E. Woolley said. “Maplewood has always been green and we have always tried to be that as a company.”
Woolley said he felt no pressure to join the family business. He went to college and studied business before going to technical school. He has a sister, who didn’t join the family business and became a teacher instead.
Like his father and grandfather, he didn’t get a pass into the head office but started at the bottom and did jobs all around the company.
“That allowed me to learn what was efficient,” he said.
The Woolleys are a mechanically inclined family, according to Norman, who said he got his first car, a 1909 Ford Model T, when he was 16 before he had even gotten his driver’s license. He and his father worked on it together. The older Norman still works four days a week, but likes to spend his Fridays working on his own antique cars.
“My father has been here 60 years,” Norman E. said. “He’s 85 and he just takes Fridays off.”
A 50-year-old father of two, Norman said his children have worked at the company part time but it’s too early to know if they’ll be interested in it as a career.
Family business hits 100 years added by Joe Ungaro on
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