Rarig Engineering Co.
President during documented 1904 ordnance and industrial furnace contracts.
Founder · architect · ironmaster · Columbus civic life
Charles Eugene Morris
His career ran from architecture with Terrell & Morris to ironwork, engineering, banking, invention, and the Columbus company that carried his name into structural steel.
Architect before ironmaster.
In the early 1880s Morris worked in the Columbus architectural partnership Terrell & Morris with Elah T. Terrell.
The surviving record connects the office to an Ohio State Fairgrounds grandstand proposal, an Ohio State University agricultural experiment-station commission, a model rural schoolhouse in Madison Township, and a group of substantial Columbus residential and commercial commissions reported in 1886. That architectural foundation helps explain the company Morris later built: a business fluent in both buildings and the iron systems inside them.
From ironwork to structural steel.
Charles Eugene Morris established The C. E. Morris Company in Columbus in 1885. Its documented work grew from architectural and ornamental iron into structural steel, public construction, manufacturing, and infrastructure.
By 1904 Morris was also leading Rarig Engineering Company work, including a federal gun-carriage contract near Columbus and furnace work at Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia. Later C. E. Morris Company projects ranged from banks, schools, factories, and theaters to the structural steel for the original Port Columbus terminal and major Ohio bridges.
Merchants & Manufacturers
A contemporary advertisement names Chas. E. Morris as a bank director.
Window-screen patent
U.S. Patent 497,891 names C. E. Morris among four joint inventors in 1893.
Port Columbus
The company fabricated structural steel for the original terminal opened in 1929.
A Columbus life.
The C. E. Morris House at 875 East Broad Street remains the clearest surviving landmark tied directly to the founder and his family.
The broader family record also places Morris in Columbus civic and business life through school-board service, banking relationships, and development activity near Cassady Avenue, where Morris Avenue still preserves the family name. Those civic and development chapters are being matched to board minutes, deeds, plats, directories, and newspapers for permanent inclusion in the source archive.
The family record.
The family archive records two marriages, a large household, and the line of descendants who continued the company across five generations.
The public archive currently traces the company line from Charles Eugene Morris through Willard Bernard Morris, Willard Frank Morris, John Henderson Morris, and Samuel Louis Morris. A complete family chapter with both wives, every child, dates, residences, and supporting records is still being transcribed from the family collection.
Archive work now in progress
The school-board record, Cassady Avenue development and Morris Avenue, both marriages, all children, and the relationship between Charles's lifetime and the original Port Columbus project will be published here as their local source copies are added. The site will not invent missing names or dates.