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HICKSVILLE, Ohio - The big red and white banner is still hanging from the girders inside the cavernous Crook-Miller Co., waiting for someone to take it down.

Handles. As in the ones the village's oldest company no longer makes because it shut down manufacturing for good Oct. 28, relegated to a commercial has-been by consolidation, global competition and a marauding little insect called the emerald ash borer.

Tragic, among other reasons, because Crook-Miller defined Hicksville's history in wood, which began in the 1840s when village laborers made staves and hoops for barrels used to transport goods on the Wabash-Erie Canal.

Tragic also because three decades later, the legacy was cemented when the railroad came through town and boosted population and products, especially things fashioned from wood. Joseph, Thomas and Robert Kerr, along with Robert Kerr's brother-in-law, Edward Crook, began making agricultural implement handles, broom handles, bicycle rims and tent poles.

Over the years, other lathed wood products - baseball bats, rolling pins and indoor stand-up flagpoles among them - were added, and manufacturing was done at several plants with ever-changing names.

The current site at 1 Handle Lane - off Main Street in the shadows of Hicksville Grain Co.'s massive bank of elevators - was called the Hicksville Handle Factory at the turn of the 20th century. It became Crook-Miller Co. in 1939 after Miller Manufacturing burned.

Hicksville was a perfect site for the wood trade because it was in an ash-rich band running from New York to Indiana and parts of southern Michigan, says retired Crook-Miller Manager Chuck Kohaut.

Besides having the best wood, Kohaut and soon-to-depart manager Doug Hancock say, employees at Crook-Miller demonstrated a good deal of pride in the sprawling plant and in the finished product, in the elaborate process that went from giant log to squared board to thick dowel to kiln-drying, steam-shaping and coatings of lacquer.

"You can ask most any old-timer in town," Kohaut says, "and they had an uncle work for Crook-Miller, or their father worked for Crook-Miller, or their aunt worked for Crook-Miller."

True enough, historian Hilbert says, but he's a little sore about the plant's effect on the workforce. There were times - not recently, he says - when the plant wasn't terribly liberal in its pay.

Hilbert, a retired optometrist, is a lifelong Hicksville resident who descended from the area's early log-cabin-dwelling settlers. He knows about getting by on little, he says, because his family was as poor as the rest, something he takes some responsibility for.

When he was 10 in 1929, he says, he fired two .22-caliber slugs into a sick rabbit, which in turn infected his insurance salesman father when the elder Hilbert cleaned the animal. It took his father four years to recover - four years at the start of the Depression.

Hilbert's lower jaw retracts, his lips tighten and tears slide down his cheeks as he tells the story. A second tale brings a simmering detest and illustrates, Hilbert says, why it's difficult for him to view Crook-Miller with a kindly nostalgic eye.

He, Kohaut and Hancock talk in varying degrees about the times when Crook-Miller had a noon whistle that not only signaled the midday for employees but also for the rest of the village's residents.

People would drive by and try to assess the health of the company based on the fullness of the yard. Lots of logs, they thought, meant business was good, while a paucity of timber meant business was faltering. The reality, Kohaut and Hancock say, was the log yard was rarely a good barometer of business: Volume depended more on loggers' abilities to skirt foul weather in getting to trees.

More and more, company executives noticed, Crook-Miller's hold on the handle market was being usurped by cheaper imports from China. Moreover, the emergence of the emerald ash borer - and subsequent restrictions on the transport of ash from state to state - made it increasingly difficult to keep stockpiles up.

Parent company Baker-McMillen, which produces handles and vacuum cleaner beater bars, also realized it would be more efficient to manufacture at one location - in Stow, Ohio, - rather than two.

A year ago, the workforce was whittled from 35 to 16. Today, says Hancock, only five employees remain, mostly to tidy up leftover inventory. Some of the let-go and short-time remaining employees were offered jobs in Stow, near Akron in eastern Ohio. None accepted, often for family reasons.

As it is, the consolidation and Baker-McMillen's decision to end in-house sawmill operations has squeezed job opportunities, Hancock says. The parent company has switched to using already-processed wood to make handles in Stow.

Mayor Haver, reeling from the both the loss of Crook-Miller and the closing of metal framing company Dietrich Industries in 2004, says he's hoping the village of 3,649 people can find a new tenant for Crook-Miller.

"Hopefully," says Haver, 66, "somebody will buy it and put some industry in there. It would be natural for any woodworking industry that needs kilns, and there's been some interest. That's about all I can tell you."

In the meantime, the workers left at Crook-Miller somberly walk or ride forklifts through the plant, which is now little more than a warehouse for tens of thousands of dowels on pallets under a big red and white banner that once meant something.

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