Kirsch, the curtain-rod maker of Sturgis

Look at the curtain rod over your nearest window. There’s a fair chance the design started in Sturgis.

Charles W. Kirsch got tired of round wooden rods that sagged in the middle and warped over time. In 1907 he started bending a flat strip of metal into a rod that stayed straight and didn’t rust, and a small company grew up around the idea. It began in Three Rivers, then settled in Sturgis, and from there Kirsch kept inventing the small machinery of a household. The traverse rod — the one with a cord you pull to slide drapes open across the window — came out of this shop. So did “cut-to-measure” hardware, sized on order to fit a window of any width, which meant a store didn’t have to stock a hundred lengths.

For most of the twentieth century, Kirsch was one of the biggest paychecks in town. The engineers, the salesmen, and the factory floor were all in Sturgis, and a family might send two or three generations through the same plant. A 1932 ad measured the company’s reach not in dollars but in windows: Kirsch hardware, it boasted, hung at “a hundred million” of them.

The company stayed about ninety years before the operations finally left town. What lingers is the strange ubiquity of it — the flat rod, the pull cord, the bracket cut to your window. Most people never read the name stamped on the hardware, and never had reason to learn that a small St. Joseph County town spent the better part of a century quietly dressing the country’s windows.