From December 1936 Popular Homecraft

In the early 1930s, the A. V. Carroll Machine Tool Co. designed and started manufacturing a new type of wood planer that they called the "Red Fox", and they also made a small tablesaw. In 1930 or '31 Charles H. Partington purchased the A. V. Carroll company and took over manufacturing of the planer and tablesaw, operating out of the old Carroll factory in Cincinnati. The tablesaw was discontinued within a few years. In 1939 the company address changed to Norwood, Ohio, but manufacturing reportedly did not move to Norwood until after the war.

The Partington company was not especially prosperous but continued to support the Partington family. In 1953, Charles Partington had a debilitating stroke that left him bed-ridden. He died a few years later. Meanwhile, his son-in-law, Fred Juergens, Sr., bought the rights to the planer, but then suffered a heart attack and never resumed manufacturing the planer.

In the early 1980s, a small classified ad appeared in Fine Woodworking from someone looking for a Red Fox planer. This inspired Fred Juergens, Jr., the grandson of Charles Partington, to finish up four more planers from his father's parts on hand. There were no patterns to make new castings, and the planers proved to be too labor-intensive to make a viable business so all remaining stock and rights were sold to a company in Beloit, Wisconsin, which seems to have let the Red Fox planer die.

Information Sources

• A 1938 brochure gives Cincinnati as the company location, and a 1939 letterhead gives a Norwood address.
• A discussion on owwm.org provides much of the detail given here, as related by the "son of the son-in-law".