Older than the light bulb.
Still printing.
One business. In continuous operation since 1855. Family-owned, in Jacksonville, Florida.
Still here.
Since 1855, Wells & Drew has never stopped running. Through the Great Depression. Prohibition. Two world wars. The dot-com collapse. The 2008 recession. A global pandemic. Most companies don’t see a hundred years. We’re well past that, and still printing.
Before the light bulb.
When Wells & Drew began, the light bulb hadn’t been invented. Neither had the telephone or the automobile. The Union had thirty-four states. The mail moved by horseback.
The fire took the building.
Not the company.
The Great Fire of 1901 burned 146 city blocks of Jacksonville and destroyed everything around our factory. We rebuilt at 45–47 West Bay Street and put a phoenix in our logo, where it still is.
Horace Drew ran the company until 1926; it stayed in the family long enough to be called the oldest family business in Jacksonville. Ed Drew and Sherwood Drew still worked here into the early 2000s.
We chose the harder kind of printing.
From the start, the goal was never just to put ink on paper. It was to do the things most printers won’t — engraving, letterpress, foil stamping, embossing — and keep them in-house.
While the rest of the trade chased volume and faster machines, we stayed with the specialty work. It’s the choice that kept us in business when the commodity shops came and went.
The engraver and the businessman.
In 1982, Randy Houser and his father-in-law, Johnnie O. Wells, founded Wells Legal Supply, Inc.
Johnnie could build anything. For years he’d run the engraving departments at other shops — Bradley Engraving among them — cutting steel-ruled dies by hand, some plates taking weeks to finish. Randy ran the business. He built relationships that lasted — companies he picked up when they were small were still his customers when they became the biggest names in their fields.
In 1997, Wells Legal Supply purchased the H. & W. B. Drew Company. The two did nearly the same work, so it fit — and together they became The Wells & Drew Companies.
Over the decade that followed, the business bought the specialty printers left in Florida: Narup, Bradley, and Pfaffco — the same Bradley whose engraving room Johnnie once ran. It’s part of why, when a buyer goes looking for this kind of work, there often isn’t anyone left to call.
Today the company is owned by Randy’s sons, Blake and Ryan Houser.
Why any of this matters to your brand.
History is only worth printing if it does something for you. Here’s what it does.
Nothing gets handed off.
The full range of techniques is under one roof, so no part of your job goes to a subcontractor who loses the thread.
A phone call places an order.
No portal to fight, no account to rebuild every time. People who know your work pick up.
Print your competitors can’t easily copy.
The result is a brand asset, not a line item — work that’s hard to source and harder to fake.
The materials that decide how your brand gets remembered.
That’s the work. It’s been the work since 1855.
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