Ferno Brand Guidelines: The Ohio Cot Maker That Grew Out of a Mortuary Supply Firm

A mortuary supplier, a cot designer and a partner.

Ferno’s roots lie in a mortuary supply business. The Washington Mortuary Supply Company was started in 1924 by William E. Klever in Washington Court House, Ohio, Ferno’s own history says; an account by the co-founder Elroy Bourgraf, submitted to the EMS Museum in 2010, says it began by making grave markers. Dick Ferneau worked for the firm for more than three decades, EMS World wrote in a November 2020 profile in its EMS Hall of Fame series, and it was there that he began designing cots.

EMS World credits Ferneau with pioneering aluminium tubing in place of steel, which made cots much lighter; ambulance builders converted, and the lighter models became an industry standard, the magazine says. It also credits him with the first elevating ambulance cot, in 1952. Bourgraf’s account names that model as the Washington #52, a two-level cot, followed in 1954 by the #54, which he describes as the first cot to rise to hospital-bed height.

In 1955 Ferneau left to start his own company, adapting his surname into its name: Ferno. The company dates the start to July 1955, in a rented building in Staunton, Ohio, staffed with people experienced in pattern making and machining. It moved to Circleville in April 1956 and, in June 1957, to a building the partners bought in Greenfield, Ohio.

The partner was Elroy Bourgraf, whom EMS World describes as a young veteran with experience of the mortuary market; the two met in 1956 and joined forces, and the company says Bourgraf became a full partner that year. Ferneau and Bourgraf then bought Ferneau’s old employer, the Washington Mortuary Supply Company: EMS World and the company give the year as 1961, while Bourgraf’s own account says late 1960. The two names were combined, and the company became Ferno-Washington, Inc. in 1963, the company and Bourgraf’s account agree.

The X-frame cot and the cots that followed.

Ferno’s reputation was built on the cot. Bourgraf’s account dates the #30 All Level Cot to 1958 and calls it the first “X” frame cot, with eight levels; it soon replaced two-level cots as the industry standard, he wrote. EMS World says the X-frame was inspired by a secretary’s ironing board, and that today’s H-frame, X-frame and independent-leg cots derive from Ferneau’s designs. The magazine also credits him with tooling for mortuary use, the “slimline” hinge used in folding stretchers and carrying chairs, and 16 U.S. patents.

The same account traces a run of later models: the #28 Fernoflex chair cot of 1967, built from rectangular aluminium tubing; the York I cot bench of 1970, designed for the United Kingdom; the #50 of 1978, designed for the Netherlands, which Bourgraf calls the forerunner of the cots used across continental Europe; the #35 roll-in cot of 1993; and, in 2005, the battery-powered Powerflex.

The mortuary trade never left the catalogue. Ferno’s website today lists emergency patient handling, immobilisation, oxygen and suction, rescue stretchers, rope and water rescue, and aviation and military equipment alongside a mortuary and funeral range. On its history page it also names the Model 30 X-Frame Cot and iNTRAXX, a system for fastening equipment inside the ambulance.

Powered cots are the current front of that work. At FDIC International in April 2025, a news release dated 11 April said, Ferno introduced the Power X2 ambulance cot and the Power F2 fastening system with Cross-Drive technology, which the release says works with both Ferno and Stryker cot systems. It named Renee LaPine as Ferno’s chief executive and set the official launch for August 2025.

The category and its codes.

Rescue and emergency medical equipment is bought by people who will use it under pressure, so the makers in this field tend to present themselves through the equipment at work rather than through lifestyle imagery. The typical brochure shows a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance, a crew lifting a patient down a narrow stair, or a basket stretcher being lowered on ropes, with the product carrying most of the colour in the frame.

That colour is often functional before it is decorative. Orange and yellow stretchers, spine boards and evacuation chairs are meant to be seen against grey streets, snow or dark water, and product photographs often make those working colours the focus of the frame, set against equipment in dark navy, graphite or black. The language is technical: load ratings, materials, fastening systems and named product lines rather than adjectives.

Training is the other stage where these brands are seen. CPR manikins laid out in rows in a training room, hydraulic cutters and spreaders opening a scrapped car at a vehicle extrication drill, and ambulances and fire trucks parked with their doors open for inspection all serve as the industry’s own advertising. The photographs are rarely staged far from that reality, because the buyers are paramedics, firefighters and fleet managers who know the work.

Trade fairs give the category its calendar. Interschutz in Hannover, RETTmobil in Fulda and EMS World Expo in the United States are where makers show new stretchers, rescue tools and vehicles side by side, and where a stand’s colours and signage have to read from across a crowded hall. For a designer, the lesson of the category is that a brand earns its look from the job its equipment does: clear colour, clear type and the product shown in use.

From Greenfield to Wilmington and abroad.

In 1972 the company moved to the former Clinton County Air Force Base in Wilmington, Ohio, with 180 employees, its history says; Ferno-Washington, Inc. remains based in Wilmington. In 1983 it bought the health care division of Market Forge, creating divisions in Boston and in Williamsport, Pennsylvania; by 1988, the company says, the Ille division had moved to Wilmington and the Forge division had been sold.

The international business was assembled from distributors and small makers. The company says Ferno UK began in 1971 as FW Equipment Co., was acquired in 1989 and renamed in 1992, and now designs and makes equipment in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Ferno Australia began in 1974 as the Australian distributor and now makes harnesses and rescue stretchers in Perth and other devices in Brisbane. Ferno Japan followed in 1992, Ferno Canada in 1994, Ferno Italia in Prato in 1995, moving in 2011 to Pieve di Cento, and Ferno Slovakia, from Saver Manufacturing, in 2001. Bourgraf’s account adds that Ferno UK developed the Falcon hydraulic cot in 1998. The company says it distributes in more than 70 countries and today goes simply by the name Ferno.

Ferneau’s name is also carried outside the company: EMS World notes that it appears on the National EMS Awards of Excellence honour for Paid EMS Service of the Year.

For a design guide, Ferno shows how a maker can carry one engineering idea, the light aluminium cot, through seventy years of new frames and power systems. Compare Stryker, another American maker of ambulance cots, and Spencer Italia, a stretcher maker from Parma. For this guide we use navy, aluminium grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ferno’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.