Barges, Edison and local history at the Bread Lock

After our visit to the incredible restoration of Morris Canal Inclined Plane 9W, I wondered whether we had enough energy left for a stop at a related site, Bread Lock Park and the museum that's on the grounds. It's open but once a month, like the Inclined Plane, so it only seemed right to check it out while we were in the neighborhood. It's just down Route 57, in the town of New Village, and I'd originally found it during my quest to find Edison's Portland cement factory.

One end of the life-sized model of a Morris Canal barge.

The park itself is part of the growing Morris Canal Greenway that's being developed under the auspices of the Warren County Morris Canal Committee. Appropriately, the canal prism (the trench the barges traveled in) and tow path curl their way through the property, which also includes a fitness path and picnic area. You can't visit the lock itself -- it's still buried -- but the park has its own delight. A full-sized replica of a canal barge sits near the foundation of the lock-tender's house, accessible enough that you can climb aboard and take the tiller to guide the boat on an imaginary trip. A store that once stood nearby was well known for its baked goods, to the point where canal workers renamed Lock 7 West for the aroma of delicious bread that welcomed them as they approached.

Then there's the museum. Officially the Warren County Historical Learning Center, it's in a ranch-style house, which gives the visitor a little bit of a surreal feeling upon arrival. Signs clearly state the building's purpose, but you still can't help but wonder if you'll be interrupting someone's afternoon by walking in. Frankly, I couldn't help but look for a doorbell.

When you walk in, it's abundantly clear you're either in a museum or someone's ambitious history project. The first room is lined with vintage photos of various historic sites around the county, but the most arresting sight is a linear representation of the canal and the community that surrounds its remnants today. A topographical map of the route through Warren County is posted above a diorama that takes up all of one wall of the room, along with photos of key locations. All of a sudden, the twists and turns of the canal made sense to me. What looks like a drunken cow path on a road map becomes a logical route when elevation changes are included in the equation. In other words, when most of the terrain you have to cover is blocked by hills and valleys, sometimes the most direct route has plenty of curves.

The big map also helped put a lot of things from my earlier visit to Warren County into perspective. For instance, the oddly-named Halfway House Road marks a halfway point along a seven-mile long level stretch of the canal that skims along the side of Scott's Mountain.

Visitors to the Bread Lock Museum can learn a lot about the canal, but there's plenty else about Warren County's history, too. Other rooms tell the story of Shippen Manor and Oxford Furnace (to be covered in a future Hidden New Jersey road trip), but a large photo of Thomas Edison grabbed my attention and pulled me forward, much like the aroma of fresh bread.

Through the use of several panels that lift and retract, the Edison exhibit tells the story of the Portland cement factory at New Village, including the origins of the crushing technology at the Ogdensburg iron mine and the large limestone mining pits nearby that provided crucial ingredients for the cement. Our museum guide also shared the story of a factory employee who ingeniously built his own concrete house near the corner of Route 57 and Edison Road. Rather than employing one of Edison's house molds (as was used to build the Valley View development in Phillipsburg), the man cast blocks from concrete dust he swept up around the plant. He and his family made about 2000 bricks, enough to construct a nice little home at an even lower cost than Edison boasted for the poured concrete homes.

Honestly, we got so caught up in the Edison exhibit (our guide really knew his stuff) that we didn't get the chance to see the rest of the museum rooms before we had to be on our way. We left, though, with the realization that there's a lot more to check out in Warren County than we realized.

Edison's New Village cement plant -- finally found!

I really should have known.

I've driven on Thomas Edison's Concrete Mile many times over the past few years, knowing his Portland cement plant wasn't far away. The inventor laid this stretch of State Highway 57 in 1912 to test the effectiveness of concrete as a paving material, yet another of the experiments he was constantly performing to perfect his products.

For as many Edison sites as I’ve tracked down, and for as many concrete houses as I’ve found over the years, I’d never located the exact site of the factory. I’d always left it for another day, passing through the community on my way to check out a lead on another story.

On the recent Route 57 trip, I decided to take a gander. A good practice in directed exploring is to look for the right names, as streets were often named for the people who lived there or the businesses that were located along them. Thus, once I saw Edison Road in Stewartsville, I took the turn. Couldn't hurt.

Older buildings and homes near the intersection with 57 soon gave way to side streets lined with houses of more recent vintage, and eventually farm fields. The road coursed under an aged railroad overpass, and as it curved, a large concrete building stood almost directly in front of me. The company sign in front of it is of recent vintage, but the factory definitely looked as if it could be over a century old. Driving further, I saw evidence of other structures that had once stood nearby but were now pretty much in ruins.

Yup, I'd found the last used and perhaps best-preserved portion of the Edison Portland Cement plant. The business was, to use a well-known bromide, the lemonade to the lemon which had been his iron ore concentrating business in Ogdensburg. Though he lost about $2 million trying to manufacture high-quality iron, he’d recouped some money by selling the byproduct - pulverized rock – to cement companies as an ingredient in their product. Seeing an opportunity, he moved the rock crushing equipment from Sussex Mountain to lime-rich Warren County and started his own Portland cement company.

The 1600 acre, 60-building facility grew to include the existing factory, lime crushers and a large rail yard to transport finished product out to market. Per his practice of innovating within whatever industry he focused on, Edison introduced a long rotary kiln at Stewartsville that he soon licensed to other manufacturers. Ironically, the design made cement production so economical that it was difficult to make a profit.

Back in the day, the Edison Portland Cement plant
was considerably bigger than today's remains would suggest

Contrary to popular belief, Edison didn't do very much of his own construction through his cement business, aside from some test pourings of a garage and potting shed at his Llewellen Park home and a couple of houses in Essex County. He was more interested in selling molds and cement to others to build the pre-fab homes. Charles Ingersoll, for one, constructed several houses in Phillipsburg and Union for working class laborers.

The most notable use of Edison Portland cement, however, stood on 161st Street in the Bronx. Yankee Stadium may have been the House that Ruth Built, but it was actually poured thanks to the Wizard of Menlo Park. It's said that during the stadium's renovation in the early 1970s, the concrete stubbornly refused to budge, and was left intact.

A concrete ruin aside Edison Road. What was it? We don't know.

At its peak, the plant employed over 600 workers, some of whom commuted from as far away as Easton. Eventually, though, it and the nearby Vulcanite Company had pretty much depleted what limestone in the area that could be economically accessed. The plant shut down in 1935 and went out of business for good in 1942.

The present occupant of the plant building has been there since 1975, operating profitably among ruins of the other structures that once served the Edison operation. What those concrete slabs were intended for isn't clear, but those visible from the road stand as testament to Edison's tenacity. They may not be as perfect as they were when first poured a hundred years ago, but I'd venture they'd be pretty hard to demolish.

Safety Follows Wisdom in Alpha

It's a January 1 tradition with us: get up early (yes, early), head out to a targeted spot and find as many birds as possible to start off a brand new year list. This time around, we started the search in Warren County, since Ivan anticipated that foraging snow buntings would be easily visible on some of the farm fields near Carpentersville. The snow cover presumably would force the flock to concentrate toward the cleared edges of the road rather than spreading out over a broad expanse of farm fields. Plus, we could also stop by Round Valley, Spruce Run and Merrill Creek for waterfowl and various wintering songbirds. Somewhere in the mix, there'd be something else of note; I didn't know what, but I was confident.

The farms offered a bit of a mixed bag. While we found a big flock of horned larks near the side of the road and snow geese overhead, buntings were frustratingly absent, and nary a kestrel was patrolling the fields. Chalking the results up to the unpredictability of nature, we went on our way, with a detour to grab some coffee and fill the tank.

We've been to the area plenty of times, but it was the first time we've stopped in the small commercial area of Alpha, so I had an eye out for the new and unusual. The roadside didn't disappoint. Not far away from the Quick Chek, we passed a large stone slab, about seven feet tall, standing proudly at a street corner. It looked kind of dampish in places, the way concrete tends to when there's been precipitation recently, but I could make out some lettering beneath a relief sculpture and the legend "Safety Follows Wisdom." Bingo! We pulled over and I jumped out to investigate.

Closer inspection revealed that the marker was an award recognizing Vulcanite Portland Cement Company for a perfect worker safety record in 1930. Only thing was, the Vulcanite Company was nowhere to be seen. Had the award outlived the business? And what was the origin of the award? We'd found a nice little research project.

We already knew that Warren County was a good location for cement companies, due to the availability of good quality lime, a core component of the building product. You'll recall that Thomas Edison's Portland Cement plant operated in nearby New Village, and there's a big cluster of lime kilns in the area, too. Large open-pit quarries reached the mineral easily and inexpensively, making the industry a natural for the location. Edison, in fact, was so high on the potential of cement that he envisioned entire communities of concrete houses built cheaply for working class families. His company and Vulcanite were the two major cement manufacturers in New Jersey.

The big cement slab of Alpha is anchored in the early days of the worker safety movement. Starting in 1912 and well before the enactment of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Portland Cement Manufacturing Association began tracking on-the-job accidents and fatalities within its members' plants. This led to the creation of programs to encourage worker safety, and eventually to the establishment of an industry award for the plant with the best record in a given year.

For the first several years of the program, winning plants received a trophy to be held until the next awardee was announced, but presumably this wasn't enough to publicly represent the industry's commitment. Something bigger, more permanent could be placed outside the plant gate to remind workers of their achievement and prompt them to keep the safety culture going. The association held a competition for the design of a larger, more permanent and more public monument to be displayed by plants that operated accident-free for a full year. Fittingly, it was to be cast in concrete, with room to recognize subsequent achievements.

The winning design was created by a group of students from the Art Institute of Chicago, with guidance from noted sculptor Albin Polasek. The character on the right is meant to represent Athena, goddess of wisdom, with a lamp to illuminate the path forward for the male figure personifying safety.

The first such monument was awarded in 1924, with the last presented sometime in the 1980s when it was deemed too expensive to hand out seven-foot tall concrete slabs on an annual basis. Google search reveals dozens of nearly identical monuments all around the country, in many places abandoned with the shells of the factories whose employees earned them. The Portland Cement Association still recognizes excellence in safety, but with a much smaller token of esteem.

The Vulcanite company opened in 1894 and appears to have ceased operation in 1941, leaving its monument behind. This would be consistent with the fate of the Edison Portland Cement Company, which closed in 1937 and was dismantled in 1942, a victim of resource shortage. The area's more accessible limestone deposits were being rapidly depleted, leaving only underground deposits that would require expensive shaft mining to extract.

Today, New Jersey has no cement manufacturers, but the work of countless plant workers is memorialized in the durability of the structures cast from their product... and the trophy that stands as testament to their commitment to safety.

Where Edison concentrated: iron ore processing at Ogdensburg

A little over a year ago, we made a trip out to Thomas Edison's concrete mile on Route 57 in Stewartsville/New Village, the site of his famed Portland cement factory. What I didn't mention in that account was the earlier use of the equipment that ground stone into fine enough particles to make a durable concrete.

You see, the Wizard of Menlo Park didn't originally set out to make concrete. He was looking to capitalize on the high iron content of the northwestern reaches of New Jersey, to supply concentrated iron ore bricks manufactured from the raw material of Sussex Mountain. And to do it, he built the first Edison, New Jersey: a veritable city of workers and innovative rock crushing machinery that used magnetic force to separate iron from pulverized stone. While mines in western Morris County and beyond were starting to peter out of useful material, he somehow thought that his experience would be different. No matter what, you've got to give the guy credit for optimism.

Finding the Edison mining property wasn't all that easy for me -- this is a trip I took before Ivan and I met, so I didn't have the benefit of his knowledge of the area. After some internet research, I discovered that my target was just off Sussex County Road 620 in Ogdensburg. More specifically, it's on Edison Road. For some reason, the Garmin people hadn't included 620 on their GPS maps, so I was left to do a little automobile bushwacking once I got into the Sussex area.

I arrived to find a stone and brass marker erected by Sussex County not too long ago, and a sign with topographic mapping of several trails that ramble through the woods. Noticing a New Jersey Audubon logo on the topo sign, I realized that I'd come upon one of the organization's unstaffed areas, and that if I'd bothered to look at my Audubon trails guide, I'd have known exactly where to go.

If you check the area out for yourself, be sure to stop at the county marker and check out the photos embedded in it. They show an environment that differs substantially from the woods and open fields currently on the property. More than 500 men and several huge pieces of processing machinery were working furiously during Edison's time there, and there's little to show for it now. Yes, as you walk around, you'll find the remnants of rustic looking stone walls, and a fair number of steel reinforcing rods poking up from the ground, but besides that, there's little to indicate the industry that existed there from 1891 to 1900. Still, though, random rocks on the ground show the telltale reddish-brown shade of oxidized iron. And fittingly, the area is now traversed by a set of high-voltage transmission lines.

Edison spent much of his time at Ogdensburg during the eleven years his iron ore business operated, ultimately spending about $2 million of his personal wealth on the unsuccessful venture. Characteristically unaffected by the cost of yet another experiment that didn't work out, he said, "Well, it's all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!"

Where does the cement come in? Like any great inventor and entrepreneur, Edison studied the failed venture to determine lessons learned. He noted that the crushing machinery was especially good at manufacturing finely-ground material that could be used in high-quality cement. The machinery was moved about 45 miles southwest to New Village, and in 1903, a new business was born: Edison Portland Cement. From roads and houses to Yankee Stadium, this durable material showed up all over the place as Edison strived to find markets for the product. Once again, he'd managed to make some pretty tasty lemonade from the lemons he'd been served.

Solid as a rock

The Phillipsburg jaunt deserves a bit more discussion on several fronts, but given that today is Thomas Edison’s birthday, we’ll talk a bit about his link to the area. Oddly enough, it’s because of Edison that we found the Barber School.

You see, among Edison’s 1093 patents are a few related to a proprietary formulation of Portland cement, and the great inventor actually built a cement factory in New Village, New Jersey, just a few miles from P’burg. Originally the machinery had been used in his failed iron ore mining enterprise farther north in Ogdensburg; it proved ideal in the manufacture of cement.

The cement venture wasn’t exactly profitable until the company received a massive order for the construction of the original Yankee Stadium in the early 1920’s. Until then, Edison continually thought of new uses for the product, a few of which are still extant in the Phillipsburg area.

The first is the Concrete Mile, a stretch of NJ Route 57 in Stewartsville. Built in 1912, this was an experiment to see if Portland cement would hold up as a road surface. Indeed it does; this stretch has done quite well, though it’s occasionally patched by crews using more cement.

The second is the concrete house. Few realize it, but Edison had a vision of creating affordable housing well before people like William Levitt. It was simple: erect a pre-fabricated mold that could include all of the outdoor and indoor walls, floors, ceilings and major fixtures. With one pour, fill the mold with Edison Portland cement, and within eight hours, the mold could be taken down and moved to a nearby location to rebuild and pour another house. He planned to sell the molds to developers at cost, and sell them the cement at a profit. The houses were expected to sell for a modest $1200.

Ultimately, Edison didn’t go into concrete houses big time, but others did, including a man named Charles Ingersoll, who built a small enclave of them in Union, NJ and Phillipsburg. Having grown up in Union, I knew that the houses there are close to Route 22 on Ingersoll Terrace, so when I saw an Ingersoll Avenue off of Route 22 in Phillipsburg, I had a good feeling that a historic site was not too far off.

Unfortunately, we found no concrete houses on that street or nearby. All we found was the Barber School and, well, a street that had a name from my family history. Just goes to show, you’ve gotta be open to possibility. Sometimes when you look for one thing, you find another.