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.

Pranked by the Wizard of Menlo Park

With Ivan away on a multi-day, out-of-state bird chase (it's migration season, after all), I was left to my own devices for Hidden New Jersey travels this past weekend. I decided to get on the Parkway and see where serendipity led me.

How'd you like to change this bulb?

The sign for the Route 27 exit led me to wonder how the renovation of the Edison memorial and museum in Menlo Park is doing. When I last looked, the website claimed the museum, at least, would be open this fall. It's worth a quick look, right? I got off the highway and made my way to Christie Street, site of TAE's first real lab, where the incandescent bulb was perfected.

Nope, the museum isn't open yet, and the building is virtually empty, so I guess it will be several weeks, at least, before they cut the ribbon. The memorial tower, cast from 1200 barrels of Edison Portland Cement, is still surrounded by a chain link fence and appears not to have much repair work done to it. No truth to the rumor, though, that the big bulb up top is being replaced with a compact fluorescent model.

What's an Edisonian explorer to do? Hmm... across the street there's a marker with lots of information on the electric railway that was tested there, but reading that only takes a few minutes. There's always the Edison Information Trail, leading into the woods behind the museum. I'd ignored it on earlier visits, and the explanatory posting was missing, but there was a big sign over the entrance. Apparently it was a youngster's Eagle Scout project. It's worth a shot, and I'll get a nice nature stroll in at the same time. Good enough.

I tromped into the woods, expecting to find little plaques or something along the way. No. I did find a yellow disk emblazoned with a light bulb, nailed to a tree. A marker, perhaps? Good enough... I'll keep going. The trail seemed obvious enough. But still, I wasn't seeing any of the data that one would assume would come on an information trail.

Abandon all hope. There is no information here.

Then I came to a spot where there was no undergrowth. The trail disappeared until I saw the start of a path across the open area. I expected to loop back, but I ended up at a ballfield that, from the road sounds, was probably separated from Route 27 by a barrier of trees. Okay, I guess I made a wrong turn somewhere.

Backtracking shouldn't have been that difficult. The wooded tract can't be any more than 10 acres, and there are houses nearby. How hard could it be?

Well, plenty hard. There were, of course, no markers, and finding the other end of the trail on that big bare spot wasn't as easy going as it was coming. I made several wrong turns and ended up bushwacking through some underbrush. Joking to myself, I figured I didn't have to worry about ticks because there were no deer around. And then, as if on cue, I saw two deer. Great.

I was close enough to some backyards that I could have taken them as an escape route, but I didn't want to deal with the embarrassment (or the police, if the homeowners were peeved). Instead, I pulled out my cell phone GPS and got a sense of where I was on the property. Fortunately the maps accurately showed where the museum and parking area are, and I was able to find my way back to the established trail after a few minutes.

No harm, no foul, but I have to admit I'm a little annoyed with the Boy Scouts, specifically the Eagle Scout program. This project was well thought out, and if this Flickr stream is any indication, it came out very nicely, but unlike others I've seen, it wasn't kept up. I guess I should have known better -- caveat emptor and all that.

Or maybe it was all planned ... like one of Edison's notorious practical jokes.

See a new side of Thomas Edison on June 4

Mark your calendars: June 4 is Edison Day! What's that, you ask? Thomas Edison National Historical Park opens the gates for a full day of special events and exploration, all totally free of charge. I'll be there along with a host of other volunteers, helping the staff share the story of the world's most prolific inventor.

Come on out and check on Edison's desk!

If you grew up in New Jersey, you no doubt visited the site on a grade school field trip, seeing Edison's library and the heavy machine shop where his muckers put together prototypes and the machines that were needed to manufacture the successful inventions. Now you can see and explore all three floors of the invention factory, including the world's first audio recording studio and the place where the motion picture camera was invented.

Besides the usual exhibits, Edison Day is a great chance to check out plenty of special events and presentations:

• The heavy machine shop will be running periodically during the day, giving visitors a rare opportunity to see and hear what it was really like to work there during Edison's time. For as many times as I've been there, I've never seen them run, so I'm especially looking forward to that part of the day.
• Musicians will be on hand to be record on wax cylinder, always a popular event at the park. It's pretty cool to listen to a contemporary performance and then hear it played back from the cylinder, sounding like something recorded during the early days of the 20th century.
• The Edison archives will be displaying documents that trace what Edison and his team were up to in 1911 ... 100 years ago!
• Glenmont, Edison's 13-acre estate just a mile or two from the labs, will be open for guided house tours, with the garage and greenhouse open, too. If you're interested in concrete buildings, you'll be interested to know that both the garage and potting shed represent Edison's experiments in casting cement structures.
• An exhibit in the home's conservatory will track the many famous and obscure visitors who cross the threshold of the Queen Anne-style mansion. 
• If you've ever wondered what might be in the basement of the house, come check out the home's new geothermal climate control system. It's a technology that Edison no doubt would have found totally fascinating. 

Finishing up the day, Glenmont will also host an evening ragtime concert with the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra at 6 p.m.

There's even more stuff on tap...stop on by and check it out!

Visiting Phillipsburg's concrete houses

You might recall that earlier this year, we blindly stumbled around Phillipsburg in the futile effort to find an enclave of concrete houses built for Ingersoll-Rand by Charles Ingersoll (no relation). Never let it be said that I don't eventually find what I'm looking for, even if it takes a compass, pickaxe and night-vision goggles.

The light blue house just behind the pole
is probably closest to the original look of these homes.

Okay, so I got lucky. Not long after that initial visit, I found a chat board discussing the P'burg houses and left a message asking if anyone could provide an address. About 10 days ago, someone responded, telling me that she'd found the enclave near Gino's Market on Congress Avenue. Taking a look at a satellite photo of the neighborhood and comparing it against a street map I'd found in an old book about the houses, I determined that the Gino's neighborhood and the Ingersoll enclave were one and the same. Thus, after our Water Gap excursion on Sunday, Ivan and I found ourselves driving back roads to get to Phillipsburg's Valley View section.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much. Last year I'd attended a National Park Service presentation on Edison's concrete houses, and the P'burg houses were represented by a dingy photo of a depressing house that appeared to be wrapped in tar paper. What we found when we got there was pretty cheerful by comparison. The Valley View folks have commemorated the Edison connection in a nearby park, and the area is pretty nicely landscaped, overall. While the houses are fitted cheek-on-jowl in 0.1 acre lots, they've been customized by their owners over the years, sporting a variety of colors, brickfaces and even vinyl siding. I have to admit I liked the original stucco the best, but I totally understand the desire to individualize what used to be totally uniform buildings lining both sides of three or four streets. Along the way we saw a larger though still compact commercial building that, no doubt, was originally built to be a community center.

We were fortunate to be invited into one of the houses to take a look around, and true to the billing, these are sturdy structures. They're also very small. As soon as you walk into the door, you're basically in the living room, with a staircase to one side and a shallow sitting room to the other. Immediately behind the living room is a shallow kitchen, and to the other side is an elevated porch that leads to the backyard.

Ducking as not to hit our heads on the ceiling, we climbed the stairs to the second floor to find two small bedrooms just large enough to accommodate a queen-size bed. There's also a shallow front room that maybe could accommodate a small home office. In brief, you'd definitely have to take careful measurements of any furniture you'd buy for the second floor. That, or plan on getting it flat shipped from Ikea, build it in the room you'd use it in, and be prepared to break it apart when you move.

When Edison first envisioned the concrete house, he saw it as a replacement for slum dwellings, an inexpensive alternative that the average worker could buy for just $1,200 (as any real estate agent would tell you, comparing your house with a slum isn't likely to attract many buyers). Ingersoll-Rand saw them as efficiently-constructed housing for laborers working at its nearby factory. Nowadays, I'd venture that they're considered starter housing for young marrieds or singles who want to build equity or would rather have detached housing than a condo. Even as an Edison geek, I'd shy away from the opportunity, though. Just too claustrophobic.


Want to learn more about Edison's many experiments? Check our our stories on his developments in iron ore production, the first town to be fully electrified, his Menlo Park electric railroad, and his West Orange invention factory. You can also learn why his 29 room mansion was a real steal.

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.