Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire RopeMumford, John Kimberly
History
Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire Rope
Mumford, John Kimberly
John A. Roebling's Sons Company; Wire; Wire rope
In both the city plants, as business grew, building followed building.
A compact and populous section had grown up at Trenton. More buildings
could not be crowded into the original ground space. More land was
needed, and as usual in such cases, men with land to sell all along to
the south of the Upper Works, saw the company's need and had a brain
storm about what the footage was worth.
The Roeblings tried a little farther down stream. But down stream
didn't mean down price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles down
the river was a little old station called Kinkora, where the real
estate infection had not appeared. There was land well up above high
water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very cheap down there, as
compared with Trenton city water rates, to a concern that used as much
water as all the rest of the city put together.
[Sidenote: A LIKELY PLACE FOR A WIRE MILL]
It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a dozen strangers had
struck Kinkora on the same evening the town would have had trouble to
find beds for them all. It meant twenty miles rail travel a day for the
workmen to live in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. Charles
G. Roebling was then alive. The new site and the planning and building
of the town were his charge. But, again, they didn't go looking for any
welfare engineers. The whole job of planning plant and town alike was
done in the long engineering room of the Roebling offices. At first
they called the plant the Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the
mills were a little below the station, and when the new venture was
well under way, and the machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and
perhaps a hundred brick houses of various types had been erected, the
place had to have a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad said
it was Roebling, and stamped the tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing
off. It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. Between it
and Roebling there are a mile or so of distance and a whole century of
time.
The name "Kinkora" harks back to the year 1000, when King "Brian Boru"
of Ireland lost his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace was
named "Kinkora." In 1836 an ambitious Irishman named Rockefeller (not
John D.) conceived the idea of an air line railroad from this spot
where Roebling now stands to Atlantic City. In fond remembrance of
Erin's Isle he named the terminus on the Delaware "Kinkora."
The enterprise itself died an early death.
The Roebling Company has more than 200 acres of land in the new
settlement, enough, in all conscience, to accommodate as big a business
as almost anyone would want to do, and houses to shelter all its
workmen. If the company should ever find it good business to shake the
dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether it certainly has a place to
go.
[Sidenote: NO TIME TO LET THE GRASS GROW]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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