Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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(YDR) It was with mixed emotions that Jeff Hines discussed the future of the York Factory Whistle Concert.
On one hand, the event's chairman wanted to assure the public that the Christmas tradition - one held at New York Wire's East Market Street plant for the last 57 years - will continue. On the other hand, he wanted to show compassion for the employees at the plant.
All 170 of them are scheduled to lose their jobs by the year's end as the facility closes its doors, said Michael Smeltzer, executive director of the Manufacturers' Association of Southcentral Pennsylvania. Continued
(Wikipedia) Tomáš Jan Baťa, CC (September 17, 1914 –
September 1, 2008), also known as Tomas Bata Jr. and Tomáš Baťa ml. and
"Shoemaker to the World", ran the Bata Shoe Company from the 1940s until the
'80s.
Baťa was born in the Czech city of Prague, in what is now the Czech
Republic, the son of Czech industrialist Tomáš Baťa. As a boy he apprenticed
under his father, Tomáš Sr., who began the T. & A. Bata Shoe company in 1894
in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. His father, however, was killed in a plane crash when
Tomáš was only 17, in 1932. Continued
(YDR) It took several tries, but a portion of Foust distillery's 125-foot-tall smokestack - built in the 1940s but never used - was brought down Tuesday in Springfield Township.
Sometimes, it seems, history doesn't want to be forgotten.
Phil Robinson, one of the partners who owns the land where remnants of the distillery remain, deployed a crew manning a crane and another piece of heavy equipment.
The red-brick smokestack had been struck by lightning twice earlier this month, rendering a fissure that runs from its top to bottom
Continued
(Jacques Kelly) The landmark Eastern Avenue industrial building fooled me. I assumed it was abandoned, and I was wrong. The former Crown Cork and Seal complex in Greektown is a busy workplace for cabinetmakers, musicians, artists and a craft brewer. It's just that nobody puts up a sign on this curiously anonymous post-industrial survivor. The place where food- and beverage-packaging machines once were made remains a bustling village. Continued
(LoC) On February 28, 1827, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad became the first U.S. railway chartered for the commercial transportation of freight and passengers. Investors hoped that a railroad would allow Baltimore, the second largest U.S. city at that time, to successfully compete with New York for western trade. New Yorkers were profiting from easy access to the Midwest via the Erie Canal.
Construction began at Baltimore harbor on July 4, 1828. Local dignitary Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, laid the first stone.
The initial line of track, a thirteen-mile stretch to Ellicott's Mills (now Ellicott City), Maryland, opened in 1830. The Tom Thumb, a steam engine designed by Peter Cooper, negotiated the route well enough to convince skeptics that steam traction worked along steep, winding grades. Continued
Photo: MDRails
(North County News) Gunpowder Falls State Park ranger Robert Bailey will lead a Mill Hike on Feb. 25 from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Winter is the best time of year to see the ruins of mills that once operated along the Gunpowder Falls. The hike begins at the Paper Mill Road parking lot of the Torrey C. Brown Rail Trail. Participants will visit the site of Ashland Furnace, an anthracite-fired furnace active in the mid-19th century, as well as other buildings from that same time period. Continued
(NYTimes) In late December 1861 Abraham Lincoln issued a directive that, had it been vigorously pursued, might have brought the Civil War to a rapid end: An order, via Gen. James Ripley, the Army’s ordnance chief, for 10,000 Spencer repeating rifles.
Because Ripley resisted the order for months and did nothing to help put the rifles into volume production, initial deliveries didn’t start until about a year and a half after Lincoln first tested the rifle.
Consequently, Union soldiers had to fight with less efficient weapons, handicapping them and greatly lengthening the bloody conflict. Continued
Photo: 1860 Civil War Henry Rifle No. 4771 by Hmaag, some rights reserved.
(YDR) You've strutted between the yellow lines, looking sharp in your plastic safety goggles and electronic ear piece.
They know your name at the Harley tour center. Your free pin collection spans the consecutive years you've visited the Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer's Springettsbury Township operations.
You think you've seen all there is to see at the birthplace of the company's Trike, Tour and Softail lines.
But it's only the beginning.
Next month, a new Harley-Davidson attraction -- the "Steel Toe Tour" -- will raise the bar, offering each guest an inside look at what goes on behind closed doors at the manufacturing plant. Continued
Photo: American Red Cross in Great Britain. One unit of the famous "Flying Squadron" priding themselves on being able to get under way within three minutes of the time a call is received. American Red Cross., ca. 1918 (National Archives)
(York Dispatch) ... Pennsylvania, birthplace of the petroleum industry thanks to Col. Edwin Drake's fortuitious 1859 well near Titusville, has 19,000-plus oil wells in production. Those shallow wells plugged nearly 4 million barrels of crude oil into the marketplace last year.
In sharp contrast to deeper oil wells in the Oklahoma and Texas fields, Pennsylvania's wells are classified as stripper wells, or shallow wells that are marginal producers and eke out 10 barrels of oil or less a day. The average stripper well in Pennsylvania yields less than half a barrel (0.43) of oil a day, or about 18 gallons of crude oil.
Still, at today's going rate of nearly $100 a 42-gallon barrel, there's money to be made in conventional oil production that typically features a mom-and-pop operation going back two or three generations.
The enterprise, though, has been turned topsy-turvey because of the deep shale gas industry that has drawn in global, mega-energy companies intent on tapping hugely prolific natural gas tucked inside rock strata ten-times deeper than Pennsylvania's conventional oil sands. Continued
(Wikipedia) On January 4, 1847, Captain Samuel Walker and the Texas Rangers, who had acquired some of the first Colt revolvers produced during the Seminole War, saw the holster revolver and ordered 1,000 of these revolvers for use in the Mexican-American War. The large order allowed Colt to re-establish his firearm business. As he no longer owned a firearm factory, or even had a model of a firearm ready for sale, Colt hired Eli Whitney Blake, who was established in the arms business, to make his guns. Colt and Captain Walker drew upon the prototype Colt had built with some improvements from Walker. From this new design, Whitney produced the first thousand-piece order known as the Colt Walker. The company then received an order for a thousand more; Colt took a share of the profits at $10 per pistol for both orders.
With the money he made from the sales of the Walkers and a loan from his cousin, Elisha Colt, a banker, Colt bought the machinery and tooling from Whitney to build his own factory: Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company factory at Hartford. Continued
York, PA (YDR) In previous years, people showing up just as Christmas broke used to see a big cloud of steam rising from the roof of the New York Wire Company to accompany the annual Factory Whistle Concert in York.
There's no longer a cloud of steam anymore. But the whistle is just as loud, and the tradition that dates to 1925 remains otherwise unchanged. Continued
(LoC) On December 20, 1790, a mill, with water-powered machinery for spinning, roving, and carding cotton, began operating on the banks of the Blackstone River in Pawtuket, Rhode Island. Based on designs of the English inventor Richard Arkwright, the mill was built by Samuel Slater, a recent English immigrant who had apprenticed with Arkwright's partner, Jebediah Strutt.
Slater had departed Britain in defiance of the British law against the emigration of textile workers (which would result in the loss of their mechanical skills and technical knowledge) and left for America to seek his fortune. Considered a central figure in the birth of the American textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island. Continued
(Aegis) ... She said the quarry dates back to the 1840s, when speculators from Lancaster County started moving west to York County.
Slate's heyday was around the early 1900s and it was primarily used as roofing material, until the Industrial Revolution produced synthetic shingles that were cheaper, she said.
The quarry's manpower largely left during World War I, she said.
Robinson noted the site still contains slate, and remaining piles of it were used for various purposes. In the 1950s, the slate was taken for highway paving material.
Hard facts about Funkhouser Quarry's operating history are hard to come by. Continued
MALVERN, Pa. (AP) The Irish immigrants building a stretch of railroad near Philadelphia in 1832 had been in the U.S. only a few weeks when they died — ostensibly of cholera — and were unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave. Their families never knew what happened to them.
Nearly 180 years later, local researchers say they have a clearer picture of the men's fate. Continued
(NYTimes) Its Impalas dropped us off at school. Its pickup trucks hauled our produce on the farm. Its Corvette sustained our sports car fantasies through the boredom of high school algebra class. Earlier than almost any other automotive brand, Chevy created a palette of vehicles that ranged from the small and thrifty to the sleek and sporty to the large and smartly trimmed. Continued
(York Daily Record) As a shiny orange automated guided cart rolled past a tour group on the Harley-Davidson Motor Co. factory floor, Amy Warner flashed a big smile.
"I told you that you get really close," the manager of factory tours said.
The up-close experience impressed Robert Seneker of West York. "It's amazing that it's open to the public," he said.
Seneker was among the 400 guests who experienced the factory tour and browsed the Vaughn L. Beals Tour Center at the plant in Springettsbury Township on its opening day. For the first time, visitors get to see the Harley production process from frame to "final dress." Continued
