Valley Girl Views: Reminiscences of Milton by J.P. Kohler

In the 1920's, Attorney James Pollock Kohler wrote a series of letters about his early years as a boy in Milton Pa. The Miltonian published them under the heading "Reminiscences of Milton by J.P; Kohler".

This letter, published on August 25 1921 discusses some of the early industries in Milton, including

The Trego and Lawson-Mervine Foundries, Joseph Sassmans Machine Shopm Baker & Kemmerer Grist Mills, The Tannery, & The Canal Boat Yards

INDUSTRIES, PART TWO

While Milton was not immediately adjacent to either coal or iron mines it had a fair share of business in both lines, because of the rich farming district, which surrounded it on all sides. The plows, the harrows, the wagons and buggies, which the farmers were obliged to use, were made in Milton. The horses were brought in to be shod and the implements to be repaired. Outside of the few blacksmith shops for horseshoeing and wagon ironing, the iron industry was located on Arch street, between Market street and the saw mill below Church Lane.

This map, a view of Milton from Red Hill in 1847, from:

https://www.miltonhistory.org/Milton_From_Red_Hill.htm

is labeled with the location of the foundry and some of the other industries mentioned. At the link, you can zoom in and see more of the layout of the town.

The Trego foundry was opposite the grist mill, while the Lawson-Mervine foundry was just above Market street, be-tween the Canal and Arch street. Heavy "pigs" of iron were piled along the canal bank, together with old stoves and other junk in piles ready , for the melting pot within. It was the same at Trego's, though there was not so much of it.

Both of these foundries turned out the several castings used in plows, sled runners for boys, wagon wheels, washers, quoits, griddles and smaller articles needed in machine or construction work. Heavy pieces, like draw-heads and car wheels were cast later at the car works, which seemed to absorb these smaller foundries.

New sled runners and wagon wheels made both of these foundries accessible to the boys, who were permitted to watch the patterns go into the sand boxes and the molten metal fill the space when the patterns were removed.

Cold weather quickly snapped the sled runners then in use, and a wheel could be broken or stolen or lost from the wagons, so that this trade was not to be sneezed at, and the boyish heart palpitated with anxiety lest his new runner would not come out of the sand just right.

The grandfather of your present Burgess made patterns for such foundry work, and it was one of the places where the finer sort of wood working could be watched. He was just overhead ,at one time, of the place where the plow handles were made by Jimmie Longan and others.

The knowledge I gained from watching these foundrymen, came handy while trying a death case in Brooklyn. The man was killed by the fall of a derrick boom on his head while he was unloading Belgian blocks from a scow at a Brooklyn wharf. At the top of the derrick mast was an iron ring with three eyes, to one of which the steel rod supporting the swinging boom was attached by a shackle. This eye gave way, with a load of stone at the end of the boom, and the question of negligence, alleged against the employer, was whether the ring with the eye that broke was made of cast or wrought iron. Upon examination of the break, the grain and appearance brought me back to my iron sled runner days, where the breaks were similar in grain and appearance. I picked up in the cellar of my office building several broken castings, and insisted in court that the ring was not wrought iron, as the defendant claimed, but cast iron, and never intended to carry the load which broke it Out of four days' trial, two days were devoted to expert testimony on the one question of whether the ring was wrought or cast iron, the defendant's expert claim-ing that the hammer marks, when it was made on the anvil, showed that it was wrought. The judge let the jury decide, afterwards remarking to me that he was surprised that I knew so much about iron.. I laughingly replied that in my younger days I had bought cast iron and saw it made in the foundry.

The widow won, but I was never certain that it was cast iron, though my experts swore that such a ring could have been moulded in any first class foundry. I know that Mr. Rhoads could have made the pattern and that it might easily have been moulded in either the Trego or Lawson foundry.

The Mervine Lawson shop, in addition to the foundry, had a machine shop, with lathes, drills and other paraphernalia, for smoothing, grinding and tooling castings, and fitting and assembling iron-made articles. Had Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, been in command of just such a foundry and machine shop, the human race, would have gotten benefits from his inventions a hundred years earlier. Andrew Carnegie, in his "Life of Watt," has given us a very interesting account of Watt's difficulties in getting cylinders, cylinder heads and piston rods for his engine, that the steam, generated in his boiler, would not escape through defects.

Up near the saw mill, in a one story frame building, was a real machine shop owned and conducted by Mr. Joseph Sassaman. It was small, but it was complete, neat, clean and com-pact. It was rumored that his shop could turn out a complete stationary engine, and he looked like a man that seemed able to do it. He never turned a boy away that dropped in to watch the work. He had the reputation also of being a beautiful penman and he looked just as much like a bookkeeper as he did a machinist.

The engine of his shop shone like a freshly scoured dishpan. The shafting, pulleys and belting overhead and his lather and tools showed that the bump of order in his head was unusually prominent. In a larger field, at a later day—for some of the big men get into the world too early—this man might have been a real captain of industry; though perhaps he was just as happy as the "boss" of his shop, as he would have been directing a combination of shops with thousands of underpaid or dissatisfied workers, parts of a single machine, and without hope of ever learning very much of the business—only a "cog," so to speak.

It was always a pleasure to watch the flywheels of the engines in those days and especially the two revolving balls that by centrifugal force regulated the supply of steam, and the feeding of saw dust into the furnace at the saw mill and of shavings at the planing mill.

At the steam grist mill, whose miller was Mr. Baker, one could lie on his stomach and watch the wheat working its way between the upper and nether mill stones, to appear below as snow white flour. The chiseling of these stones when dull was another interesting operation. At the lower grist mill the farmers also came with wheat and went with flour, but it was run by water, like the mill at Kemmerers.

One can go back in imagination to the days when this mill was built on the side of the river before there was a Front street, its power provided by the incline of the bank, a hill that boys coasted down with glee.

The tannery was an industry of no mean importance. Huge heaps of tan bark were piled on both sides of Back street, and, inside the vats were always in use. Piles of salted hides, with their peculiar flavor, came through the vats, on to the scraping benches and later appeared as sole leather. The butchers killed the cattle and the tanner tanned their hides, and the farmers, butchers and banner, all did well. The sons and grandsons of "Sammy" Brown, the tanner, attest the prosperity of that business, when hides came from near by butcher or farmers and no one cared whether they were on or off the free list.

Among the larger industries of a miscellaneous character were the yards that built canal boats. One of these where two boats might be seen under construction at the same time, was below Center street and close to Limestone Run. The other was just above the lock. I think that George W. Strine was proprietor of the former and the Maladys of the latter. These boats were keeled, ribbed, slabbed, calked and painted, very much as ships are in modern yards, and were launched into the canal with flying colors. They were about sixty feet long, eighteen wide and seven deep, with space in the bow for the mules and little cab-ins in the stern used for dormitory and kitchen. The "Mary Jane of Jersey Shore," the "Three Brothers of Lock Haven," "The Monitor, of Milton," and hundreds like them, were freighters that took lumber, grain, lime, bricks, etc., to Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York and came back with heavy hardware, coils of rope, machinery, coal, salt, sugar, molasses, mackerel and other merchandise. Occasionally, a floating dry goods and general store would tie up at Murray's wharf and dispose of stock over its counters, but the day of "packets" had passed.

If my memory has slighted any of the larger industries, it is unintentional, and there were so many smaller industries, also worthy of mention, that I risk in recalling too many of the larger, neglecting some of the smaller. JAMES P. KOHLER,

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