A Company Town and Museum are Capturing Industrial History

By Wendy Greenberg | Images courtesy of the Roebling Museum

It’s 4 o’clock. The factory whistle sounds, and several hundred men trudge up the hill from the steel mill in Roebling to their row homes nearby.

Many of them Eastern European immigrants, they shop at the general store, play on athletic teams like the Blue Centers football team, and do their banking and mail their letters a few blocks from their homes.

Some 750 houses were built near the John A. Roebling’s Sons Company steel and wire mill in the early 20th century, a decision by management to keep the workers close by instead of risking lateness from a poorly negotiated trolley trip from Trenton. Those in the brick row homes on Second and Railroad avenues got the mill noises, not to mention soot and dust. Those in administrative jobs lived closer to the Delaware River in more spacious homes.

Such was life in a company town.

The steel mill is gone now, but the town remains. Some 3,500 people live there today, many descendants of the mill workers.

The Mill Gatehouse and now, Roebling Museum.

Those mill workers were the heart of the town, and it is with that appreciation that the Roebling Museum, located in the mill’s former gatehouse, is focusing on the workers and their day-to-day lives. Executive Director Lynne Calamia has met with many of the workers’ relatives, who have discovered artifacts in their basements that they have brought to the museum.

“I sit on a lot of couches and look at a lot of photo albums with other people’s grandmas,” says Calamia, who has a master’s degree and Ph.D. in American Studies and studied historic preservation and labor history. “The workers don’t have biographies, so, to find the information, we have to dig deeper and be creative in our research.”

To do this, she has gone beyond the museum walls. “The building that houses the museum used to be an administration building and the gate to the steel and wire mill,” she says. “Stories about the mill and its work find a natural home there, in my opinion.”

But, she adds, “stories about life in the company town are best told on the streets of the company town through our walking tours or audio tours, and in the house at 101 Second Avenue.”

The museum purchased this corner house, and Calamia has plans to restore it to show how company town life was for the lowest paid laborers, who lived closest to the plant. The New Jersey Historic Trust is funding the restoration of the outside of the building — bringing the porch and bricks back to their original appearance.

“The rowhouse was very important to me,” Calamia says. “Museums are not usually focused on the workers, but Roebling is special. Most people when they hear Roebling think bridges, but I want visitors to understand what it was like after a 10-hour shift at the mill.”

“These stories belong in the house,” adds Calamia, who intends to incorporate the sounds of the mill.

Calamia wants visitors “to think about what it was like to come home after a shift at the mill and sit down at the kitchen table for a meal with your family with the sounds of the loud mill outside of your windows. Or to think about how hard it would be to handwash the work clothes of a steel worker in 1920.”

The house will open in 2028, and the staff is doing research and paging through Sears, Roebuck, and Co. catalogs of the time to find the appropriate furniture.

Museum board member Martha Moore, who happens to be a direct descendant of John Roebling’s son Ferdinand (his daughter was her great-grandmother), is enthusiastic about the museum’s direction.

“I’ve been involved with museum since it started and to me, it has always been a museum about the town and the workers as well as about bridges and engineering achievements,” says Moore.

The museum, she says, “came from a community of people who worked at the mill. It is their history as much as that of the family who built the company. They came to Roebling to make a life for themselves. I got interested in the town because of how it was designed, but the story of who worked there lends a richness to the whole place.”

Moore envisions the whole town as a museum, hoping for more expansion. For example, two riverside buildings housing pre-stretcher equipment used on the George Washington Bridge are among the last remaining industrial structures from the steel mill.

The museum combines two things that made industrialization possible: immigration and technical innovation, and it accommodates both, she adds.

A “Serious Town”

That the town outlasted the mill may be a surprise to some, but it was predicted in a New York Herald article dated April 22, 1906, which stated, “The town promises to endure as a monument to their (the Roeblings) name far beyond the lifetime of Trenton’s great industry.”

The unbylined article is noted in The Roebling Legacy, a book by Princeton preservationist and historian Clifford W. Zink, who wrote and directed a film for the museum with the late Richard Blofson of Princeton that introduces visitors to the history of the Roebling family, the former mill, and the town.

John A. Roebling was born in Mühlhausen, Germany, in 1806 and studied architecture, engineering, bridge construction, hydraulics, and foundation construction before he moved to Saxonburg, Pa. There, he developed a seven-strand wire rope and built his first suspension bridge in Pittsburgh, Pa. Moving his company to Trenton, he built a bridge over the Niagara River, and his sons continued with the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and the George Washington Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Roebling died in 1869 during construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and his son, Washington, took over. When Washington became disabled from decompression sickness, his wife, Emily, stepped up to help finish the bridge.

Son Charles, born in 1849, is credited with founding the town of Roebling (originally called Kinkora) to accommodate the growing John A. Roebling’s Sons Company and the construction and operation of seven large wire mills, a steel plant of 12 furnaces, and other manufacturing plants. His brother Ferdinand was treasurer and general manager of the company, which manufactured wire rope used for oil drilling, elevators, logging, construction equipment, mining, tramways, ski lifts, and, most famously, suspension bridges. Their electrical wire and cable division contributed material used in telephones, televisions, washers, and refrigerators.

Roebling started in 1904, when the Roeblings decided to build a mill to make their own steel for the wire rope. They looked into the available land next to the existing Trenton plant, but Charles decided to purchase a 115-acre peach and potato farm near the railway station for $17,000, according to a write-up on florence-nj.gov. Charles and Ferdinand then spent $4 million to build their steel mill, wire rope plant, and the town of Roebling for its workers.

“The steel mill needed a few thousand workers,” says Zink. “They could have taken the trolley from Trenton, but the Roeblings saw that immigrants new to the country might find the commute challenging and come in late.”

“The Roeblings built a really serious town,” Zink continues. “In those days a lot of housing was wooden but the Roeblings built in brick, and lined the streets with London plane trees, which says a lot about them personally.”

Zink called it an “era of civic capitalism. What that means is that people that owned the plants lived in or near the towns. The owners would build well because it reflected on who they were and how they valued their community.”

Roebling echoes other company towns, like Krupp in Essen, German; Sparrow’s Point, Md., site of a Bethlehem Steel plant; and Pullman in Chicago, built by George Pullman in the 1880s for employees of his Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman thought his quality housing and town amenities would keep his workers satisfied, but a strike in 1894 shattered that concept.

“The Roeblings in contrast were not trying create a workers utopia,” says Zink. “As Charles Roebling said, ‘We have no ideas for social engineering, we’re just building good houses for our workers.’”

Postcard of the Roebling Steel and Wire Mill expanse.

Found Artifacts

The museum, which was founded in 2010 and is owned by Florence Township, does not shortchange the accomplishments of the Roebling family but, under Calamia, the focus includes the workers themselves.

One discovery that Calamia calls “an amazing time capsule all on its own,” is the collection of employee ID cards saved by resident Louis Borbi.

Borbi salvaged some 13,000 employee ID cards with information such as height, weight, country of origin, and notes on the employee’s working habits. Borbi, whose grandfather, father, uncles, and brother worked at the mill, as he did during summers, chronicled life among the workers in his book, Roebling Company Town: Steel, Immigrants, Moonshine and Crap Tables 1905-1947.

After graduating from the Roebling Grammar School, Florence Township Memorial High School, and the University of Maryland, where he majored in history, Borbi taught in the Roebling Public School for 29 years and was one of the founders of the Roebling Historical Society.

“Records like this don’t usually survive, and these almost didn’t survive,” says Calamia. “When the mill closed in 1974, they were left behind. Since they cover the years of 1919-1945, they were considered inactive.”

Visitors to the museum often ask if there is information about their specific ancestors who worked at the mill, and the cards provide that service. They were digitized through a grant from the American Historical Association and the New Jersey Historical Commission and will be cataloged.

Another significant discovery was a gold charm bracelet. Decades ago, says Calamia, a local mother, Mary Agnes, saved the service pins her husband and five sons earned over their lifetimes working for the Roebling company, and had them made into a charm bracelet. “It tells the story of years of hard work, pride, and one family’s connection to the mill,” Calamia says,

Other finds include a wooden spoon and washboard shown in the museum. Artifacts that are newly discovered and not yet in the museum might be featured on a Zoom series on works in progress.

“The Roebling family gave a lot of people their first job — secure, reliable jobs,” says Calamia. “Like any community, it was complicated. There are pros and cons to living in a company town.”

She explains that when options were presented to immigrants and Black workers in the early 1900s, a steady paycheck and a brick house with indoor plumbing were something many had not experienced.

“At the same time, they had dangerous jobs with long shifts, a noisy steel mill across from their houses, and industrial pollution all around them,” Calamia says. “That might have been worth it, compared to the other options available at the time in industrial America.”

The General Store building.

The Town and the Aftermath

And Roebling was where they would settle, many after a grueling journey from another country, or from the American South. A general store opened for business on June 3, 1906, according to the Florence Township website. “Here they sold everything from pork chops to pianos. This was really one of the first indoor malls in the United States,” it states.

On January 2, 1930, the Roeblings turned the grocery and meat departments over to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (known as A & P), and in 1947 it was sold to a corporation, but continued to operate until 1959 when newer shopping malls in the area forced its closing. The building still stands, and houses a deli and pizza shop.

The town boasted a bakery, barber shop, a doctor, a dentist, a firehouse, an infirmary, a recreations center (four bowling lanes, six pool tables, and two shuffleboard tables), and, in 1920, a bank.

Roebling School opened in 1914, and an auditorium — one of the first air-conditioned buildings in the U.S. — opened at 7th and Main in 1915. It was a site for vaudeville shows, boxing matches, silent movies, and later sound movies. Roebling Ball Park opened in the 1920s with seating for 1,200 fans.

On December 31, 1952, notes Zink, the Roeblings sold their factories to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) of Pueblo, Colo. With the Middle East Oil Embargo of 1873, the spike in the price of oil and gas made the old Roebling factories noncompetitive and CF&I shut them down. When steel production moved overseas, the entire business closed in 1973, says Zink.

The Environmental Protection Agency designated the former Roebling steel and wire plant a Superfund site in 1983, and the factory buildings were demolished except for the main gatehouse, which was rehabilitated for the museum.

The Roeblings sold the houses to the workers starting in 1947.

“When the company owned the houses, it had leverage over the employees — the leases specified that they could be evicted with one week’s notice,” says Zink. “With the union, there was no reason to own all the houses.”

Although an investor wanted to buy the whole town, according to Zink, Roebling turned him down and gave preference to those who lived there. Veterans also had preference, and some workers who had saved enough money moved up to the larger houses.

These days, Calamia is spreading the word about one of the few remaining steel towns in the country, and the museum that showcases both its founders and its workers. She sees the property as four museums in one: the mill yard and equipment, which loom like monumental sculpture; the museum itself; the town; and the Second Avenue row house.

And it should interest more than the workers’ descendants.

“For the story we are telling,” she says, “one does not need a direct connection. Almost all of us have relatives who came to the U.S. from other countries who were working to build a better life. That’s the story we’re telling.”

The Roebling Museum is open March through December, Thursday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., except for major holidays. In January and February, it is open by appointment for groups and researchers.

It also offers Saturday walking tours, bike tours, and virtual programs. For more information, including admission, visit roeblingmuseum.org or call 609.499.7200.