USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Wilkes-Barre > A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania : from its first beginnings to the present time, including chapters of newly-discovered early Wyoming Valley history, together with many biographical sketches and much genealogical material. Volume IV > Part 58
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The plant covers some fourteen acres of land, employs some twelve hundred skilled men when in full production, and the value of its product is close to the $5,000,000 mark per annum.
The removal to Wilkes-Barré of these promising industries naturally called attention to others which had been established in a small way by individual effort in the period between the earlier manufacturing era and that which marked the early 80's. W. B. Bertels had been engaged in the manufacture of tin products in a shop of his own established on West Market street in 1856. Later he was lent encouragement to branch out into wider fields by the more optimistic at- titude of his neighbors. In 1890 the firm was incorporated as W. B. Bertels Son and Company and the products of the firm now enjoy a country-wide market, particularly with reference to their own brand of dinner pails.
Another industry then in its prime was the Perry Organ Company, men- tioned as one of the community's major establishments in the census of 1880. This company was established by J. R. Perry in 1874, and at one time its product had a wide vogue throughout Pennsylvania.
The term "diversity of industries" was one heard much more frequently in the period dominated by the activities of Charles Parrish than it is even today.
In its search for this diversity, Wilkes-Barré capital organized on April 1, 1885, the Wilkes-Barré Lace Manufacturing Company originally capitalized at $30,000. The intent of the company was to supply American markets with Nottingham lace curtains then woven exclusively by English mills. The venture was one of the pioneers in its field in the United States and its original employees were induced to emigrate from England for purposes of the experiment. Start- ing in a small way with two machines in a building erected on a large plot of ground bounded by Courtright avenue and Darling street, the company almost at once entered upon an era of great material prosperity.
The officers and directors of the newly organized company included Henry H. Derr, president, Isaac M. Thomas, secretary-treasurer, L. C. Paine, Charles A. Miner, F. S. Godfrey, E. J. Judd, R. F. Walsh, R. J. Flick and J. C. Atkin, directors. To the persistent efforts of Mr. Atkin is due the credit of establishing this pioneer among the many textile plants which have recently brought the Wyoming valley into prominence as a district which produces more lace, silk and cotton fabrics than any other of the country with the exception of Paterson, New Jersey.
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Mr. Atkin reached Wilkes-Barré from England a total stranger and agreed to invest his entire ineans in the business provided local capital would furnish the balance needed. For a time his appeals fell upon deaf ears but finally a long list of subscribers to the stock in small amounts was secured and the organ- ization of the company effected.
In 1892, Mr. Atkins severed his connection with the original venture and established the Wyoming Valley Lace Company which remodeled the old Hillard mill on Union street and began business on a small scale. His interest in the pioneer company was purchased by representative local men and the business was reorganized with John Welles Hollenback, president; George S. Bennett, vice-president; Henry A. Dunning, secretary and Clarence Whitman of New York, treasurer. This list of officers and a directorate made up of some of the inost representative men of the period was an assurance that what the concern needed in the development of its business would be forthcoming.
This assurance has been generously fulfilled. On September 3, 1885, the capital of the concern was doubled and additions built to the original plant. On February 2, 1887, the capital stock was increased to $100,000. By 1890 the amount of capital invested had grown to $500,000 and again in 1902, when extensive additions were required, the capital stock was increased to $1,000,000.
The company is the only concern of its kind equipped to transform raw cotton through a continuous process into a perfected curtain ready for the market. On a part of its extensive land holdings, the company was likewise a pioneer in building roomy, comfortable and modern homes for many of its employees. These homes possess an architectural beauty not often to be found in buildings of their type and vie in upkeep and surroundings with residences along the most exclusive streets of the city.
A commodious lunch room, fulfilling every sanitary requirement, is maintained by the company for its female employees.
The production of the company has on an average, exceeded 10,000 pairs of lace curtains daily, all of which are marketed through the firm of Clarence Whitman and company whose branch offices are maintained in all large cities of the country. The company gives employment to approximately 1,500 people and its payrolls run well up to the million mark per year.
In more recent years, many of the progressive policies of the company have been established through the efforts of George H. Smith, general manager, who is one of the textile industry's most outstanding figures.
Just as the Wilkes-Barre Lace Company blazed the trail for the introduction of the textile industry into the Wyoming valley, the Hess, Goldsmith Company foresaw opportunities for the profitable employment of available labor in the manufacture of silk products. The first location of this firm was in South Wilkes- Barré on Waller street, where a plant was erected for the needs of the industry in the year 1886.
Requiring additional room for the expansion of a growing business in the manufacture of high-grade silk dress goods of every variety, the firm in 1905 erected the first unit of its present plant in Kingston, to which three additional units have since been added. The company's modern plant on Blackman street in Wilkes-Barré became an added link in the chain of holdings of this pioneer venture in 1921, and in 1925 the purchase of the assets of the Atwood Silk Com- pany of Plymouth added further lines to the production of the concern.
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Attracted by the success of the Hess, Goldsmith Company in more recent years have come to the community more than a score of other manufacturers of silk in its various fabrics. One of the world's largest of these, and most mod- ern in all its appointments, is the Dorranceton Silk Works, formed in 1916 by the merger of the Duplan Silk Mill and the Frigerio Silk Throwing Company, occupying, when additions to the two adjoining plants were built, two-story buildings approximately 200 by 300 feet in dimensions.
It is not the intention of this History to furnish a compendium of manu- facturers of the Wyoming valley. It is rather for the Chamber of Commerce or other trade bodies to compile such statistics as are needed in that direction and to proclaim the merits of the community as a manufacturing center. The historian can be interested in industry only as it affects the characteristics, population or development of a district.
To record the pioneer enterprises and the names of men of energy and foresight responsible for these is unquestionably a duty. To deal with an array of banks, mercantile establishments, manufacturing plants and other details of business ventures which have followed in the wake of these pioneers, is repe- tition, interesting for statistical information but valueless for historical data.
However, as a matter of reference for those who may be interested in the subject, a brief narrative of the beginnings of other industries now classed as permanent and all of which echoed the spirit of enterprise of men of the calibre of Charles Parrish may be considered in order.
The Wyoming Cutlery Company was one of these. With H. H. Harvey as president, W. J. Harvey, vice-president and Abram Nesbitt, treasurer, the manufacture of cutlery on a large scale was begun by this company in 1888 in a plant constructed at Horton and Warren streets. An addition to the plant was erected in 1903 and for many years the company enjoyed a very satisfactory measure of prosperity. Due to unusual competition of foreign manufacturers, particularly those of Germany in pre-war days, the whole cutlery trade of the country found its markets in a precarious condition in the year 1912 and over- tures were made by interests in New Britain, Connecticut, for the purchase of the local plant and its eventual consolidation with other plants of the combination. These negotiations were afterwards concluded and the business was lost to Wilkes-Barré.
In its stead, however, and using the buildings of the former company, was organized the Perma-Loc Manufacturing Company which began in a small way the manufacture of automobile accessories. The business of the new con- cern has prospered with the industry with which it is affiliated and the number of employees on its rolls in 1925 fully equaled the number employed by its predecessor in business at the height of the latter's prosperity.
The Penn Tobacco Company was a later institution with the genius of Russel Uhl to thank for much of its astounding success. The company was incorporated in 1902 with William Drury, president; Russel Uhl, vice-president; J. C. Bell, treasurer and Henry C. Weigand, superintendent. A modest output of some 30,000 pounds of tobacco produced in its first year of operation in a small plant in South Wilkes-Barré, multiplied to some 600,000 pounds production ten years later. In 1912 the new building of the company, a model in architecture as in cleanliness and efficiency of operation, was opened on South Main street with an Industrial Exposition under auspices of the Chamber of Commerce. The
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new plant permits an annual production of 10,000,000 pounds of the company's brands when fully operated. With a capital of $1,000,000, the company is rated as one of Wilkes-Barre's most prosperous industries and bears the distinction of having weathered trust opposition for more than twenty years in spite of the fact that nearly every other smaller tobacco manufacturing establishment has either been absorbed by powerful competitors or else been engulfed in heavy financial losses.
Still another concern whose product is of country-wide use is the Wales Adding Machine Company, organized March 7, 1906. This company secured the inventions of Charles Wales as to various devices relating to computing machines. The plant of the company, located in Kingston, is of modern con- struction to which various additions have been built as increased business de- manded. The first officers of the company were A. G. Nesbitt, president; F. J. Stegmaier, vice-president; A. D. Hermann, secretary and Stanley W. Grover, treasurer.
Here was another industry which felt the effect of a monopolistic control of its lines of product. The annual meeting of 1912 left in doubt whether the stock of the concern was still held locally or by outside interests identified with the opposition. Coming to the aid of the local concern, fearing removal of the industry in case of its passing to foreign control, Abram Nesbitt on the morning of the meeting purchased the balance of treasury stock until then out of the market and thus voted in a board of control entirely in sympathy with local sentiment.
The industry is now ranked as one of the community's most dependable assets and announcements made in 1925 seem to confirm the belief that still larger things are in store for the Wales company.
The record of civic events from the early 80's to the concluding narrative of this Chapter while dull and father uninteresting in the main, nevertheless has its high spots of accomplishment. The community had not yet settled into that complaisant attitude which was to mark a decade following the Spanish- American war. Nor had it yet arrived at that era of consolidations in the an- thracite industry which was to mark the final phase of the development of Wyoming's underground treasures. There were evidences at hand of the passing of the old regime. On September 18, 1881, the Grabill Hill proved the last canal boat to clear the locks near Northampton street for its final trip on the obsolescent Wyoming division of the North Branch canal.
Even before the formal abandonment of all sections of the once prosperous canal system from Nanticoke to Columbia was announced on April 11, 1901, Wilkes-Barré had begun to abandon bridges crossing the canal and to fill the bed with culm. The old time wooden bridges which narrowed Franklin and Washing- ton streets and Hazle avenue to bridge width were condemned and abandoned in 1886 and practically the entire bed of the erstwise waterway within the city limits was filled in 1888.
The Canal company's report for the year 1900 indicates a cogent reason for the canal system's decline. A portion of it read as follows:
"Gross earnings, $38,218; deficit, $4,756; interest on funded debt, $136,830; State tax on stock, $225; total, $136,832; total deficit transferred to profit and loss, $141,588. The balance to debit of profit and loss account Dec. 31, 1900, is $2,264,065."
The year 1882 found the present wholly inadequate Lehigh Valley railroad station completed and ground broken for the large summer hotel of that company
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which, until 1916, when it was purchased by the Glen Summit company and torn down, was to attract guests from many portions of the country to the exclusive resort at Glen Summit Springs.
The year 1884 seems notable for one of the infrequent earthquake shocks recorded in the annals of Wyoming, but which fortunately wrought no damage. No further disturbances of the earth were again a matter of notice until March, 1925 when, in common with much of the Atlantic seaboard which felt the tremors, other slight shocks gave residents an apprehension of serious explosions within nearby mines.
A feature of the year 1886 was the celebration by formal program of the centenary of the erection of Luzerne County. At a meeting of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society held September 10th, it was decided to hold exercises appropriate to the occasion in Judge Woodward's court room commenc- ing at 10 A. M. on September 25th, the latter being the date of approval of the act creating the county. A large concourse of people filled the court room at the appointed time. Judge Woodward ordered the proceedings of the meeting incorporated by way of a minute on the records of the court. At the conclusion of informal remarks by the jurist, Judge E. L. Dana, president of the Society, took the chair and read an address prepared by Dr. Horace Hollister of Providence who was unable to be present. Judge Dana himself then followed with a paper of the "Chevalier de la Luzerne" as did Dr. William H. Engle, Historian of the Commonwealth, on the "House of Lancaster to the Rescue." At an ad- journed meeting held in the afternoon, addresses were read by Rev. S. S. Kennedy of Abington township, Hon. P. M. Osterhout, Frederick C. Johnson and Wm. Penn Miner, Esq. These addresses referred to various phases of the county's history and development but furnished no information in addition to that already referred to in the volumes of this History.
Equally a feature of the same year and one much more amusing in re- trospect was the paving of South Franklin street with asphalt, an experiment fraught with more bitter dissensions than any other public improvement of record. The Public Square and West Market street at that time alone boasted a surface. This was of cobble stone, the effect of which upon passing vehicles and their occupants can be better imagined than described. South Franklin, while possibly no worse off than other street areas left exposed to the elements at all seasons, nevertheless bore a remarkable reputation for the depths to which its muddy strata extended in times of storm and for the quantity and quality of dust it exuded in dryer seasons. Progressives in the City council demanded its surfacing while residents of that thoroughfare strenuously objected. A perusal of the controversy which raged with great violence in the press of that period gives some indication of the difficulties which Wilkes-Barré was encounter- ing in the spread of progressive ideas among a class of its citizens of whom more might have been expected. The burden of plaint on the part of "Stick-in- the-Mudders," as the objecting property holders were termed, seems to have been that the mud and dust of Franklin street was sufficient for their ancestors, hence ought to please any one else. It seems not to have been pleasing to the progressive element of council, however.
Under the leadership of I. M. Kirkendall and Allan P. Dickson, that body declared the street a nuisance and proceeded forthwith to lay asphalt between Market and South streets, levying the improvement upon abutting
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owners. This added insult to injury, and a case was framed to the Pennsyl- vania Supreme court to determine the ability of a City to collect an assessment imposed by such arbitrary measures. The city won its point, the property owners paid and the matter soon passed from public attention .* So successful was the experiment, moreover, that other streets soon made application for a like improvement and Wilkes-Barré later merited a reputation for thoroughfares second to none of the Commonwealth.
On November 11, 1886, Wilkes-Barré was first warmed by steam heat supplied by the Wilkes-Barré Heat and Power Company, a sketch of whose formation has been given in a preceding Chapter. As this was one of the pioneer efforts of the country in the supply of a municipality with heat from a central system, it excited considerable discussion and remark in the press of the nation.
October 10, 1888, was to cause a shudder throughout the county as it did throughout the nation in the record of the Mud Run disaster.
That day, being the anniversary of the birth of Father Mathew, various branches of Catholic Temperance societies selected Hazleton as a place of meet- ing and some six sections of a special train over the Lehigh Valley railroad carried the constituent branch societies to that city via Penn Haven junction.
All went well until the return trip, when one section of the train, carry- ing residents of Avoca and surrounding territory, was forced to stop on the sharp curve at Mud Run. Before proper signal precautions were taken, the section following crashed into its predecessor, killing fifty-five excursionists, subsequent deaths increasing the number to sixty-three. It was the most appalling railway catastrophe in the history of Luzerne county and, from its nature, was one to cause widespread sorrow. A majority of the victims were buried in the cemetery of St .. Mary's church at Avoca and on the anniversary of the occasion it has been customary for the congregation to hold memorial services at the graves of those who perished.
On January 28, 1889, after many vexatious delays, occurred the opening of the Osterhout Free Library in its present quarters on South Franklin street. Few public libraries were then in existence in Pennsylvania. In a previous Chapter the affairs of the Wyoming Athenaeum, or Wilkes-Barré Library As- sociation as it was frequently called, have been mentioned. What books remained of the earlier efforts of the community with respect to literary attainment, some fifteen hundred in number, passed to the custodianship of the Young Men's Christian Association upon organization of the latter. The Athenaeum was one of the many literary institutions which had sprung up from time to time to satisfy the community's instinct for books. Its treasurer, from its organization in 1839 until his death, had been Isaac S. Osterhout. While its membership fee was the nominal sum of five dollars per year, it was not a free library in any sense of the term and it was probably from his experience as treasurer of the institution and from realizing not how many people it served but the compara- tively few it could serve under the circumstances that Mr. Osterhout was prompt- ed to provide by the terms of his will for the creation of the splendid institution which bears his name.
Mr. Osterhout died in 1881. Agreeable to provisions of the will, the bulk of his estate was to accumulate for a period of five years under management of certain trustees and then be devoted to the creation of the library. Seven
*Beaumont vs. Wilkes-Barre, 142, Penna. Reports, p. 198.
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trustees were named: Hubbard B. Payne, Louis C. Paine, Edward P. Darling, Edmund L. Dana, Harrison Wright, Andrew H. McClintock and Sheldon Reynolds. Harrison Wright having died prior to the death of the testator him- self, Andrew F. Derr was subsequently named as his successor. The trustees in 1886 proceeded to carry out provisions of the trust by securing a charter for the library, the charter providing that the seven trustees and their successors and the Rector of St. Stephens church as well as the Pastor of the First Presby- terian church of Wilkes-Barré should constitute a permanent board of directors. In organizing, under the charter, Rev. Dr. Henry L. Jones and Rev. Dr. Frank P. Hodge became ex-officio members of the board.
The trustees at first considered the erection of a building intended to house such collection of books as was deemed necessary for the opening. A decision of the congregation of the First Presbyterian church to abandon their old place of worship and build on a nearby plot a more commodious structure whose corner stone was laid July 11, 1887, afforded those responsible for the trust an opportunity to procure a substantial building which, without extensive alterations, could be adapted to library needs. The decision of the trustees to purchase this building was confirmed by a well-known authority on such matters, Prof. Melville Dewey, librarian of the state of New York, who responded to an invitation to come to Wilkes-Barré and advise with the board. His recommendations as to the in- ternal arrangements of the altered building were accepted after its purchase and, in turn, he was again invited to the community to make the principal address when the library was opened.
But, while plans of Prof. Dewey were eventually followed by the board, various delays on the part of the church in securing possession of their new edifice occasioned much inconvenience in adapting the former church to its intended purposes.
Meanwhile, the services of Miss Hannah P. James of Newton, Massa- chusetts, one of the noted librarians of the country, were secured by the board as librarian. She selected Miss Myra Poland as her assistant and they immedi- ately set about the task of selecting, cataloging and shelving nearly eleven thousand volumes which were the nucleus of the present library. According to the Library's catalog for 1924, it had then grown to 62,036 volumes.
The selection of Miss James and her assistant proved most fortunate. Both brought with them a wide knowledge of books, coupled with executive attainments out of the ordinary. Until her death, April 20, 1903, Miss James did much to bring the Wilkes-Barré institution into favorable notice throughout the country as well as to open opportunities for a wide range of research which at present are available to residents of the Wyoming valley. Miss Poland succeeded her superior in office and the local library is fortunate in having as its present head, one as familiar with the work and as capable in management.
In 1906 a wing was added to the Library building containing a three- story stack, accommodating some 40,000 additional volumes, a catalog room and a repair room. The probable vacation of the adjoining building, owned by the Library but occupied by the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, the latter organization having planned at some future date to occupy its own building as part of the Museum of Art and Science, will afford the Osterhout trustees further room for expansion as needs of the Library require.
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As an evidence of the community worth of the Osterhout bequest, the report of the Library for 1924 is of interest.
Its board then consisted of Lewis H. Taylor, M. D., president, Lord Butler Hillard, vice-president, Gilbert S. McClintock, secretary-treasurer, Hon. Henry A. Fuller, recording secretary ; Rev. Frederick L. Flinchbaugh, D. D., Rev. Paul S. Heath, William H. Conyngham, Theodore S. Barber and Paul Bedford, Esq.
After thirty-four years of serving as a community center of the central city alone, the establishment of two extensions was reported as successfully accomp- lished, the North Branch, located on North Main street being opened in 1923 and the South Branch in 1924. From the Main Library and its two branches a total of 283,793 volumes were circulated in the year of the report, exceeding that of any other year by approximately 31,000 volumes. A childrens' room was opened by the Library in 1904. The wisdom of this step has been manifest in the increasing use of this department in each year since its establishment, the total circulation of volumes among children reaching an astonishing total of 114,148 for the year 1924. Illustrating the increased service rendered since the foundation of the Library, a staff of thirteen assistants to Miss Poland was named in the report for the year.
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