Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire Rope

by John Kimberly Mumford

ROEBLING, THE TOWN, A STORY IN ITSELF

Roebling—the town, not the plant—to which some attention has been given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor’s pathway broad and bright. There’s a town superintendent to look after things and he earns his pay.

BUILT TO MAKE WIRE AND ROPE

The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful notions about “welfare work.” The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty, accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases to be lovely.

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.

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.