GREAT FOUNDERY.
From the foundery we proceed, across the open yard, to the smithy, a large, lofty, well proportioned apartment, containing two enormous steam-hammers, the speed and consequent impetus of which can be modulated by a very easy application of manual force, at the pleasure of the operator, so that they can be made either to rise and fall as slowly as the maces of Gog and Magog on the great bell of Saint Dunstan’s, or to impinge upon whatever is objected to their descent with a velocity which almost mocks the eye. In this apartment and its adjunct forge there are no less than eighteen stithies, the bellows of all which are worked by the ubiquitous power of the engine, with anvils of all manners and sizes in due proportion, and sturdy operatives plying them with tranquil and regulated industry, worth five times the amount of human force exerted unequally and impulsively, by fits and starts. These men, for the most part, and, in fact, always when not called off by some casual and unexpected pressure of business in some one department, are kept constantly employed at that peculiar species of work with which each is the most familiar, such method and system in the subdivision of labor being found to insure not only the greatest excellence, but the greatest celerity of workmanship.
SMITHY.
In this shop all such portions of the engines, presses, large and small, printing and inking machines, and of the machinery by the agency of which the above machines themselves are created, as are composed of wrought metal, are forged, welded, made new from the commencement, or repaired in case of damage. For it is worthy of remark that, although many of the labor-saving machines and tools are of English make—not a few by the celebrated Whitworth, said to be the first tool-maker in the world—there is not one that cannot, on emergency, be made, mended, or altered, within the precincts of the establishment; while many of the most admirable contrivances are patents and inventions peculiar to this country and this firm.
Immediately adjoining the smithy, is the engine and machine shop, and on the same floor the large lathe-room containing four enormous surface lathes and two turning lathes, for drilling, boring, turning, and finishing both circular and horizontal surfaces.
From this point, we shall proceed to the saw works, preferring to take each separate department of work by itself, from the commencement to the end, rather than to adhere to the precise order and position of the several rooms, as situated in the building.
The first room devoted to this branch of manufacture, which is a very considerable and important item in the business of Messrs. Hoe & Co., the annual sales amounting to not less than 140,000 dollars, in circular saws, mill-saws, pit-saws, and crosscut-saws, for all parts of the country, is known as the saw shop.
Herein is performed the business of smithing, teething, and blocking the great saws; hundreds of thousands of which are at work, driven by water or by steam-power in every portion of the boundless territories of the United States, to which the enterprising foot and adventurous axe of the white settler has found access—clearing with their restless and indomitable teeth the solid and tenacious fibres of the gnarled live-oaks in the pestilent swamps of Florida, and the dank “regions far away, by Pascagoula’s sunny bay,” into the crooked knees of mighty vessels, that shall set at naught the howling billows of the wild Atlantic, and the blasts of the mad storm-wind, Euroclydon, riving into planks and beams and timbers, that shall build up the palaces of commerce, and the happy homes of our lordly cities, the white and penetrable flesh of “those captive kings so straight and tall, those lordly pines, which fell long ago in the deer-haunted forests of Maine, when deep upon mountain and plain lay the snow.”