Last week Kevin Abt, an ex-student and dear friend of mine, was in town for a visit and offered me the opportunity to spend a day exploring industrial archaeology in Mercer County, an opportunity I was eager to accept. Kevin has had a distinguished career working as an engineer/project manager in the Virginia Beach area for the past two and a half decades and has a keen interest in everything technical and historical. He currently is finishing an engagement as Project Manager for a new tunnel under the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission. His visits are always enjoyable and road trips with him have always been memorable. This one was no exception.
We began by driving to Greenville and inspecting the outdoor exhibits of the Railway Museum there. Greenville has a proud history of industrial achievements, many of which were related to transportation. It still is the home of the railyard and shops of the Bessemer Division of the Canadian National Railroad. From 1900 to 2004 it operated independently as the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad (B&LE), primarily hauling iron ore from the Lake Erie port at Conneaut, Ohio, to the Pittsburgh steel mills, a service that continues today.
The centerpiece of the outdoor exhibit is a magnificent locomotive, the largest steam switch engine ever built. It was manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive in 1936 for the Union Railroad which at that time serviced eight different US Steel mills in the Monongahela Valley. Its 0-10-2 configuration features ten driving wheels transmitting 3500 horsepower. In 1949 it was sold to the Duluth Missabe and Iron Range Railroad. Retired in 1958, the engine was eventually donated by the B&LE to the museum where it has been proudly displayed ever since.
Among the other pieces of rolling stock on display was an iron ore “jenny”. This is a single-hopper car specifically designed for hauling iron ore. The standard (sixty feet long) two-hopper cars hauling coal or grain are designed for material weighing about fifty pounds per cubic foot. Their limit, when filled, is one hundred tons. If they put one hundred tons of iron ore pellets in one of those cars, it would fill less than thirty percent of the hoppers. Each jenny is twenty-seven feet long and holds seventy tons of pellets; two jennies take up the same length as one conventional hopper car and hold forty percent more payload. This jenny was built in 1952 by the Greenville Steel Car Company and used on the B&LE main line.
Our next stop was the Kidd’s Mill covered bridge, about five miles south of Greenville near the community of Reynolds Heights. I was generally familiar with this bridge but had never visited it. It is unique, a “Smith patent truss” constructed in 1868 by the Smith Bridge Company of Tippecanoe City, Ohio. At first glance the design looks like a mistake, ten panels of “X” diagonals with a diagonal missing on the two center panels, and no vertical posts. A closer look discloses that it really is a conventional Warren truss with a second Warren truss superimposed with panel points offset halfway between those of the first truss. I suspect this is the product of a clever businessman looking for a gimmick to permit him to build a truss without paying a fee to someone else holding a patent on a conventional design. At any rate he ended up with an extremely rugged bridge that has survived fifteen decades without substantial rehabilitation.
No longer in use, the bridge spans the Shenango River at a point where it is about one hundred and twenty feet wide. A nondescript deck girder bridge carries a township road across the Shenango about two hundred feet upstream. Fortunately, the bridge site has been converted into an attractive, small park. The bridge is single lane and a little over sixteen feet wide. It is the only extant Smith patent truss bridge in Pennsylvania. It is also one of the very few surviving covered bridges that has not been reinforced by the addition of steel girders under the trusses, a tribute to Mr. Smith’s conservative design.
Six miles to the southwest, “as the crow flies”, was our next stop in the village of Sharpsville. It too is on the Shenango River, perhaps twenty miles downstream, “as the river runs”, and is the location of Lock 10, the only surviving lock on the Erie Extension Canal. One hundred thirty-six miles long, the Canal was constructed in the early 1800s, finally opened for traffic in 1844. It ran north from the Ohio River at Bridgewater, following the Beaver River to New Castle, then the Shenango to Greenville before heading cross-country to a summit west of Conneaut Lake. From that point it descended to Erie where it terminated at the lakefront. Lock 10 was a “guard” lock, built to provide a transition between a conventional canal and one running in slackwater behind a dam in the Shenango River with the towpath following the edge of the dammed-up pool.
Constructed of massive stones and equipped with lock-gates, Lock 10 cost $9,210 ($1 million today) to build. The adjacent dam, built to provide a dependable navigation channel for the canal boats, cost $13,582. It certainly is interesting to visualize a canal boat being pulled through the village of Sharpsville by a team of mules into an open lock, the gates being closed and the upstream gates being opened, the water rising to meet the river level, and the boat then being pulled out into the river and continuing its journey upstream.
It is equally interesting to imagine Mercer County a century and a half ago, a collection of bustling industrial towns filled with mills and furnaces serviced by canals and railroads. I am grateful to Kevin for providing me with this opportunity and to all the historical preservationists who are attempting to retain these valuable artifacts.