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Portion of 1876 Pomeroy, Whitman map of downtown Glen Rock showing industries.

Glen Rock, Pa. was really a booming manufacturing town a hundred years ago. It was among the York County towns that enjoyed the advantage by being located on a main railroad line, allowing easy shipping of raw materials and finished products.

According to a front page article in the January 23, 1900 York Press, Glen Rock even weathered the 1890s Depression well.

The article reads:

When we are living through worrisome economic periods we tend to ignore that throughout the history of our country we have had many similar slumps and that we have always recovered to new prosperity.

There have been different complicated causes for economic recession and depression over the years. One of the contributing factors to the Great Depression is said to be the 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff which was meant to help keep U.S. industries competitive. The higher tax on imports instead led to less foreign trade, which at this time was with European countries, and less of a market for U.S. goods.

Tariffs had been called for, and enacted as an attempt to help local industry, long before the 1930s. The December 31, 1867 York Gazette carried the following item from the Columbia Herald:

It was 1908. Although their families had been immigrants only a hundred years or so before, some York County people weren't too sure about the new immigrants coming in to work at plants, mills and quarries or to build roads.

These new arrivals weren't of German, English and Scots-Irish stock like them. They were Slavs, Poles, Italians and who knew what.

In the incident below, from the April 30, 1908 York Gazette, York Haven found out that not all foreigners were troublemakers.

Variety Iron Works from 1868-69 city directory at York County Heritage Trust

I am glad to see that some of the remaining buildings of the Smyser-Royer Variety Iron Works complex are part of York City’s Northwest Triangle redevelopment project.

One of my York Sunday News columns outlined the metamorphosis of the company from a small stove manufacturer to a huge fabricator of mill gears and turbines; garden benches, fountains, and statuary; cast iron buildings fronts; light posts; lacy iron railings, such as the famous ones in New Orleans; iron bridge parts; and much more. You can read that column below.

Then I just came across an article in an 1867 York Gazette that added even more variety to the company’s products.

After recently posting the article on the 20 horse power York-made Pullman’s win in a 1908 hill climb, I was curious to see what the car looked like.

Click here to read about the hill climb.

The newspaper article didn’t say if the winning auto was a 1907 or 1908 model. Since the race was in early 1908, I went to a 1907 Pullman catalog in the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives.

The factory turned out three 20 horse power models that year. I’m including illustrations below from the catalog of all three models, along with specs and price. Which do you think beat the competitors up the hill?

The Lewis Miller drawing above shows a busy King’s Mill in 1799.

In a previous post I mentioned that, now and in the past, we are impressed by the biggest and the best. Sometimes, though, we must stop and wonder if figures have been exaggerated or misreported.

The following small item caught my eye while reading the York Gazette microfilm at York County Heritage Trust. The newspaper was from the fall of 1877.

McCall's Ferry (Holtwood) Power Plant Under Construction, ca.1907.

Electric power was on the front page 100 years ago. The Merchants Electric Light, Heat, and Power Company distributed hydroelectricity generated by the York Haven Water and Power Company, which utilized giant Kaplan turbines. These turbines were manufactured in York by the S. Morgan Smith Company.

When York Haven went on line in 1904, they were said to be one of the three largest water powered electric plants in the world. Just three years later, by the fall of 1907, there was a much larger hydro project underway. A 3,000 feet long high dam was being constructed at McCall's Ferry. A Gazette article of the time reported that it was believed that York, as well as Baltimore, would be receiving electric current from the McCall's Ferry Power Company by August of 1908.

Two days after the initial article another article appeared in the Gazette that raised doubts about the McCall's Ferry project:

We didn't know how bad smoking was for our health 90 years ago, when cigar factories were springing up everywhere. In York County, we knew cigars were very good for our economy. For well over 150 years, processing tobacco into cigars kept many York Countians gainfully employed.

Lewis Miller illustrated a group of youths, himself among them, making cigars in 1811 at the shop of "William Spangler, Tobacconist." They were Henry Sheffer, John Lehman, Jacob Weiser, Lewis Miller, Daniel Masse, Daniel Wolf, Emanuel Sheffer, John Jones, and Henry Wagner. Miller would have been around 15 at the time. Some of the boys look quite a bit younger.

According to the Red Lion Area Historical Society webpage, in the month of October 1929, 15 million cigars were shipped out of the Red Lion train station on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad. This wouldn't have included the millions more made each month in factories large and small in York and just about every community in the county.

My grandfather, Edwin Shelley, converted a three-story house into a cigar factory in Lucky, Chanceford Township. Grandpa wasn't alone as shown in the following Gazette article from the fall of 1917:

One hundred and twenty-five years ago there was excitement in Glen Rock, according to an article in the Glen Rock Item, which was reprinted in the York Gazette of November 28, 1882.

A new steam engine had arrived to bring York County agriculture into the automated age. According to the tone of awe in which the article is written, this might have been one of the first steam engines in that area. It certainly seems to have been the first traction steam engine, one that could move under its own power, ever seen climbing the hills of Glen Rock, as the following description attests:

One hundred years ago, in the fall of 1907, the Gazette ran the following article:

“A horse and dog hospital and a horse ambulance are new things promised for York. The York Rendering Works, of which E. A. Dempwolf is manager, is trying to interest local members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and others in the matter of raising a fund for the purchase of an ambulance which can be used to haul sick horses to a hospital which will be established in this city.”

The proposal goes on to say that as the horses recuperate,