VI. Conemaugh, Woodvale, and the Cambria Iron
The choice of a steel producer capable of rolling the intricate Johnson design was a narrow one. By 1882, there were approximately a dozen major steel producers in the country, not all of which produced steel rails. All but a few were members of the Bessemer Group which had pooled the Bessemer patents in an attempt to limit production and guarantee themselves adequate market share. One of these, the Cambria Iron Company of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had been a major innovator in the rolling of railroad rails for over twenty years. A significant iron and steel producer since the early 1860s, the Cambria Iron had pioneered the commercial production of rolled steel railroad rails in 1871. It was at the Cambria Iron Works that the Kelly converter had first been made operational. And it was in the rail mill of the Cambria Iron that the legendary careers of John and William Fritz began.
Moreover, and of greater interest to Moxham, the Cambria Iron had some previous experience in the rolling of primitive girder rail designs out of steel in 1877 for the Clay Street Cable Road in San Francisco. But while that roll was apparently successful, it was apparent in the late 1870s that the production of street girder or cable rails was not a particularly lucrative market. Most streetcar lines were horse-drawn and used the much cheaper wrought iron strap rails spiked onto wooden stringers for track. Such strap rail designs could be rolled in virtually any iron rolling mill. The Cambria Iron itself did manufacture a series of strap rails of different weights and designs, but its principal product line was steel railroad rails.
Cable roads did require a heavier type of rail, such as the one produced for the Clay Street line, but these were, technologically-speaking, very new in the late 1870s. And given the extraordinary construction costs involved in their installation, cable systems presented an alternative to horse-drawn systems that few cities were willing to consider, and fewer still were willing to construct. While there was a small but brief boom in the construction of cable systems in the mid-1880s, there is no evidence that the Cambria Iron pursued the girder rail design or the street railway market in earnest.
Yet, the Cambria Iron was an integrated steelmaker, and most of its revenues came from the sophisticated production lines of its rail mill. Consequently, in times of slowed demand for steel railroad rails, the company was more than willing to take on short-term contracts to roll special shapes. The rolling of the earlier Clay Street girder rail was in fact a contract taken on during just such a market downturn following the Panic of 1873. Similarly, when steel rail prices dipped markedly in 1881, due to overproduction in the market, the Cambria Iron was willing to take on piecework for rolling special shapes. Fortuitously, it was in the fall of 1882 that the Cambria Iron was approached by Moxham with a contract to roll the Johnson design.
Being careful not to tie up the rolling capacity of their steel rail mill in case of market upturn, the giant steelmaker would only agree to the contract for the production of the Johnson girder rail on a year-to-year basis. The Moxham roll design and sequence was adopted into its steel rail mill in early January 1883, and experimental rolling begun immediately. After five months of experimentation, the first successful Johnson girder rail was rolled in June. From that point on, Moxham applied for patent protection for all possible combinations of the roll designs and sequence of roll passes, most of which were granted by 1885. He also hurried to establish capabilities for casting and forging of specialty track work such as railway frogs and switches and for laying out and fitting the completed track work before shipping to customers.
Initially the iron castings of specialty track work were to be made in Indianapolis in foundries known to Tom Johnson. Moxham however was able to contract the work locally with John Hannan, operator of the small Fulton Foundry at 726 Centre Street, across from Turners Hall in Conemaugh Borough. For the first five years of Moxham's operation in Johnstown, he would secure all of his castings of frogs, switches and curves from John Hannan. Moxham also commissioned John McKenna's Machine Shop, two blocks east on Portage Street across from the Gautier Wire Mill, for machine work and hand tools. Railway chairs, tie plates, rods and bolts were initially obtained from the Cambria Iron Company.
For a laying out yard, Moxham chose an open cinder dump on the curve of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad near Centre and Railroad Streets behind the Hannan Foundry. Several years before, Daniel Morrell, President of the Cambria Iron Company, had encouraged the Baltimore and Ohio to build a spur from south of Johnstown into the Cambria Iron mill to give him shipping access to southern markets. This spur was now used also to ship the finished Johnson girder rails out of the main steel rail mill to the Conemaugh site, where Moxham erected a temporary roof on four posts, installed a hydraulic jack to bend the rails into precise curves, and pieced the track work together.
The actual operations of the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company in Johnstown began in June of 1883 after Cambria Iron successfully rolled the Johnson girder. At first, only Moxham himself and five other yardmen worked at the Conemaugh site, cutting, bending, and fitting by hand the custom-designed track work ordered by the firm's first customers, all of whom were small horse car lines. It was hard and dirty work, requiring long hours in the summer heat and the frequent rain and thunderstorms common in the Conemaugh Valley. Plus, with winter weather approaching and the days growing shorter, the yardmen had to take advantage of whatever daylight hours the summer and fall afforded them.
When he first moved into Johnstown, Moxham stayed at the Club House, one of the better downtown hotels within walking distance of the Cambria Iron offices, a few blocks south on Washington Street, and of his own company's laying out yard, a similar distance in the opposite direction. He established a small office in the rear of the first floor of the Wehn Building at 421 Main Street, where he employed a clerk and an errand boy.
Above the office on the second floor, accessible only by outdoor stairway, the Moxhams furnished a small three-room apartment for themselves and their two small children. At the time, Helen was expecting their third child, due in spring. Since there were no cooking facilities in the apartment, Mrs. Wehn prepared meals in her own first floor kitchen and walked them up the outer stairway to the Moxham apartment. In April, the Moxhams' first daughter was born, but tragically died within a few days. Two years later, their second daughter Dulcenia Coleman Moxham was born, named after Helen's mother (and Tom Johnson's aunt) and likewise nicknamed Dullie.
In its abbreviated first year of operation, the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company purchased over 23 tons of steel girder rails from Cambria Iron, rolled in five different sections based on the Johnson Jaybird design. Willing to show off its ability to roll complex shapes, the Cambria Iron Company included a display of Moxham's rails, frogs, and crossings in its exhibit at the 1883 National Exposition of Railway Appliances in Chicago. By the next summer, Moxham's company employed over thirty men at the Conemaugh yard, fabricating track work from the Cambria-rolled rails and the cast steel specialty track work produced by the Fulton Foundry. Producing as it did the only lighter weight street railway rails from steel available in the national market, the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company established an immediate presence in the street rail market. The June 1884 issue of the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association reported that the company was already producing over 10 per cent of the country's street railway rails.
In that first year, Moxham also attempted to handle sales for the new company, but he was quickly overwhelmed. Even though the company's sales literature was still being compiled and printed in the offices of the Bidermann du Pont's publishing house in Louisville, it became clear that Moxham was neither very good at sales nor had the time to devote to its complexities. He preferred instead to work entirely in production. Recognizing this, he began to hire his own salesmen, knowledgeable men in the street railway business, and place them in major cities in the eastern part of the country. The first such sales office, covering the eastern seaboard, was in Philadelphia.
That same summer, probably at the coaxing of Tom Johnson, the company moved to integrate another major dimension of the railway business into its operation by bidding on the track work for entire street railway lines rather than simply providing rails and specialty track work for other contractors to install. In July of 1884, it secured its first railway contract from the East Liberty and Wilkensburg Street Railway Company. It was this dimension of street railways that would give the company its greatest national prominence. In six short years, the company came to dominate not only track work design, but system design as well, and its name would become synonymous with street railways nation-wide. In December 1884, after its first full year of operation, the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company displayed its own rail and track work designs at the world's exposition in New Orleans.
With the spread of horse-drawn railway systems throughout mid-sized cities in the United States, and the development of cable-powered systems as a realistic alternative, the demand for well-engineered, high quality, durable track work increased in dramatic fashion. Moxham realized that the open Conemaugh yard severely restricted the company's capacity to keep up with orders, and with the approach of a second winter season, leased an abandoned barbed wire mill in the southern-most section of the small Cambria Iron company town of Woodvale in late 1884. The site was just across the bridge from Conemaugh Borough, still very close to both the Fulton Foundry and the McKenna Machine Shop.
As a principal mill of the Iowa Barbed Wire Company in the 1870s, the facility had been gutted by fire on October 26, 1881 and abandoned. The Cambria Iron Company had taken over the facility shortly thereafter, intending to establish their own wire mill, but by the spring of 1884, they had moved their equipment to one of their western sites. Astride a major spur of Cambria Iron Company's own railroad tracks, the empty mill building suited Moxham's immediate need for a year-round facility. In January 1885, he abandoned the Conemaugh yard and moved into the northern section of the Woodvale building. The mill site was fully operational within two months and by summer of that year, over forty men were working at the site under supervision of foreman Henry O'Shea.
But increased orders for rails and track work, and the company's success in securing bids for entire railway lines, forced Moxham to seek expansion almost immediately. The Iowa plant itself simply did not meet the company's growing needs for space. By June of 1886, the company purchased a two-acre plot of ground in Woodvale north of the Cambria Iron's Johnstown Manufacturing Company, a complex that included a large woolen mill and a flour mill. Located below Maple Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets, the new Johnson site was designed to accommodate four new buildings, including company offices. By September, track connections and sidings of the Cambria Iron Railroad were completed to the new plant site. The frame mill buildings and offices, all painted barn red, were completed by late December and the Iowa building closed down shortly thereafter. The new plant and laying out yard, which would come to be known as the Woodvale switch works, was fully operational by the end of the January 1887.
By this time, the Moxham family moved into a large brick residence on Maple Avenue previously owned by W. H. Rosensteel, a prominent local businessman and proprietor of the Dell Tannery next to the Iowa mill building in Woodvale. Helen now employed two maids to help her care for the three children and the several sisters and cousins from Louisville who, during the summer months, traveled north to enjoy the wooded rolling hills and cooler climes of southwestern Pennsylvania. On several occasions, the summer visitors included Moxham's aunt Dora Coleman, the family matriarch who delighted in seeing the growing success of the bright young nephew she had brought over from the Old Sod not twenty years before.
Also frequenting the house were Moxham's business partners Tom Johnson, now residing in Cleveland, and Fred du Pont, the capitalist from Louisville, both of whom always took rooms at the Club House downtown. As one would expect of such a successful street railway entrepreneur, Johnson played an extremely active role in decisions concerning the both product development and sales. It was characteristic of him however to leave all production and management decisions to Moxham. Du Pont was an inveterate industrial tinkerer who liked to muddle around at the switch works and was well-known around town as a spokesman for the company. Over the next five years, du Pont would come to invest significant amounts of his personal wealth in the development of the growing enterprise.
By June 1887, Moxham's need for additional investment capital was pressing. He was forced to build additions onto the plant's main buildings, forge, and general offices. At the same time, with the price of steel railroad rails recovering and the market for street railway rails still fairly small by comparison, Cambria Iron wanted to withdraw from what had been to both parties a lucrative arrangement for four years. For several years, Moxham had contemplated the manufacture of his own steel castings and the rolling of his own steel rails, but the high profit margin of his current operation had made such a huge capital investment seem unnecessary at the time.
But now Cambria Iron's desire to withdraw from the manufacture of the Johnson rail caused Moxham to search in earnest for property on which he could locate steel and iron foundries, a rolling mill, and perhaps later even blast furnaces. After originally considering property in Franklin, the Johnson Company opted for purchasing much of the Von Lunen farm, close to 200 acres of bottom land along the Stony Creek River south of Johnstown. By December 1887, the farmland was purchased for $65,000, and the necessary rights-of-way to connect the new mill to the Cambria Iron Company via the Cambria and Somerset branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad were secured.
The purchase of the Von Lunen property was accomplished in two separate transactions. For $40,000 the company itself purchased the prime 95-acre mill site along the river for a plant to be designed and built by Moxham. An additional 94 acres of farmland were purchased for $25,250 by Tom Johnson and his older brother Albert, who had joined his brother's railway operations in Indianapolis and later in Cleveland and was now venturing out on his own with street railway investments in Brooklyn. The additional property was secured entirely as an investment, in the anticipation of a growing workforce at the mill and the accompanying need for residential housing adjacent to the mill.