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FeedThe Pennsy vs. the Papermaker
Like gorillas, big corporations have always made messes wherever they please.
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When a corporation pollutes our environment—as BP has done in the Gulf of Mexico—it’s easy to forget that the mess is accidental.
Deliberate pollution would be immoral. But corporations are merely amoral. Oil companies don’t want to pollute, but they are willing to run the risk if the payoff is large enough. So they spend lavishly on deep-sea drilling and little on remediation technology that produces no profit.
In Lower Merion, the same calculus was used in the 1880s by the Pennsylvania Railroad, then engaged in a long war against the rival Reading. Solely to take a few customers away from its enemy, the PRR—known for generations as simply “the Pennsy”—ran track so close to a local paper company that its soot made paper manufacturing impossible. The paper company went out of business.
Like the Pennsy cared.
“PRR was the Microsoft of its time,” said John Hepp, a railroad historian and associate professor of history at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre. “It was one of the strongest, wealthiest and most important corporations in the country.”
And it didn’t get that way compensating others for damages.
Founded in 1846, the Pennsylvania Railroad started out as a contractor for the Main Line of Public Works, a strange system of canals and railroads built with state money beginning in 1829. The “works” included the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, which linked Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna River. But the works also included canals between Philadelphia and places like Reading and Allentown, and between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. Depending on their destination, passengers and freight switched between trains and boats, and back again.
The PRR’s original assignment was to build a rail line from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, which positioned the company to take over the entire system.
Never profitable, the entire purpose of the Main Line of Public Works had been to help Philadelphia compete with New York, which boomed after completion of the Erie Canal. But politics made it inefficient and, eventually, the legislature tired of its deficits. The works was auctioned in 1857, and PRR picked up the entire thing—118 miles of track, 273 miles of canal and 168 canal locks—for $7.5 million. It subsequently scrapped the canals.
Completion of PRR’s western branch in 1855 made it possible to travel by rail from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. During the Civil War, a merger gave it access to Baltimore. Mergers in the 1870s took PRR south to Washington and north to Jersey City, from which it served the New York market. In the 1880s, the Pennsy would reach Chicago.
Despite being financed with Philadelphia money, though, PRR had only a small presence in the city. This was true of all railroads. Steam engines occasionally exploded. As a consequence, locomotives were banned from the business district. For PRR, this meant that trains had to be disconnected from their engines in West Philadelphia, and then towed by horses or mules across the Market Street Bridge on the city’s streetcar lines. “Moving freight and passenger cars over the city railroad was an arduous process,” wrote historian David W. Messer.
Throughout the late 19th century, the Pennsy laid track and built new terminals. By 1903, it would have 450 miles of track within the city limits. Broad Street Station, a swaggering statement of the Pennsy’s power, opened in 1881.
Reader Comments:
So that future historians and other writers will have the facts in this article:
1) The PRR did not start out as "contract operator" of the Main Line of Public works. The PRR built its own RR from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, then later bought most of the State Works. Also, PRR-backed railroads reached Chicago in the 1850s, not the 1880s.
2) The canal from Philly to Reading was not part of the State Works. It was a separate private company that was later bought out by the Reading. There are other oversimplifications in the canals paragraph. The PRR did not buy the entire State canal network - many segments were sold to other buyers. Plus the PRR continued to operate some portions of the canal network for another 40 years or more.
Also, please note that the PRR's Main Line to Pittsburgh should not be referred to as its "Western Branch". PRR initiated through service Philly to Pittsburgh in 1852, not 1855.
3) The statement that the PRR had only a small presence in Philadelphia is not correct. The PRR was always the largest rail carrier serving the City. Steam locomotives were banned from City streets not because they "occasionally exploded" but because the continual sounds and smells of their operations were too disturbing to horses pulling carriages, plus were a general nuisance to anyone else on the streets or occupying adjacent buildings.
4) The Reading RR was founded in 1833, not 1843. Its original line was built between Philly and Reading, not between Reading and Pottsville. Its extension from Reading to Pottsville was completed in 1842. Reading Terminal was opened in 1893, not 1889.
5) The PRR line up the Schuylkill Valley was built in the 1880's not the 1870's. It did not go through to Wilkes-Barre and Shamokin, but relied on the Lehigh Valley RR to provide the connecting link to those places. Also, the PRR reached Shamokin and Wilkes-Barre via its own lines from Sunbury.
6) The PRR Schuylkill Valley Division track followed Vine Creek, not Gully Run.
Gulley Run doesn't flow along Belmont Ave, except near its mouth where it formed Ashland Paper's pond that the PRR polluted.
7) The current Manayunk Bridge is dated 1917, not 1910.
8) The Ashland Paper Mills were on the other side of Belmont Ave from the Pennsy. The railroads crossed close to Rudolph's house and the houses in the picture for his workmen. The pond was on the other side of the Reading, hundreds of feet from the crossing.
9) Ashland employed 65 in 1893, according to the Hexamer map of that year, never "several hundred workers." Hexamer says they made book paper, not newsprint.
10) Pencoyd Iron Works was east (downstream) of Ashland Paper, not south. It was owned by Percival and Algernon Roberts, not just Percival.
11) The spur was a switchback, not a loop, that ran next to Ashland's pond, not the plant. The Reading ran next to the plant; the Pennsy never had access to it.
12) According to the New York Times article of September 27, 1885, the PRR used only anthracite on its lines to New York, and bituminous elsewhere.
13) The famously steep grade on the Schuylkill Valley Line was between Manayunk and Cynwyd, not near Ashland Paper.
14) The atlases show that Ashland Paper was gone by 1900, though Rudolph still owned the Paper Mill and pond.
In 1908, the pond, labelled Mineola Lake, was the property of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. In 1913 the Rudolph Paper Mill was in ruins and the pond gone. Between 1926 and 1937, the property became the Glen Willow Ice Co., supplanted by the Expressway about 1950.