or the Haunted Soul Factory?

 

 

 

"Got seven dollars to my name

Got sixteen cigarettes somehow I just ain't smoked yet

Got two shoelaces and two shoes

I should toss ‘em on the telephone wire as a monument to my blues"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I'm goin' down to get a coffee

Gonna mean one less buck

Maybe six will bring me luck

Got a little shake I kept in the fridge

Gonna drink my bean and walk out smoking on the Walt Whitman Bridge"

 

 

"Faraway from these winter streets

On a cloudless day

Your memory

Blows away"

 

 

My heart is the bums on the street

With nothing to eat and their dirty hands cupped up

My heart is the squirrels in the park

Late Sunday evening dodging the raindrops

My heart is a barrel on fire

That blows burnin' ashes at a telephone wire

My heart is the avenue wind rattlin' street signs

With its delicate din...

 

 

 

My heart is the smell of the sewer,

The taste of the lobster, the price of the wine

My heart is the rush of the traffic

The tug of the music, the scene of the crime

My heart is the crowd that keeps cheerin'

The trains by the river, the points that we score

My heart is this wondrous city

With its love and its life

And its one..slammin' door

 

 

 

I've waited all through the years love

To give you a heart true and real

Cause I know you're living in sorrow

In your loveless mansion on the hill

 

The light shine bright from yer window

The trees stand so silent and still

I know you're alone with your pride dear

In your loveless mansion on the hill

 

 

 

 

This was the Common Sense Engine Company.  Engines of Common Sense.  I guess they ran on pragmatism.

 

 

 

 

(song lyrics from Marah and Hank Williams)

 

 

eerily interesting

By the structural style, I'd say this almost certainly was a flour mill, and it looks like it was run from the hydraulic. That big pipe is big enough to have been the tailwater for a turbine.

 

 

great thread!

....well, they made turbines in Springfield,  as water power kicked off industrialism here, so there was an interest in the technology.

 

According to an old map, this was part of the 'Champion Machine Company", and it appears there was indeed a hydraulic race here, but on the side of the river (Buck Creek) that I am taking the pix from.  Nearly nothing left but foundations.  This was a huge complex by the old maps.  The area was called "Lagonda", sort of an industrial suburb at the time. 

 

I think this may have been built around the 1880s.

 

 

Springfield!

VERY good.

....According to an old map, this was part of the 'Champion Machine Company", and it appears there was indeed a hydraulic race here, but on the side of the river (Buck Creek) that I am taking the pix from.  Nearly nothing left but foundations.  This was a huge complex by the old maps. 

 

Googled this:

Champion farm implements were highly regarded by their owners, and are prized today among collectors & agricultural museums.

 

Pointless idle speculation, but the thirteen-year-old geek in me gets fascinated by such things; maybe they ran a pipe across the creek from the hydraulic race to feed a turbine, hence the big pipe connection. With a head between six and nine feet a turbine can produce an impressive amount of power on a surprisingly modest flow.

 

As electricity entered the industrial environment around the turn of the century, many industries that had direct hydraulic via turbines or wheels installed turbine-driven generators, and replaced the line shafts and belts in their factories with individual motors on machines. There's an 1847 commercial flour mill at Orland, Indiana, that was converted early in the 20th century and still operates that way. They can actually produce more electricity than they need, and they sell the surplus output to the local utility company.

The hydroelectric connection happened here in Dayton in a way.  The old Dayton View hydraulic canal, which was built for waterpower via wheels and turbines, became the source for hydrolectric power for DP&L, the local utiltiy, which built its first generating station on the race, in what is now McKinley Park...that park was orginally the industrial site for the Dayton View Hydraulic, but attracted only a few factories. 

 

The Dayton View Hydraulic was the last built in Dayton at least "sucessfull", was filled in, and is todays Great Miami Bouelevard.

 

Springfield had a three or four hydraulic races...the one at Lagonda, and one that tapped Buck Creek about there and then went downtown, with the tailrace factories near Limestone street (some foundation ruins and one factory survive)..and a creek south and west of downtown (which now runs partly underground through downtown proper) provided waterpower to some early factories, including the first Champion plant just south/southeast of downtown.

Pointless idle speculation, but the thirteen-year-old geek in me gets fascinated by such things;

 

Me too...I am really interested in this old industrial developement and technolgoy.  Hard to find sources though on local things.

 

Linseed oil mills/presss?..run by water power.  An early industry in Dayton..but what did the machinery look like?

 

Rattler rooms in foundries? ..I see these on the Sanborns, but whats a "rattler" in this context?

 

 

 

 

Linseed oil mills/presss?..run by water power.  An early industry in Dayton..but what did the machinery look like?

 

Rattler rooms in foundries? ..I see these on the Sanborns, but whats a "rattler" in this context?

 

Some wild-ass guessing here, because I wasn't able to find anything on Google about rattler rooms except another guy asking the same question.

 

new castings come out with sand adhering, sometimes some scale, and flash, those sharp projecting ridges where some of the iron seeps into a seam in the mold. Sometimes smaller castings (no big stuff like engine blocks or transmission housings) are cleaned up by tumbling them in a cylinder something like a cement mixer, with steel shot or abrasive materials. It's a noisy process. Maybe that's what they're referring to. My brother has some history in the foundry business; I'll ask him if he knows what it is.

 

Sort of speculating again on the linseed oil, but I can visualize something like a cider press, where the pulped apples are placed on a tray covered on both sides with cheesecloth or burlap, and then the tray is placed on a flatbed screw press that resembles Ben Franklin's printing press. The screw can be turned by gears and pawls driven from a mechanical power source, so that it slowly ratchets down, applying increasing pressure. Linseed oil, of course, is extracted from flax seed. They would probably crush or fracture the seeds first with a roller mill like the ones that replaced stone buhrs for grinding flour. Most oil-seed extraction in that era used steam, too, to provide heat to make the oil flow more freely.

 

Hmm. A research project.

Jeff, I think you'd enjoy Coolspring Power Museum, just south of Brookville, PA. It's one of the world's best collections of 19th and early 20th-century internal combustion engines, many Ohio-built, the kind of thing you expect to only see in old illustrations, or at best, broken and incomplete and gathering dust in a local historical museum where nobody knows anything authoritative about them. At Coolspring, they're complete and restored and in buildings, and they run. The engines range in size from coffee-table-sized to beasts the size of a small house. There are hot-air engines and hydrogen-burning German engines from the 1870s that use direct-flame ignition, and beautiful, ornate English-built oil engines, as well as the workaday machines that pumped oil wells and ran feed mills and small factories.

 

The museum is open one weekend a month with some equipment in operation; the best times to go are the expo weekends in June and October, when nearly everything is in operation and there's lots of activity on the grounds.

All this talk about old machinery got me excited!  I took a lot of photos of the river valley area I live in last autumn; there is this very secluded area just to the south of my parents' property along the West Branch Huron River and my sister and I once found this old till machine in the woods.  So on this hot October day, I decided to take a walk and add some pictures of this piece of equipment to my collection.  And don't worry, this is relavant to Springfield, Ohio!

 

First off, here is the area of where I took these pics (just to show how secluded and kind of creepy it is):

 

This area used to be known as Myers Mills, because Adam Myers (born in 1755, fought in the American Revolutionary War) owned this property and ran a ghrist mill (of which no physical traces exist today).

 

It is somewhat hard to tell, but this could have possibly been the old canal that drew water from the river and powered the mill:

 

 

This is a tributary of the river that runs near the southwest edge of the property:

 

 

The piece of old machinery sits (just out of view) on the right of this photo, near old County Line Road, which is nothing more than a grassy overgrown trail through the woods:

 

 

The old till machine:

 

 

Up close:

 

 

It's tough to make out the words, but it reads:

Force Feed / Grain and / Fertilizer / Drill / with / Variable Speed / D. 1796 (the date it was made)

 

 

More writing:

Fertilizer / Grain Drill / Manufactured By / The / Oliver Farm / Equipment / Company / Springfield / Ohio USA

 

 

I love local history and finding old things like this till machine.  I searched on the 'net for the Oliver Farm Equipment Company (no longer in existence, I assume) and couldn't find any info on it.  But nonetheless, I still appreciate the fact that this pioneer-era piece of equipment sits practically in my back yard!

wow what a find very interesting. great thread.

tcjoe, here's a picture of an intact machine very similar to what you discovered. This one is by a different manufacturer, but probably almost identical in appearance:

 

 

The long wood box held seed grain, and a mechanism driven by one wheel metered it out into evenly spaced-rows, where the machine covered it. Often, the box was divided lengthwise into two compartments; one dispensed seed, and the other dispensed fertilizer. The small box below and in front of the larger one was used to dispense seed for hay & pasture crops; often they were planted along with wheat, so that after the wheat was harvested, the pasture crop grew up to take its place.

 

The more I look at your pictures of your find, the more I think it probably perished in a fire. Otherwise, at least some fragments of the wood likely would have remained, especially in the wheels which were often made of ash or hickory. All that remains of the wheels is the iron tire, or band, that provided a wearing surface around the outer perimeter. The whole structure seems to be bent in the middle, too, which could have happened when part of a barn or shed fell on it while it was red hot.

 

It might be fun to poke around with a metal detector and look for building hardware. Perhaps it was in a building that burned on the very spot where it now rests.

That date wouldn't be 1796 would it?  Maybe 1896?

Hoping not to belabor the subject to death, but I asked a friend who's very familiar with Oliver history about this. He said that Oliver bought American Seeding Machine Co. in Springfield in 1929 or 1930, after the merger of Oliver, Hart-Parr and Nichols & Sheppard. They continued to operate the plant until the 1950s, and manufactured their manure spreaders and all their seeding/planting machinery there.

 

I'd guess the date of the grain drill is pretty close to the 1929-1930 purchase by Oliver, because this machine had a then-outdated design with wood wheels. It appears to be early production for Oliver, because all they did was put their name on the American machine. Later versions had all-steel wheels, and by the 1950s they had standard-sized rubber tires and steel boxes for seed and fertilizer.

 

For an excellent, concise overview of Oliver and the companies they acquired, click here.

 

Yeah 1796 is extremely early; I will have to make a closer inspection in May when I'm done with school.  The date may be on the panel opposite the one I took pictures of.  Ooh.....and a thought just popped into my head (uh-oh  :-o ).........there is an old carport-type structure that has old farm equipment just sitting there about a mile or less from this grain drill.  I am gonna check that out, come May, as well. :)

i enjoyed