The Magic of Alpha Portland Cement Plant
See how a German town reclaimed an old factory to become a museum.
Most folks, now living in Jamesville, view the abandoned Alpha Portland Cement Plant factory complex as an eyesore, a polluted place. But for me it is a place of memories. I worked there as a kid, during World War II. There was a labor shortage. Most able bodied men were in the services. For me, Alpha was not only a place to earn money, it was an amazing place, a place where my imagination soared.
Once I started this tome, I began to share it, as it developed, with friends and relatives, who were associated with the “Plant” too. Some of them were: brother Russ Reals; my Best Man and former Jamesville Postmaster, Bill Hopkins; Greg Titus; and Joan Garlow Brayman. Russ informed me that I had worked at both the “Old and New” Plant. It seems that things began to change to a newer technology, during my working years at Alpha, the late 40s and early 50s. Russ worked there right out of school, 1955, until the Plant closed in 1980. Bill worked there right out of high school in 1947, until John (Jack) Kennedy became president in 1961. Postmaster jobs were political appointments, way back then. Greg worked there during his summer vacation while in college. After graduating from Leigh University in ‘72, he worked there until the Plant closed. Joan never worked there, but was well aware of the Plant’s presence in the community. She’s lived in Jamesville since 1941. She sometimes ruminates that a lot of the cancer, the community’s long time residents endure, could have been caused by the dust from the Cement Plant. I know my mother often had to re-rinse her laundry, when a train from Solvay Quarry was delivering stone to the Alpha Portland Factory. It would regurgitate a ton of coal dust from the smoke stack of the locomotive onto her white sheets hanging on the backyard clothes line. My Uncle Stoney (Clarence) Casselberry was the happy brakeman on that train, dangling on one foot from the ladder on the last car. I’m sure others will wish to comment on this essay too. Feel free! We may have the making of another booklet for the Jamesville Community Museum.
The first section of the factory, where I began my labor, was the Stone House. I remember how cold it was. All buildings at Alpha were opened to the outside air, not a furnace for heat in the place, except the Wash House. My after-school job were during the fall or winter, when the Plant needed help. The Stone House was where we unloaded those huge black DL&W railroad cars, which were filled with the limestone from the Solvay Quarry. You had to open the hatches at the bottom of the car with a creaking lever. My imagination thought they were like a huge cow’s udder. It was a struggle to opening them. You had to get into the cold car, feeding with a short handled shovel, the stone down the opening onto a conveyer belt. When a car was emptied of its cargo, the empty hulk had to be moved, and another load moved in place. A special large hand cranked lever was used for the move. Sometimes I was the guy, who had to put shovels-full of shale on the belt along with the limestone. There was a required ratio of limestone to shale. The stone was gray, hard, a little smaller than a lemon. The shale was darker, almost black, and flaky.
The shale came from a small quarry on Gates Road, where my Uncle Blonde and Mike Torak sometimes worked. They used large equipment to mine the shale, and load it onto trucks, which carried it to the main plant. There had been another Shale Quarry behind the Albanese Farm on Apulia Road. After Alpha got all the good stuff out of the hill, they just left the hole. Eventually vegetation grew over it, but it still is like a dent on the side of Jones Mountain. That large hill at the end of Butternut Crick Valley, which is named after one of my ancestor families, the Jones, who came directly from Wales to Jamesville in the mid 19th century.
In 1933 my folks moved to the south-side of the Alpha house at 4723 North Street, Jamesville, NY. The house is also referred to as the Jackson House. It was the very first frame house built in the hamlet of Jamesville. The house was rented by my grandmother Mertie Hotaling Reals. She had lived in it for many, many years. It had been her boarding house for Alpha Portland employees, during Alpha’s heyday, which began long before I was born. I know she was living there in 1910. She was often a single mom, because her husband Clarence would abandon her for long periods at a time, leaving her without support. That boarding house provided a living for grandma, her eight children, her two brothers, and her dad, Walter Houghtaling.
Walter and the boys, Lester and Clifford, became a part of the family, when grandma’s mother, Ida Madison Houghtaling, died in 1903 at age 38. At that time in 1903, Mertie, Clarence and their first set of twins, Belle and Bessie, were living with her folks. Walter and Ida lived there in the late 19th Century, because Walter worked transporting stone from the quarry to the plant in a small dump wagon pulled by the horse named Patsy. The place is the little house, where Pete Torak now lives, at the corner of Solvay Road and North Street. The address is 4714 North Street. The house belonged to Alpha Portland Cement Company at that time. Before the Plant closed, they sold off all their houses, as did the Solvay Quarry. The Torak Family bought the place. The property borders the new Fiddlers Green Park.
By the time we moved into the south-side of the Jackson House, grandma was renting the entire place for $15.00 per month. When the house was full, there may have been as many as fifteen boarders, plus family and relatives. In '33, the Great Depression time, there wasn’t a lot of work, she had only two boarders. She sublet the south-side to my parents for $7.50 a month, pretty cheap rent even in those times. It wasn't much of a place though, sort of a Pullman type apartment with a woodshed, kitchen, dining room and living room on the first floor. There were two bedrooms on the second floor, with slanted ceilings, not much over six feet in height. The only running water was at the kitchen sink, and it was cold. We heated what hot water we needed in a large tank on the side of the cook stove. It was a beamouth of light green enamel with a black steel top. At first we burned wood, which my dad and his friends cut from the woods behind the Cement Plant. That wood was split to fit into both the cook stove in the kitchen, and the pot bellied stove, which heated the living room at the other end of the house. Later we converted the cook stove to heating oil, kerosene. It was home to me from age four until age nineteen, when I was at Syracuse University as a second-semester freshman.
I shall always remember the house dance that warm Spring day, when my folks took up lodging at 4723 North Street. Before the furniture was carried in, they had a dance. I don’t remember exactly who made the music or did the calling, but there was music, and they square danced. The music was probably a harmonica, and maybe a Jews harp or fiddle. They had a rollicking good time. I stayed in the front yard. In those twelve by twelve rooms with all those rip roaring adults, I wouldn't have stood a chance. I may have been trampled.
The limestone, sprinkled with shale, in the Stone House, was mixed a bit, and stored in a tank at the back of the House. From there it was transported by belt to the Ball Mill. Huge iron balls ground the mixture into a fine powder. I shall always remember Old Paul Torak sitting, repairing the Ball Mill. The machine looked like a very large bulging milk can. When it ran it roared and shook. The Plant was a very noisy place. Every machine rattled, roared, clanked, squeaked. The machines were forever breaking down. Sometimes you thought the breakdowns were intentional, for there was a large staff of repairmen. They had to have something to do. The oiler’s tasks was to keep the machinery lubricated with oil and grease. The lubrication was intended to keep the machines moving bearings working.
Sometimes I was assigned to that good job as an oiler. It was a plum job, because you only had to go around, and lubricate the bearings every so often, like every two hours. In between times you could sleep, during a night shift. Usually you’d find a pile of old paper bags, make yourself a nest, and catch a bit of shuteye, until you were required to go the rounds again. Sometimes a go-around might be missed, if you forgot to wake-up. My sense was that the missed lubrications often caused a machine to break down, making more work for Old Paul.
Old Paul was a very robust man, father of ten kids. He looked like a giant Buddha sitting on the bottom shelf of the Ball Mill, as he aimlessly worked fixing the machine with appropriately sized tools, wrenches, bars, and other specialized tools. Some of his sons also worked at the plant. Mike worked at the Plant’s quarry, Steve was a foreman. Andy was a laborer. Andy was my age. The boys quit school at sixteen to work at the Plant.
Paul lived down the hill from the Plant in a Company house, where Pete, his son still lives. Paul’s oldest daughter was my Aunt Anna, who was married to my mother’s brother Rudy Streiff. Their youngest daughter Sharon Streiff Ginther wrote this about her grandfather Paul: “Grandma Mary Torak was born in Syracuse of Russian immigrants. My Grandpa Torak was a kind fella. He would walk home from work at the end of the day and would have a licorice pipe (with the red dots on the top) for me. I waited on those 2 or 3 small, cement steps in the front of the house next to the road. He and his brother Peter were stowed away on a boat when they were young to come to America to escape a draft for a war in their homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They never saw their parents again. The older brother settled in or around Elizabeth PA. Home for them was Galicia, Austria. His official papers indicate that his original last name was ten plus letters long with no vowels.”
When Sam worked at the Plant he too lived in the little house at 4714 North Street. It was just across the street from the Jackson House, where I lived. I often played with his many children. I remember that the boys constructed large tunnels in their back yard out of cardboard, It was a fun experience crawling in an out of the maze. Violet was my age. We played Ring around the Rosie in the front yard. My grandmother Mertie was a great friend of Mrs. Blackman, and even helped deliver some of her many kids.
Even though I only worked at the Plant during the late 40s and early ‘50s, I was aware of its presence since I was a child. I grew up in Jamesville. When Sam Blackman and I began to work in the Raw Mill the mixture of limestone, shale and sometimes sand, was fed into the kiln dry. Once the new kiln was installed, the mixture became wet, a slurry.
The slurry was blown into the kiln, which was like a silo on its side. It was probably three hundred feet in length and ten feet in diameter. A man could stand up in it, as he re-fire bricked its interior. Ground up coal was also blown into the kiln. It was a burning inferno. The kiln burner was the elite guy at the Plant. It was his job to burn the slurred mixture into small balls called clinkers. It was these clinkers, which were mixed with gypsum, and pulverized into cement. Without the gypsum the finished product was mortar, which is used for laying-up cement blocks. Mortar was a sometime product of the Plant, according to the demand.
I was not allowed to operate the kiln. It required a specialize know-how. I’m pretty sure that Les Marsh was brought to Jamesville, from an Alpha Plant in Pennsylvania, to do the “first light” of the kiln, and instruct the other new kiln burners. Driving on US Route 81 over the high plateau of Pennsylvania, you can see active cement plants along the way. My grandmother Mertie Reals’s longtime border Johnny Calabria was an excellent kiln burner. Johnny came to Jamesville at eighteen from Reggio Calabria, Italy with a cousin. Both of them found work at the Plant, prior to World War I. Both were drafted from my grandmother’s boarding house. Johnny returned after serving, and automatically became an American citizen. He lived with grandma until her death in 1968. Johnny spent his final years, till age 97, with grandma’s youngest daughter Aunt Ida and her husband Uncle Fritz Feldmann.
The kiln was a mysterious hulk, rotating and roaring. The kiln burner had to wear tinted glasses to look into its white hot interior. He used all kinds of knobs and gages to keep the temperature just right, and the slurry moving at a controlled speed down the throat of this dragon monster. The clinkers came tumbling out the opposite end like five inch warted gray marbles, onto piles.
The gypsum came to the Plant in railroad cars, similar to those bringing the limestone from Solvay Quarry. I never found out who emptied those cars. The gypsum was in piles near the Finishing Mill, near the clinker piles. The process of scooping up the clinkers and gypsum was the job of a crane operator, which was also a specialized job. I expect they earned more money too. I think the pecking order at the Plant was something like this: The Superintendent Ted Boyne was the top man. His office was a distance from the banging and clanging noise of the factory. There was a Foreman for every shift. Harry Stacer, Steve Torak, and for a while, Bill Hopkins were a few of the foremen, I can remember. The kiln burner, the crane operators, the repairmen, came next in line, and then there were the generalized workers, the laborers, like me. I was seldom elevated above the general worker status. Although, I think the oilers were considered a step above the general workers. I did get that duty a couple times. I think I was paid more, when I was classified as an oiler?
I don’t remember the year I first noticed Ted Boyne’s wife. She was a petite, very well dressed French woman with black hair. She looked like Coco Chanel. Her face was, as they would say, "made-up, " but she was not pretty to my eyes. She drove a shinny new car, and had a white French poodle, clipped to perfection. It had pom pons on tail and legs. Its body and face were clipped too. She’d walk the dog around the car, while she waited for Ted. No one I knew had a French poodle. I imagined it cost more to keep that dog, than my folks spent on me. She was not of our class. She was a very sophisticated lady. She never spoke to me. Ted would come down the hill, and off they’d go. It was told that Ted’s salary was $25,000.00 a year. At that time, in the ‘30s, most men weren’t making a dollar an hour at the factory. For me, twenty-five thousands dollars was an astronautical sum. I thought to myself, “If I grow up and make that sum, I’ll be a rich man.” I had not yet heard the word inflation.
Another person, who stands out in my mind from those times, was my foreman, Harry Stacer. Harry lived on Siawassia Street. He was married to Loretta Bogan. They had three children, Tom, Jimmy and Mary. Harry was a good boss. He left you alone, if you were doing your job. In fact he worked right along with all the rest of us. He repaired things which needed fixing, anything to keep the Plant running. He was a real chain smoker. He’d light the next one before the last one went out. There was always a "cig" hanging from his lips. Certainly the smoke and the dust contributed to his early death of lung cancer and cancer of the mouth. He was a gentle man, a good man, a man of few words. It could be said, "He gave his life to the Alpha Portland Cement Company!"
After the cement was completed it was stored in gigantic silos, from which the cement was either sent from the Plant in closed cement railroad cars or in bags loaded into box cars. I did that a few times. Boy, were you tired after a day of stacking those heavy sacks box car high.
I did get to work in the bag room, at least once. It was quite a hectic job. You had to be extremely agile and alert, because the cement would flow into the bags from hoses. You had to know when to quickly move a full bag to the place where it was fastened closed. Some bags were paper, others were cloth. Don’t ask me why? There was a stitching machine, which automatically stitched each bag, as it was shifted from the hose to the stitcher. It was so dusty that you wore a nose cover. In-fact it was almost a requirement to wear a nose cover in most of the buildings at the Plant. Some of the areas were so dense with dust that you could hardly see in front of your nose.
When Jim Blizzard and I were in college, we spent our summer working at Alpha. Our job was to hoe out the silos. If you noticed, the silos have ladders up to the roofs. About a quarter of the way up, there is a little platform, which is not much bigger that four by three feet triangle, just enough room for two people to stand, side-by-side. Next to the platform is a small door. The interior of the silo was through that door. That summer there was a great demand for cement, which the Plant was hard, put to fill. So, Jim and I were required to go into the silos, one at a time. We’d wear a harness with a rope, which was held by the person on the ledge. We used very, very long handled hoes to scrape the cement off the walls into the hole, which went to the Bagging Room where it was packed for shipment. It was kind of fun sitting on that perch at the side of the silo. We did a lot of philosophizing too.
The Shop was where the tool maker worked. It was his job to fabricate any part of a machine, which need fixing. Charlie Wood was a longtime machinist. Les Pelcher was the last in that job, so I’m told. Charlie was a distant cousin. He was a wonderful man. There are many stories about him, but that is in the Reals Family Story I’m attempting to write for the Museum. His grandmother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister.
Jim Keech was the Sample Boy. His domain was the basement of the Office House. He had a series of scales, beakers, and other scientific paraphernalia to work with. He’d come down to the dusty plant with his little bucket, which looked like a paint can, to get his samples. The cement was tested for all sorts of qualities, strength, elasticity, and whatever. I only visited his place a few times, but one knew from his operation that the Plant’s operation was scrutinized.
Alpha provided a Wash House for the men. That place, and those showers provided sort of a right-of-passage for the young boys living around the Plant. Most of the homes did not have bathrooms or showers. When you were small, your mother bathed you, once a week, in the wash tub in the center of the kitchen, using the hot water from the cook stove tank. Once you were old enough, you could go to the Wash House for your showers. Life was sort of convenient with Alpha Portland Cement Plant around! There was a distinctive smell to the Wash House. It was sort of like cement slurry with Lifeboy soap. The building was made entirely of concrete with metal lockers for each man. The floors were shiny, and could be slippery. There was a foot bath with Clorox into the shower room. The single louvered windows were made of metal webbed translucent glass.
Now, what to do with what is left of the deserted Alpha Portland Plant? It looks like the plan to use it as a coal gasification site has been stopped. There is some rumor that it can be completely torn down, and developed into a planned community, with houses and shops. Wouldn’t it be nice to make the silos into condos? I'd enjoy a round penthouse! Another idea came to me during my 2004 European tour. In Saarbrücken, Germany they have a factory museum. It isn’t your typical museum, but is an actual old factory, which has been made safe for visitors, with captions about the manufacturing process. Please take a look at their website: http://www.voelklinger-huette.org/en/welcome/ They’re having a big celebration at the site, Spring ‘09 , which you may wish to attend. Wouldn’t it be nice to save some of Our Alpha, as a reminder of Jamesville’s Industrial Past? Lest we forget, Jamesville has been the home of industry, since Butternut Crick was discovered by the first settlers. The creek was lined with mills. I’m not sure we could do anything as grand as Germany, but . . . . Our Hamlet has a past, which is part of America’s past. It may not all have been good, but hopefully we can learn from it.