For more than two years after his resignation as chief engineer and superintendent of transportation of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, Horatio Allen toured England and the continent with his wife and her widowed mother.
A complete record of their years abroad flowed from the tireless pen of Mary Moncrieff Simmons Allen. Her fine, even script fills more than 700 closely written pages in a travel diary one of her granddaughters presented to the Charleston Library Society almost a century later.
Apparently written with a view to later publication, the journal presents a lively and detailed travelogue of Europe, the Near East and North Africa in the early nineteenth century. Disappointingly, it lacks almost completely any personal reference to the Allen family.
Almost, but not quite.
No one can write 700 pages of this sort without leaving between the lines a wealth of clues to her own personality and the family's interests. Her travel diary reveals Mrs. Allen as a woman of courage and character with a keen mind, strong convictions and a degree of self-confidence unusual in a sheltered young lady of twenty-three.
An old lithograph showing the Novelty Works (at the foot of 12th Street, New York City), operated by StilIman, Allen and Company, in which Horatio Allen was a partner and an officer. (The colored lithograph is the property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is on loan to the Museum of the City of New York.) |
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She shared, or was wise enough to seem to share, her husband's consuming interest in things scientific and mechanical. In England, for example, the AlIens spent a great deal of time at iron foundries, cotton and silk mills, glass and china plants, machinery works and locomotive factories. At Killingsworth, near the locomotive works at Newcastle, the ladies donned long cotton gowns over their traveling clothes. Against the advice of the mine superintendent they made with Horatio Allen the 900-f00t descent by wooden basket into the midnight depths of a coal mine.
Not that they overlooked the tourist attractions of the places they visited. In London they roamed the city with avid eyes and ears-soaking up the sights and sounds all the way from the Tower, Waterloo Bridge and Kensington Gardens to the narrow, crooked streets where near-beggars sold shabby furniture and half-worn shoes.
Traveling by railroad and stagecoach the AlIens toured the countryside, stopping often at the great manor houses that were almost museums of fine furniture and art treasures.
By late fall of 1835 they were in France. Miserable weather kept them in their Paris lodgings most of the winter of 1835-36 but the milder days of spring sent them on through the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
As 1836 drew to a close, they followed the Danube River to the Black Sea and Constantinople, crossed to the Asiatic coast and back to Greece. They spent the winter along the Nile and the spring of 1837 in Italy. Retracing their route through the principal cities of Europe, the Allens embarked for home that fall.
Allen, who must have grown restless after two years of professional inactivity, found opportunity waiting. His friend and former chief John B. Jervis had a project under way worthy of his talents-a water supply system for the growing city of New York.
Not long after his return Allen became principal assistant engineer of the Croton Aqueduct project. During the times Jervis had to be absent from the construction work, Allen acted as chief engineer.
New York's first large scale water supply system was five years in the making. Forty-five miles up the Hudson River valley, a dam built across the Croton River trapped 500 million gallons of water in a 400 acre reservoir. The overflow, 35 million gallons a day, was to be channeled south to the thirsty city through masonry aqueducts and cast iron pipes.
The aqueduct followed the Hudson River valley, crossing roads, streams and valleys on 114 culverts. It spanned the Harlem River on a quarter-mile-long bridge. (At the time, Horatio Allen recommended putting a tunnel under the river, a plan followed years later when the city's water system was enlarged.)
Reports by several writers indicate that when the aqueduct was completed in June, 1842, Allen had the honor of turning on the water for the first time. (A detailed contemporary account of the completion celebration does not mention this.) It is certain, however, that he received an appointment in 1844 as one of the five city water commissioners.
A combination of circumstances brought Horatio Allen in October, 1843, to the presidency of the New York and Erie Railroad.
The line planned to extend from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes was halted for lack of financing, with less than 65 miles actually completed. Allen's keen interest in railroads generally became directed to this particular project in part at least because his uncle, James Brown, was one of the Erie's directors. His success in South Carolina had added greatly to Allen's professional reputation in railroad circles.
A historian Edward H. Mott of the Erie puts it in his massive work Between the Ocean and the Lakes, "in the critical emergency to which Erie affairs were brought in 1843, friends of the company appealed to Horatio Allen as one perhaps most capable of saving the work from the fate that confronted it."
Allen did save it-but his contribution was not readily apparent during the year that he served as president. Facing a problem of finances rather than engineering, Allen acted with vigor but without the sure professional touch that always characterized his approach to problems in his own field.
Two of his plans failed completely-one to have the city of New York subscribe the necessary $3 million worth of stock to complete the road, and another for a popular subscription of $6 million in new stock to have first demand on a 6 per cent dividend.
A third plan-which proposed that 200 persons furnish the $6 million with a priority dividend of 7 1/2 per cent - met with only limited success. Discouraged, Allen and his board resigned on October 23, 1844.
But interest in the project had been revived, and the 1849 board of directors acknowledged theirs and the public's debt to the Allen board "for commencing the work of resuscitation."
In 1846 the New York state legislature appointed Horatio Allen chairman and John B. Jervis a member of a commission to enquire into the route of the Erie with a view to possible changes in the portion not yet completed. Three years later Allen was named consulting engineer for the Erie. By the time the road reached the Great Lakes, he was chief engineer.
President Millard Fillmore and Senators Stephen A. Douglas and Daniel Webster were among the dignitaries who accompanied officers of the company on a first-run celebration of the opening of the line from New York City to Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie, in May, 1851. Allen joined them in addressing the jubilant crowds from the balcony of the Loder House at Dunkirk at the end of the 4-day celebration.
Soon after his resignation as president of the Erie, Horatio Allen undertook the major independent business venture of his career. Late in 1844 he became a partner in the firm of Stillman, Stratton and Allen, who operated the Novelty Iron Works in New York. (The company owed its origin and its name to a college president who invented a stove and steam boiler for burning anthracite coal. To prove his invention practical, he had built a small steamboat called the Novelty, which ran from New York to Harlem. He docked the boat at night at a landing at the foot of Twelfth Street, where he built a small shed and kept a few tools for repairs. Gradually the shop was enlarged and came to be known as "the Novelty's Works." Thomas B" Stillman had acquired the property and used it as a small machine works.)
Horatio Allen's entrance into the firm seemed to fire it with new vigor. Business expanded rapidly in a number of directions-metal mill work, stationary and marine engines, sugar mill machinery, steam fire engines, hydraulic presses and others.
The firm expanded again in 1847 under the title Stillman, Allen and Company and rapidly became the largest establishment in the country for the building of marine engines. Side-wheelers powered by engines from the Novelty Works roamed sea lanes all around the globe. The Adriatic, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and Baltic of the old Collins Line; the Constitution, the Moses Taylor, Ancon, Mariposa, Great Republic, Idaho, Montana, Golden Age arid Golden Gate of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company-all carried engines produced at the Novelty Works.
At one time more than 1,500 men swarmed around the "U" shaped cluster of buildings at the foot of Twelfth Street. Finding qualified men proved so difficult that Allen made his third trip abroad to employ a number of European artisans and bring them back.
Under Allen's guidance as president, the reputation of the Novelty Works increased. Their marine engines came to l1e acknowledged as the best in use, and several foreign governments contracted with the firm for machinery. Two large warships built for the Italian government were equipped with the firm's engines.
During the Civil War Allen's firm built engines for three gunboats, for the sloops Adirondack and Wampanoag, and two of the double-turreted monitor-type ironclads-Mianotomah and Roanoke. (Roanoke. was one of the five Union frigates that received the first attack of the Confederate ironclad Merrimac, or Virginia, at Hampton Roads in March, 1862. It was later rebuilt as an ironclad.)
Further evidence of the esteem in which Allen was held as an engineer and builder may be found in the government's 1863 appointment of Horatio Allen and the Novelty Works to conduct a series of experiments in the relative economy of using steam pressure at various degrees of expansion. After five years and an expenditure of $100,000 the Navy ordered the tests discontinued, but the firm conducted experiments further at its own expense.
Though the Novelty Works hummed busily throughout the war years, the firm prospered little financially. Working on contracts at fixed prices, in a period when wages and material costs were constantly rising, the company never knew with any certainty where the final delivery of their products would leave them financially.
When war's end cut off the flow of government work, Stillman, Allen and Company-and Horatio Allen personally-faced a difficult decision. Overhead and fixed expenses for a machinery works of that size were large, and the amount of business dishearteningly small. The company was operating at a loss. Unless their out-of-date tools and machinery could be rebuilt or replaced (at a considerable outlay of capital) the firm had little chance of ever crossing to the profit side of the ledger again.
Allen, in his late sixties, must have viewed with dismay the prospect of making what would almost be a new start. Like most businesses, the Novelty Works had known its periods of prosperity and also times of heavy losses. But it did have one valuable asset the real estate on which the shop stood had greatly increased in value. It was decided to close the Works, wind up the business and sell the property. In 1870 the Novelty Works ceased to exist, and Horatio Allen retired from active business life to a newly-built home near South Orange, N. J.
Allen's last professional engineering project was his service as head of a board of consulting engineers appointed to study the practicality and safety of a wire cable suspension bridge across the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
After months of study, the group advised the builders the strength of cable that would be required, how the strands of wire should be twisted and joined, and how the cables should be coated with boiled linseed oil and paint for protection against the weather. (Note: the Brooklyn Bridge is still there, unimpaired by time and usage.)
Allen's "retirement" was short lived. In 1871, his professional colleagues elected him president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a post he filled for two busy years in which the Society was expanded in membership and in services.
A prolific inventor all his life, Horatio Allen was a frequent customer of the u. S. Patent Office between 1841 and 1879. He obtained 17 patents, principally for steam engines, valve gear, cut-offs, tubing connections and stop-cocks, but two of them were for railroad car seats and couches, and sleeping cars.
One of the most important railroad developments he made he never patented. It was the double truck locomotive with movable trucks designed in 1830 for the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company.
In October, 1834, Ross Winans of Baltimore obtained a patent for eight-wheeled cars with movable trucks. In 1838 he brought suit against a railroad for using cars containing his patented improvement. It was the first move in a series of suits against railroads that lasted 20 years before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroads in 1858. Loss of the suits could have cost the railroads millions of dollars. in penalty payment for unauthorized use of Winans' improvements.
Testimony by Allen and those who had worked with him on the South Carolina road figured importantly in the court trials. And in the course of the litigation, one U. S. Circuit Judge gave this opinion:
"In addition to the 'Quincy car,' the defendants have furnished a model and drawing of the eight wheeled steam carriage, devised and constructed by Horatio Allen, and put in operation in February, 1832, on the South Carolina railroad. "
"The drawings were made in the winter of 1830 and 1831. A few of these carriages were running on the road before the close of the year 1833.
"This car was therefore devised and completed in working order by Allen prior to the patent of Winans, and indeed prior to the perfection of his improvement preparatory to obtaining the patent. This steam carriage embraces all the elements, arrangements and organization to be found in the cars manufactured by the defendants. .."
In an account of Allen's life published in 1890, M. N. Forney points out that "it was the early adoption of swiveling-trucks for both locomotives and cars in this country which has so materially 'differentiated' American railroad practice from that in other countries, and to Mr. Allen belongs the credit of having had the prescience to see, and the courage to put into practice, what are now recognized as essential principles in railroad construction."
At the close of his term as president of A. S. C. E., Horatio Allen began a new career-as a snowy-haired "grandfather, eyes twinkling merrily behind his spectacles, who always seemed to be interested in what a child thought and what he wanted to learn. Always devoted to his family, he enjoyed to the full the almost unlimited time he could now spend with his wife, his son, his three daughters and his grandchildren.
But until his death on January 1, 1890, he maintained a lively interest in engineering, scientific subjects and railroads. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, he served as president of one of the groups of judges of mechanical exhibits. In 1883 he went to Chicago to address the National Exposition of Railway Appliances.
Much of his time was occupied with the study of methods of teaching mathematics and astronomy to children. He wrote textbooks on both subjects and devised several instruments to aid the elementary study of astronomy. His last patent, in 1879, was for a terrestrial globe.
He found time, too, to write about his experiences in the days when he and railroads were young, a monograph published in 1884 entitled "The Railroad Era, First Five Years of Its Development." In it he mentioned all too briefly a visit to the canal bank scene of the run of the "Stourbridge Lion" a half century earlier.
Still hearty at 80, he walked the track alone in the sunlit early morning, with nothing to distract him from the memories and speculations that came welling up. He did not say what they were-he only said they were there.
Imagination supplies them with ease-the teakettle of a locomotive he drove across a creaking trestle, the road he built so long ago across the low country from Charleston to Hamburg, the engines he designed, the timetable and accounts he sweated over for that fledgling South Carolina road, the disappointment and triumphs between the Atlantic and the Lakes, and the miracle of a nation built and unified by steel rails in little more than 50 years.
Railroads knew Horatio Allen as a builder, one of the earliest and most able.
Engineers knew him as a talented, inventive member of the profession.
His friends and family knew him as a gentleman in the best sense of the word-honest, generous, affectionate and kind.
During and after his lifetime Allen received many honors. Both the South Carolina Road. and the Delaware and Hudson named locomotives for him. He received an honorary degree of LL.D. from New York University in 1857. When Columbia University in 1929 selected four outstanding pioneer engineer graduates, he was one of the four.
Much could be said of Horatio Allen but nothing that would do him justice more than this:
The iron road he built-the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company-is still' living thing, growing and serving beyond even his far-seeing hopes for it.
In the growth of these early rail lines into a 220,000-mile network of steel rails across a continent, his influence continued to be felt.
This is the monument of the young engineer who staked his career on an experiment of great promise, the legacy of a man on art iron road.