The Kingston Water Works and the King of Coal



When Coal was King; The Nineteenth Century Kingston Water Works

By Henk Wevers

In the latter part of 1890, the Osborne-Killey Mfg. Co. from Hamilton finished the installation of a steam driven municipal water pump at the Kingston Water Works Co., located on Ontario Street at West Street. Soon the steam engine and the water pump would be tested on its performance. The efficiency in pumping potable water to the cistern located at the junction of Barrie and Colbourne, 70-feet above the lake level, was an important requirement in the contract between the company and the City of Kingston. No wonder, therefore, that Mr. Worswick, representing the company, wrote to the City Engineer on November 1, 1890.[1]

“Dear Sir,

As the engines will shortly be ready to run a test, we would like you to kindly supply sufficient Lehigh lump coal.

Yours Truly, Osborne Worswick.”

The outcome of the test would be affected by the amount of heat energy per bushel of coal and therefore it was important that the boilers should be stoked with the best coal available. The Lehigh lump coal, clean burning anthracite, the “king of coal”, was of the highest quality mined in the Pennsylvania coalfields and exported since 1870 from Oswego and later also from Rochester, NY, to the Canadian side of Lake Ontario.

On December 22, 1890, Mr. Worswick wrote again, but now more forcefully, to the City Engineer regarding the quality of coal.[2] Was there something amiss with the outcome of the test run?

“Dear Sir,

Since my return I have had a conference with Mr. Wm. Osborne regarding the quality of coal to be used for the test for the duty of the engine. He says that he insisted that the coal to be used should be the very best Lehigh lump coal. It appears this was fully discussed at the time and agreed upon. You will therefore please see to it that a sufficient quantity of that coal be procured in time for the test, and oblige,

Yours Truly, … (unreadable)… Worswick”

The “test for duty” was a performance test originating at the time of the earliest steam engines, designed by Newcomen, and later Watt, in Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is the amount of water, measured in pounds, which can be lifted one foot with one bushel of coal. A bushel of coal contains a certain amount of heat energy, depending on the quality of coal; the energy is freed during combustion. Lifting a certain volume of water one-foot, at a known pressure, represents mechanical work. The mechanical work divided by the input of heat energy is a measure of the performance or efficiency of a mechanical device. While the pressure and volume of water at the Kingston Water Works could be precisely measured with relative simple tools, the energy in a bushel of coal was less well defined, both in volume and in quality of the coal. Witness the exchange of letters regarding the latter between the company and the city.

According to one document the duty of the Osborne-Killey pump ought to be hundred million foot-pounds per bushel of coal, and the acceptance test was successful; the Osborne-Killey engine and water pump delivered 105 million foot-pounds per bushel of coal, five percent better than the contract requirement.[3] In another document published on the museum’s website, it states that this 105 million foot-pound achievement was an incentive for the company to meet and the company would receive en extra payment of five hundred dollars if they succeeded. [4] However, in a report for the Public Utilities Commission of the City of Kingston, the duty was defined as hundred million foot-pounds per 100 pounds of coal and this duty was never attained.[5]

Since a bushel of coal is between 74 and 80 pounds, depending on the source of information, there is a wide discrepancy between the three reports regarding the amount of coal used and the outcome of the test. It is probably safe to conclude that the outcome of the test in 1890 was below expectation, but good enough not to trigger action by the City against the manufacturer.

Since this historic moment in the life of the Kingston Water Works and until the late 1950s, massive amounts of anthracite have been consumed not only by the Kingston Water Works, but also by industries along Ontario Street: the public institutions west along the water front; Queen’s University; Kingston General Hospital; the penitentiary; and the asylum at the most western edge of town. Each of these had coal docks near the lakeshore and stockpiled anthracite. Large stockpiles of coal were also located downtown, at the gas plant where softer, more bituminous, coal was used to produce the “town-gas” for street lighting, as early as 1847.5 There were coal piles at the electrical power plant on Queen Street, and beside the Kingston Water Works, now the parking lot at the foot of West Street that served the Kingston Water Works, Figure 1 a and b are watercolor sketches by the late Nan Yeomans[6] made in 1950 when she participated in the Queen’s Summer School of Fine Arts. These watercolor sketches give a true impression of the industrial nature of the waterfront along Ontario Street.

Statistics of the coal trade at that time are sparse or non-existent. Newspapers provide information about specific shipments and trends but no longer term annual data. To get a better idea of the importance of coal energy in the late 1800s the Kingston fire insurance maps of 1892[7] show in detail more than 14 large coal docks and wharfs, and many coal sheds with adjacent storage space. Prominent among them are the East Side Simcoe, Locomotive, Swift’s, Baker’s, Folger and Hanley’s, Atlantic and Crawford’s wharf as well as the Gas and Electric Works, the Water Works, and several institutional coal storage areas. From the total coal shed and wharf surface area indicated on these maps it can be estimated that there is between 60,000 and 100,000 tons of coal storage capacity within the city limits, not counting the varying private and small business supplies.

Where did the coal, soft and mostly hard coal, or anthracite, come from?

Starting in 1871 when the railroads in Pennsylvania and New York reached north to the shore of Lake Ontario, first at Oswego and later Rochester, the first anthracite was shipped from Oswego by schooner. Later bulk transport was by steamboat across the lake and then by rail on the Canadian side of the lake, to Kingston’s coal docks. Before 1871 in Eastern Ontario, mostly wood was used to heat and cook, while soft coal for town gas and industrial applications came from New Brunswick and the United Kingdom. [8] When the railroads from the mines in West Virginia and other states in the USA were finally linked up to the northern spurs, they also could supply the Canadian market with bituminous coal.

One of the many coal-schooners is shown in Figure 2 docked at the Kingston Water Works, the lower part of its sails blackened by coal dust. This photo was taken after 1918 since at that time, an extension was built at the rear of the original Romanesque pump house building, to accommodate electrically driven centrifugal pumps, which complemented the steam driven pumps. The extension can be seen in the photo. Schooners like this were displaced by steam driven freighters, which started plying Lake Ontario in the early part of the nineteenth century; by 1841, according to Barker’s Canadian Magazine, “There are ten daily first class steamers running to and from Kingston, and about thirty smaller steamers…and a fleet of two hundred schooners and sailing barges.”[9]

A bill of lading, Figure 3, issued by Arthur G. Yates on July 22, 1885, for the schooner Annandale with Robert Crawford, a coal merchant for more than thirty years in Kingston, as consignee, shows how the coal freight was conducted. Yates was a major coal merchant, who had established a dock for coal barges bringing the Lehigh Valley coal to Charlotte near Rochester, later, in 1883, he built a coal trestle to permit loading of his barges from the new Buffalo-Rochester railway by gravity fed chutes. From the barges, the coal would be transferred to the coal-schooners. Yates’ business rivaled the coal export from Oswego, an otherwise much more important port on the south side of Lake Ontario.[10] To put this in context, in 1890 the port of Rochester shipped 350,000 tons of coal and only 18,300 tons of industrial and agricultural exports. Oswego shipped as much coal and much more general merchandise, industrial and agricultural products; as early as 1838 Oswego boasted 6,582 boat tonnages, while Rochester only had 408 tons, Buffalo had then 9,615 boat tonnage. It can be seen that the coal export from Rochester grew very fast, catching up with those of Oswego, once the railroads reached the port in 1883; other exports remained of little importance as the ports of Oswego and Buffalo offered many natural and competitive advantages.

The 1885 Yates bill of lading shows a contract totaling 33,513 tons of coal, going to R. Crawford of Kingston, with 376 tons shipped by the Annandale on this voyage. Crawford was only one coal merchant, albeit a prominent one, there was also Anglin and Co., and Swift and Co., to name just two other rivals. To ship these large quantities of coal one can imagine the constant arrival and departures of coal schooners at Kingston’s many coal docks.

The work was dirty, tiring, and boring since these coal-schooners did nothing else than sailing back and forth between Oswego or Rochester NY and cities on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario.

Bob Crothers, a multi generational citizen of our city, sailed as a teenager during the mid 1930s on a coal boat, the “Pat-Doris”, a steam driven freighter that hauled several times per week coal from Oswego, NY, to Kingston. The boat was about hundred fifty feet long, built in the UK and owned by local businessmen and coal merchants: Crawford and Swift. Pat was one of the daughters of the Swift family, and yes; Doris was a daughter of the Crawford family. There were several more boats making the coal run across the Lake Ontario.

Bob describes the work on coal boats in his own words.

“She was a fasts boat, she could run 22 miles per hour and it took her usually two hours to cross the lake from Oswego to Kingston. The crew, except for the captain and one or two older sailors, were local teenage boys. Most of us lasted only a week. The loading at Oswego was fast, she was a bulk carrier and the coal was dumped from the coal trestles through chutes into the hold. That did not take more than a few hours, and then she sailed back to Kingston. We had only a few hours rest between the loading and unloading work. At the coal dock besides the Kingston Water Works, a crane did the bulk of the unloading with a grab shovel: two big steel shells that could be opened and closed at the end of the cable. The crane dumped each load in the coal bins on the dock. Besides the bins, there were also mountains of coal all over the place. The crane could only do so much until there were a few feet of coal left at the bottom of the hold. The crew had to shovel the coal manually to the middle of the hold so that the grab shovel could pick up a load again. After a while that didn’t, work and we had to shovel the coal by hand into the grabber… That was by far the worst! The work was not only physically demanding, but it was dirty, lots of carbon dust, and in the summer with the humidity at hundred percent in the hold, it was almost impossible to do. The pay was good, at least in the eyes of us, young boys, but most of us did not stay long. For the captain and older crew it was not too bad, as long as they had enough younger boys willing to do the dirtiest work.”

If the work on the schooners and freighters and at the receiving docks was dirty, unhealthy and exhausting what was the effort on the other side of the supply chain?

Anthracite was discovered in 1791 in the Maunch Chunk mountain area in Pennsylvania, about sixty-to-eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia. There are several anecdotes that describe the discovery. One states that a hunter picked up some black stones that he took home and had identified as “rock coal”. In another story a miller looking for a new millstone discovered a black shiny rock, having heard of “stone coal” he took it to a blacksmith who put it in his fire and it burned, clean and hot. Or … a hunter made a campfire and to his astonishment the black rock in the side of the mountain started to burn! What is for sure, the discovery fuelled the American industrial revolution and its coalfields are still producing the second largest quantity of coal in the world after China.

The earliest anthracite from Summit Hill at Maunch Chunk was hauled over a distance of nine miles from the mountain over difficult terrain to the town on the shore of the Lehigh River, there it had to be loaded on primitive open pole boats and floated down the Lehigh and Delaware rivers to Philadelphia. The shipping was so difficult that not much happened until 1812 when the supply of soft coal through imports was disrupted because of the War of 1812. [11] Soft coal was the predominant fuel besides wood in the eighteen century; it was imported from the UK and New Brunswick Canada via the east coast Atlantic ports.[12] It was dirty but relative inexpensive and easy to burn in most appliances. Anthracite burns clean and very hot therefore stoves and industrial boilers had to be especially designed to withstand the intense combustion at higher temperatures. Once anthracite became widely available it was the preferred fuel for most needs, except for making “town-gas” and coke for smelting iron and steel.

In 1818 the Lehigh Navigation Co. was organized to simplify the river transport to market. This was accomplished with a series of dams and sluice gates. A one-way lock with a sluice gate would accept a boat, then the sluice gate opened and the rush of water would propel the boat to the lower slack-water pool. This was a one way shipping system and the boats would be dismantled at the end of their trip.

The markets expanded rapidly and in 1827 a “switchback” railroad was built to bring the coal down from the mountain. Soon plans for a canal system utilizing the Lehigh and Delaware rivers was developed and funded. The canal construction began in Mauch Chunk in 1825 and was completed in 1832 with improvements to the Delaware River section to Philadelphia. By the mid 1830s, the company shipped 200,000 tons of anthracite annually to the city. However, by 1850, bituminous coal and anthracite provided only five percent each of total energy consumption in America; wood was still the most prominent energy source outside the urban areas on the Atlantic seashore.[13]

Canal building was going on everywhere in the states of Pennsylvania and New York to facilitate shipping and commerce between the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes.

The Erie Canal was built between 1823 and 1825 connecting Buffalo with Albany and then via the Hudson River to New York City. Branch canals connected every productive region, county and town to the main east west canal. One of these northern canals was the Oswego Canal; it opened in 1829 under great pressure from the Oswego businessmen and local politicians to counteract the growing dominance of Buffalo-Albany trade through the Erie Canal. The anthracite from the Lehigh Valley could now be shipped to Oswego on a larger scale but still only for local use. [14] While some canals were very lucrative for the investors, others lost money and soon they were made obsolete by the railroads.

Railroad development connected the anthracite mines in the Lehigh Valley via a regional network to Oswego in 1871 when the Lehigh Valley Rail Road, (LVRR), finished its lines from Wilkes-Barre via Athens, Owego, and Ithaca to Fairhaven on Lake Ontario, near Oswego. This enabled the port of Oswego to export more and more coal to Canada, including Kingston across Lake Ontario. Coal shipments from Oswego increased from just over fifty four thousand tons in 1871 to nearly a million tons in 1941. [15]

The Delaware Lackawanna Western RR also shipped anthracite from the Lackawanna Valley from Scranton NY to Oswego. The map, Figure 4, shows a schematic of the LVRR and the DLW connecting the anthracite fields in eastern Pennsylvania with the ports on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Coal shipments increased further with the opening in 1907 of a railroad car ferry from Rochester, NY, to Cobourg, ON. The Ontario Car Ferry, started with the Ontario I, and soon with the second ferry, the Ontario II, to operate winter and summer, taking on coal-cars at the terminal of the Buffalo-Rochester-Pittsburgh Rail Road and ferry them across Lake Ontario. The cars would then be assembled by the Grand Trunk Rail Road and delivered to the downtown coal-storage areas. This system operated until the early part of 1957.[16]

[pic] [pic]

Figure 1 a and b. Coal docks in 1950 at the Kingston Waterworks sketched from the bottom of West Street, looking east. In de sketch at the right the grapple crane can be seen, in the background the Shipyards and a sign saying “Do Not Anchor, Intake Pipe”.

[pic]

Figure 2. A coal-carrying schooner docked at the Kingston Water Works. This photo was taken after 1918 when an extension was built at the rear of the original Romanesque building of the Kingston Water Works. When looked at larger magnification this extension is clearly visible. This may be the Horace Taber.[17]

[pic]

Figure 3. Bill of Lading for coal shipped by the Lehigh Valley Coal Co. to Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in July 1885. The total tonnage of the contract is shown on the left side of the description of the load with the actual tonnage carried by the schooner Annandale at 376 tons. R. Crawford was a prominent Kingston businessman.

[pic]

Figure 4. A schematic of the main coal carrying railroads shipping anthracite from the eastern Pennsylvania anthracite mines to Oswego, Rochester and Buffalo.

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[1] Letter from Osborne-Worswick Co. Dated November 1, 1890. Queen’s University Archives Letter Box 555, 1888-1900 City Engineer II3

[2] Letter Osborne-Worswick Co. Dated December 22, 1890. Ibid.

[3] 2009-03-021 Cross Compound Pumping Manufacturer’s Specifications

[4] City of Kingston website, The History of Kingston’s First Water Pumping Station

[5] A Short History of the Public Utilities Commission of the City of Kingston, Ontario. 1914-1967. Frederic F. Thompson, Royal Military College, Kingston, Ontario. Page 17.

[6] Nan Yeomans, personal communication, August 21, 2001. Water color owned by Bill Dalton, Kingston, ON.

[7] Fire Insurance Plans of Ontario Cities and Towns, published by the Toronto Underwriters and Survey Bureau, 1892. W. D. Jordan Special Collection, Douglas Library, Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario.

[8] Minard’s Map of British Coal Exports.

[9] A Short History of the Public Utilities Commission of the City of Kingston, Ontario. 1914-1967. Frederic F. Thompson, Royal Military College, Kingston, Ontario. Page 17.

[10] The Port of Rochester, Rochester History, Blake McKelfey, Vol. XVI, October 1954, No. 4

[11] History of Lehigh Canal and Lehigh Valley Railroad. Xxxx

[12] Minard’s Map of British Coal Exports.

[13] The US Coal Industry in the Nineteenth Century. Sean Patrick Adams, University of Florida. Page4.

[14] Oswego Daily Advertiser & Times, Saturday, July 3 1869

[15] A History of the First Fresh Water Port in the United States. John W O’Connor. Oswego County Historical Society, February 24, 1942.

[16] The Port of Rochester, Rochester History, Blake McKelfey, Vol. XVI, October 1954, No. 4, pg 15.

[17] Suggestion of name by D. Smithies, volunteer archivist Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, ON.

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