ROBERT POOLE (1818-1903) 

IRISH-BORN INVENTOR AND INDUSTRIALIST

 

*indicates continuing research activity to establish exact dates/information

** indicates semi-speculative material awaiting further investigation/confirmation

 

Although Cyrus McCormick is universally noted and revered as an example of Irish engineering achievement in the United States, his connection to Ireland and the uniqueness and scale of his work may be found somewhat wanting in comparison with the record of Robert Poole, the Baltimore inventor and industrialist.

 

By the time that Cyrus perfected the reaper concept developed by his father Robert, the McCormicks had been in America for almost one hundred years; and both McCormicks are often represented as building on the inspiration and labor of others, including a blacksmith named McFettridge (from whom Robert purchased the original drawing); competing inventors Ann Harned Manning and Obed Hussey (whose patents Cyrus McCormick bought); and Jo Anderson, a McCormick slave who worked on the early machines.

 

McCormick’s early location (the western part of Virginia) and area of activity and research were relatively obscure: he was working on a technology with essentially rural application that took two decades to be recognized for its revolutionary potential (he was forty-two by the time the McCormick reaper became well known in the country.

 

Poole’s rise to prominence began little more than two decades after his arrival in the United States – in 1822 at the age of four – from Maghera in the Irish northern county of Londonderry. By the age of twenty-five he was operating on his own account in an enterprise that would soon come to dominate Baltimore’s mid-19th.-century industry scene.

 

The Poole family were originally of Welsh Puritan stock, but had been in Ireland from the last years of the seventeenth century. About 1815*, Robert’s father George married Mary Shiel(d)s from the same locality and they emigrated to the United States some seven years later with their young family.

 

The Pooles settled in Baltimore, and having exhibited some aptitude for things mechanical, Robert was apprenticed to a series of engineering shops, first on Lanvale Street* and later in the nearby community of Savage*, where the extensive sailcloth mill established by Amos Williams required significant mechanical skills.

 

At about the same time as momentous corporate events were about to unfold, Robert Poole married Ann Simpson, the daughter of George and Ami (nee Williams); they were both of an age, and in their early twenties.

 

In 1841, at the age of twenty-three, Robert set up on his own account in a small machine shop in downtown Baltimore. Two years later he met William E. Ferguson, an older engineer of Scottish background* and they determined to form a partnership to exploit the new opportunities they saw in almost every area of mechanical engineering.

 

Their first location was at 161 North Street (now Holliday Street), and it was here in 1845 that they took on a young apprentice named German Hunt, who had spent the previous year working at the Watchman and Bratt steamboat and stationary engine plant, set up by two immigrant British engineers in 1816.  

 

German Horton Hunt was born in Baltimore in December 1828, the only child of Germyn Hunt, an English mechanical engineer who had left Derby in Britain in 1820 with his wife Eleanor to review from abroad the progress of engineering in that country (his wife was a daughter of a British Army general with a name made famous in an earlier generation by a Cromwellian soldier who had signed the death warrant of Charles I and died during military operations in Ireland: Thomas Horton). Within a few years he resolved to remain in the US.

 

Though a sickly youth who had been educated at good schools, the younger Hunt’s mechanical abilities were already apparent at the age of sixteen, and when Ferguson died in 1851, the 23-year-old Hunt was elevated to partner status, a role he fulfilled until his retirement in 1889.

 

Two years later, in 1853, the North Street plant was consumed by fire, and the decision was made to move the operation to Woodberry, then a village some five miles north-west of central Baltimore that was developing as a milling center.

 

The proposed site for the venture was a 20-acre swathe of land on the western side of the Jones Falls Valley, on what would become known as Clipper Road (for the clippers powered by the sailcloth manufactured nearby, in a series of mills operates mainly by the Gambrill family). The adjacent Falls Turnpike, developed from an old Indian trail, facilitated communication and growth from the first establishment of a flour mill in the area by the noted Quaker philanthropist Elisha Tyson in the 1790s (both Elisha Tyson’s house and the entire Woodberry village settlement are now on the National Register of Historic Places).

 

It was here that the plant known as Union Works expanded to accommodate within a decade a total in excess of seven hundred employees (some remained at the downtown location until 1858), eventually providing employment for thousands, according to some accounts.

 

In 1853 Robert’s son George, who would manage the firm after his father’s death (though only surviving him by seven years) was born and plans were completed for a grand mansion home on a vast site bounded by Union, Sycamore and Cross Streets (some of these street names have disappeared in the redevelopment of the site for housing in the 1920s, when the Poole mansion was also demolished).

 

The progress of the company at the new location was spectacular. Facilities expanded to include a drawing office and pattern shop, a melting house, an iron foundry and casting facility, an assembly and construction area, storage lofts, general offices and extensive stabling for the dozens of horses used to carry raw materials and finished products throughout the complex, which was also served by a spur of the North Central Railroad.

 

Over the next half-century the Union Works produced virtually every known category of industrial and public engineering installation: presses, shafting, pulleys and hangers; stationary and mobile steam engines and boilers; pumps and hand-pumped fire engines; textile machinery (including sailcloth looms for the local mills); hydraulic cylinders and water-powered turbines; mining machinery, including specialist plant for white lead works; conveyors, hoppers and grinders for grist, flour, cottonseed and other oil mills; and both circular and gang saw assemblies and splitters for timber mills.

 

Some of its technology came from the brain of Robert Poole himself, with strong inputs from his partner: a joint patent application in 1859 concerns a small adjustment to dimensions and configuration in a standard forcing pump, ‘the object being to prevent the throttling of the water, and thus relieve the pump, which increases its working capacity to a corresponding ratio.’

 

But the scope and scale of its work in the rapidly-developing industrial age of the United States – and, from 1862, its war-time economy – gave the company a stature that few others on the North American continent, and indeed in the world at large, could aspire to. Among the most noteworthy of its accomplishments were

 

- the thirty-six iron brackets and columns cast to Thomas Ustick Walters’ design for the dome of the US Capitol;

 

- a pit lathe capable of turning out a wheel over sixty feet in diameter (the 65-foot wide sand-cast wheel for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company brought them world-wide acclaim);

 

- the friction clutches that handle the operation of the Brooklyn Bridge cable railway;

 

- the iron columns fronting the New Orleans courthouse completed in 1860 to the design of Alexander Thompson Wood;*

 

- base rings for battleship turret guns in the manufacturing boom that surrounded the Civil War expansion of Union forces.

 

The company also manufactured popular and innovative products designed by others:

 

- iron screw-pile lighthouses, originally designed by a blind Irish engineer named Alexander Mitchell; they were small constructions of about a storey and a half with a cupola  containing the light; they were erected on screwed piles and were popular in the soft-sandbed conditions of the Chesapeake Bay and the North Carolina shoreline;

 

- David Chenoweth Ebaugh’s (1824-95) mineral crusher, developed in South Carolina by the owner of the Ebaugh Lime Fertilizer and Manufacturing Company, a descendant of Swiss immigrant millers named Ybach who had settled in Maryland in the early 1700s;

 

- Leffel’s ‘American double turbine’ water wheel, developed by James Leffel (1806-66), the son of a Virginia miller, at the family milling and stove-making business in Springfield, Ohio; the Leffel Water Turbine and Engine Company was founded in the early 1860s and over seven thousand were in operation by 1880 (the company continues in operation today);

 

- Von Schmidt’s pumping dredge; with increasing demand for the deepening of water channels, the Prussian-born Alexis Von Schmidt (1821-1906) developed the basic engineering for a pumping deredge, based on a platform of a barge or ship's hull, a dredge pump, power plants, maneuvering spuds and lines or engine propulsion, a suction line (cutterhead) and ladder, and a discharge line. The technology has not changed much in succeeding generations; Von Schmidt went on to become a major figure in the controversial development of water resources for the San Francisco area.

 

The Poole manufacturing operations also pioneered the use of the Hiram Maxim (‘the farm boy inventor’) Springfield Gas Machine developed by Gilbert and Barker in Boston in the 1860s, which was installed both at the Poole residence and in their own manufacturing areas (the self-contained equipment, which operated independently of municipal gas systems, was based on the refinement of a by-product of oil production that became known as gasolene/gasoline and that eventually attracted attention in its own right as a fuel for the automotive industry; the Gilbert and Barker connection is continued in the Gilbarco company and its range of gas-pumping techologies).

 

The family connection with the milling sector was enhanced in the 1870s* with the marriage of Robert Poole’s daughter Sarah (1842-1924) to James E. Hooper (1830-1909) as his second wife; Hooper became President of the Cotton Duck Company after a number of mergers.

 

In 1889 German Hunt retired from his role in the Poole and Hunt partnership, although he continued with other commercial commitments (including membership of the boards of banks and industry) and involvement in the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Maryland, the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts and the McDonogh School. He retired completely from his commercial concerns in 1903, but continued his work for the Methodist church and the Masonic order until ill health prevented him five years later.

 

George Poole took the former partner’s place in the corporate structure and the company changed its name to Robert Poole & Son. A massive construction shed, built in 1890 to store the largest products of the workshops, became a symbol of the new era, as Robert Poole, now in his early seventies, reduced his involvement in day-to-day management. In 1891 his wife Ann Williams Poole died at the age of seventy-three.

 

In 1903 Robert Poole himself died at the age of eighty five and was buried beside his wife at Green Mount Cemetery, Fells Point in downtown Baltimore. His legacy to the area, apart from the huge influence of his employment, included the Enoch Pratt Free Library which he supported on its foundation in 1882 by his friend, a Baltimore iron commission merchant; a thoroughfare that runs to the west of Roosevelt Park in Hamden-Woodberry was named Poole Street.

 

At his father’s death, George Poole, who had married Mary Norris of Westminster, Maryland in 1882, was now fifty, and the father of a son, Robert, and two daughters, Anna Howard and Mary Shields.

 

As he took over sole control of the company, its status was now reflected in the new corporate title The Poole Engineering and Machine Company. It continued to dominate its chosen fields of expertise and supply well into the twentieth century.

 

In 1910 German Hunt died at the Chattolanee health resort in Garrison, Maryland and in the same year he was awarded, as ‘survivor of Robert Poole’, a sum of over $40,000 by the U.S. Congress under an act for the allowance of certain claims reported by the Court of Claims.

 

(Little is known of German Hunt’s family, though it is certain that he had at least two daughters, one of whom, Ellen Louise or Eleanor, born in 1852, married William Hopper Emory of Baltimore, and had a son William Hopper Emory Jr. who became an architect and is credited with the Baltimore Municipal Building).

 

Barely more than three months later George Poole died, a posthumous profile giving this frank explanation of the cause of his demise: ‘It is an easy matter for one who has seen a great business grow up under his hand to forget that he cannot give to the business the same service in every little detail that he did in its earlier days when it was a smaller business and he a younger man. Resulting from this, it is not an uncommon for our country to see capable men break down and pass away at a time when they ought to be in the prime of life.’ 

 

Though we know that George’s daughter Anna Howard Poole (1882-1962) married a doctor named Paul Plummer Swett, lived in Hartford CT, and had some fame (at least within her family circle, who published a biography in 2000) as a writer, we know little about the other members of the family, including Mary Shields Poole, who married a Baltimore businessman named Howard Patterson Harris,* or of the only son Robert Poole, who might have been expected to carry on the illustrious name and reputation of his Irish-born grandfather.

 

In 1926 the Poole family mansion was demolished to make way for a housing development. The manufacturing complex survived for another few decades as the market for its wares declined.

 

The huge site was taken over in 1967 by the Franklin Balmar Company, a company that had begun as a railway supply enterprise in Franklin, Pennsylvania in 1917 and expanded its operations to Chicago, where they created a UA Strand division. This division diversified into making outer skins for aerospace manufacturers (the company had earlier been a  sub-contractor on the Manhattan Project which created the atomic bomb), an activity they hoped to promote in Baltimore (the project did not succeed, though the corporate entity survives in altered form within the Gilbarco group of companies).

 

In the same year, the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1883, relocated to a site near the former Poole plant, thus giving the area a live and continuing connection to the inventive history of the area. 

 

Subsequently the buildings were vacated on a piecemeal basis and re-occupied by smaller enterprises under the umbrella of the Clipper Industrial Park. The old foundry was sold in 1972 to a manufacturer of kitchen cabinets, and soon the early signs of artistic activity began to make themselves felt.

 

In 1992 the cavernous construction shed completed one hundred years before became an indoor activity center with 60-foot-high climbing walls. In 1995 a fire destroyed much of the old Union Works machine shop area. 

 

Recent decades have seen the addition of a light rail station and some high-tech locations to the site, described in one report as ‘shoe-horned between the north-eastern flank of Druid Hill Park, Television Hill, and the Jones Falls Expressway.’

 

Somewhere within it may very well be the spirit of Robert Poole, contemplating the vastness of what he created, much like his compatriot James Withers Sloss (1820-1890), the son of Northern Ireland immigrants, essayed in a similar urban environment in Birmingham, Alabama. Cyrus McCormick may have a little catching up to do!