Watercolor of the Trenton Roebling Works, right, was painted by the late Trenton artist Tom Malloy, who worked at the Roebling mill during World War II.
By Susan Van Dongen
There is a single poster in the exhibit “John A. Roebling’s Sons Company,” currently at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, which pretty much says it all.
On one wall of the second-floor gallery, viewers will see a chart depicting a host of wire products made by the Roebling Company, flowing down toward industry, commercial, and personal use. We see everything from huge wire rope used in bridge and highway construction, mining, shipping, and other transportation, to the thinnest possible wire utilized in such tiny, innocuous things as safety pins, paper clips, and even in Slinky toys.
That’s always been the special fascination for curator Richard Willinger, chair of the Trenton Museum Society’s collections management committee, of just how all-encompassing the Roebling Company and its products were in 20th-century life.
“As the curator, I wanted to show that the Roebling Company made many more products than wire rope for suspension bridges,” Willinger says. “They made wire rope for anything and everything you can think of — elevators, tram ways, ski lifts, cable cars, ships, airplanes, huge steam shovels for mining, and then there was the wire they made for screens, mosquito nets, flat wire for tape measures, and whatnot. This framed poster gives a great summary of this.”
“There is also a small booklet in the collection with all the different products alphabetized,” he adds. “I was making a copy of it and counting them, and discovered that there were 960 wire products that the Roebling Company produced. What they produced was everywhere and was essentially in everything this country was involved in.”
The second-floor exhibit, which runs through Sunday, December 6, features examples of these sundry wire products, but also art and artifacts such as company catalogs and employee regulations, as well as post cards, advertisements, letterheads, and other memorabilia from the world-renowned John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, which was once the largest employer in Trenton, and a world leader in the construction of suspension bridges.
Items in the exhibit have been loaned to Ellarslie by the Roebling Museum in Roebling, and the New Jersey State Museum. Other items come from Willinger’s personal things, and from the collection of historian Clifford W. Zink, probably the foremost expert on the Roebling family and company and author of “The Roebling Legacy” (Princeton Landmark Publications).
Some of the more unusual objects in the exhibit include a bronze plaque from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair that commemorates the Skyride, an innovative aerial ride at the fair, that the Roebling Company helped engineer and for which it supplied the rope.
From the Ellarslie’s own collection, viewers will see three boards showing dozens of types of electrical wire made by the Roebling Company. The boards were crafted by engineer Howard Godfrey, who donated them to the museum about 30 years ago.
The exhibit also includes four large, rarely exhibited paintings from the Roebling exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, depicting the Brooklyn and George Washington bridges, as well as interior factory scenes.
They had been found in the basement of the former Roebling offices after the buildings were purchased by Mercer County, which then donated them to Ellarslie in 1982. Recently a donor paid for the cleaning and restoration of the painting of the George Washington Bridge, which has brought the work back to its original brilliance. The Trenton City Museum is now looking for a financial “angel” to support the cleaning of the Brooklyn Bridge painting.
The late Tom Malloy, a longtime artist based in Trenton whose loving and meticulous renderings of the capital city’s streets, buildings, monuments, and people have graced Ellarslie from time to time, did an exquisite watercolor of the Trenton Roebling Works. Commissioned by Zink, this rarely seen painting is also included in the Roebling exhibit.
On Zink’s website, www.cwzink.com, a recent blog post focuses on the Roebling exhibit at Ellarslie. Zink writes that “Tom (Malloy) worked in the Roebling wire mill during World War II and shared his experiences there in a 1993 oral history.”
Zink also elaborates on another unusual piece in the exhibit: “The most notable artwork is an 1898 ink and gouache painting from the collection of the New Jersey State Museum of the Roebling Works on South Broad Street and the Delaware and Raritan Canal,” he writes. “The Roebling brothers, Washington, Ferdinand, and Charles, commissioned the painting to capture the tremendous growth in the 50 years since their father, John A. Roebling, founded the factory with a single wire rope shop in 1848.”
“Expertly rendered by H.B. Longacre, a Philadelphia artist about whom little is known, the painting illustrates the tremendous investment, employment, and productivity in Trenton during the height of America’s industrial age,” Zink writes. “Longacre meticulously and precisely depicted the incredible bustle at the Works, with numerous billowing smokestacks and steam vents, and with workers, horses, steam locomotives, canal boats, and electric trolleys in motion.”
Willinger says he became interested in all aspects of Trenton’s history when he came to work for the Department of Health in 1984. “I worked there for 27 years, soon after the state passed a new law, the Worker and Community Right to Know Act. I helped to set up that program.”
A native of Dover, New Jersey, Willinger graduated from Rutgers in 1973 with a degree in environmental studies, and in 1977 earned his law degree at Northeastern Law School in Boston.
“I was in private practice for several years, but I was also interested in environmental law,” he says. The two interests merged when he came to work for the state. “I felt that the ‘Worker and Community Right to Know Act’ was related to the health of the environment as well as the health of the public. Then, after I got the job with the state, I felt I wanted to learn more about occupational health.”
Willinger returned to the University of Medicine and Dentistry at Rutgers, where he earned his master’s degree in public health in 1991.
“When I moved here from Dover, I got involved with the Trenton Historical Society and the Trenton Museum Society, then started collecting and have been interested ever since,” Willinger says, noting that the current exhibit has been in planning for about a year.
John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, Cadwalader Park, Trenton. Through Sunday, December 6, (609( 989-3632 or (609) 989-1191, ellarslie.org.
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