ChinoyIndustries
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4 years ago Also--Penn State's library has in its special collections a group of historic photographs (check em out!) (or look at the boring catalog entry) from the Oreminea site.
Back at Penn State Altoona the campus librarian caught me scanning all these papers in the library shortly after I salvaged them and indicated that the PSU archives might be interested in collaborating should I ever happen to do further work with this. Might count as fraternizing with the enemy, but it's something to explore...
Well, here's my proposal, which many of you already know about. I maintain a small library of books, documents, ephemera and artifacts from the Pennsylvania Railroad and other railroads and industries around Pennsylvania, and one of the most unusual items on file is a collection of freight receipts for shipments to and from the Woodbury Clay Co. of Oreminea, PA in the 1930s.
Background A bit of context is probably necessary here. Before coming to Pitt-Greensburg, I lived in Altoona for a couple years, where I found these documents. While the mountains of central PA are quiet now, much of the surrounding region was alive with industrial activity through the Depression and wartime years, not only with lumbering and coal mining but with a number of smaller industries, including the mining of "fire clay"--a mineral clay that can be baked into extremely temperature-resistant bricks, called "refractory brick", which are used to line kilns and blast furnaces. The fire-clay mines of Blair and Huntington Cos. in particular fed the refractory, porcelain and steel industries of Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Very little legacy survives of this industry today.
These papers, 120 in all, provide a rare glimpse at the business done by one of these clay mining companies, the Woodbury Clay Co., detailing both their shipments of fire clay to various manufacturing plants across the US and Canada, as well as some of the shipments of various supplies that arrived in the typical small company town that supported them, back in the day when these towns depended on their railroad connection for everything.
Project Goal There's very little other material out there on this industry in this time period, so it has some real usefulness to local historians in the region and to railroad enthusiasts, especially model railroaders. I've already scanned and partially digitized all 120 documents and tabulated various totals of information from them, as well as encoded one receipt as XML and partly prepared a schema for the various kinds of receipt, inbound and outbound. As a project this could involve a variety of visualizations of this data, although it dates only to a few particular years and doesn't form a complete record. Probably the centerpiece of this would be an interactive map of the various customers and merchants who ordered clay from or shipped goods to Oreminea.
A lot of research will be necessary on my part at least to map out some of these long-defunct companies and provide a historical background on them, and I can't necessarily ask people to come with me on a road trip to find an old mining shovel in the woods (there's one in there!), but if there's anyone who wants to work on the website and data viz side of the project with me, this could be really cool. Might even be publishable down the road. And of course, if you actually DO want to come hunting for old mine pits and whatnot, come along!
I believe all the associated project files are uploaded to my personal repo if anyone wants to take a look at them.
EDIT: link