Etna Iron Works

John Roach emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1832 at the age of sixteen, eventually obtaining employment as a common laborer at the Howell Works of James P. Allaire at an initial wage of 25c a day. After securing an apprenticeship as an ironmolder at Howell Works, Roach later transferred to Allaire's other plant, the Allaire Iron Works in New York, where he learned the manufacturing method for marine steam engines. Roach would remain an employee of Allaire's for twenty years.[1]

By the 1850s, Roach, concerned about the needs of a growing family and anxious to obtain a more secure financial future, began to consider starting his own business. He had been unable to save much money of his own—only $1,000 (equivalent to $30,732 in 2019)—but was able to persuade three of his co-workers at Allaire, including his brother-in-law Joseph Johnstone, who had savings of $8,000 ($245,856), to join him. The four partners mustered between them a total of $10,000 ($307,320).[2]

In April 1852, Roach and his three partners purchased for the sum of $4,700 ($144,440) a small New York ironworks known as the Etna Iron Works, which had recently fallen into receivership. The ironworks, located at 102 Goerck Street, occupied a 40-by-100-foot (12 m × 30 m) property and consisted of a small foundry and some raw materials.[3]

John Roach

1861 advertisement for the Etna Iron Works

Following their purchase, Roach was given the task of promoting the business while his three partners attended to management of the shop floor. Roach began by touting for custom piecework, his first sale being for cast grate bars for a Brooklyn distillery.[4]

By the end of the first year of operations, the partners had made a modest profit of $1,000, but now a dispute broke out over how to employ the money. Roach wanted to use it to expand the business, but his three partners voted to divide it into dividends of $250 each. Realizing that they had reached the limit of their ambition, Roach took out a mortgage on the property and used the loan to buy his partners out, thus becoming sole proprietor.[4]

Roach thereafter began canvassing the local shipyards for business. Although New York's shipbuilders were still at this time constructing mostly wooden sailing ships, each ship needed about forty pounds of iron fastenings and cables, in addition to a number of anchors. In one ninety-day period, Roach made a profit from such sales of $8,000, giving his business a solid foundation.[5]

Roach was able to continue expanding the business through the sale of a variety of products, including Franklin stoves, firebacks, slats for iron shutters and other items. In 1856 he added a new steam boiler to the ironworks for driving a blower which forced a draft into the melting furnace, thus obtaining a higher temperature and melting the iron faster, which saved valuable man-hours. He also purchased the adjoining property at 104–106 Goerck St., upon which stood a small three-storey building. Roach used the third floor as a pattern shop, while renting out the first and second floors to an iron shutter manufacturer.[5]

By 1859, Roach was employing forty men and his property was valued at $15,000. A contemporary evaluator noted that Roach was "getting along well" and deemed him "safe for a fair amount of credit".[6]

Windfall capital injection

In 1859, one of Roach's closest friends, a lawyer named John Baker, died and left Roach the trustee of his estate. The estate, worth $70,000, was entrusted to Roach for investment until Baker's four children came of age. Since the money could not be claimed until 1881, it was as good as a long-term interest-free loan to Roach, who was soon to take advantage of it to expand his business.[7]

Third Avenue Harlem Bridge, completed in 1868

Roach had long nurtured a desire to become a builder of marine steam engines like his mentor James Allaire. Competition in the industry was fierce, and entry difficult due to high capital costs, but Roach believed that by utilization of the best tools, labor-saving devices and practices, he could compete successfully. Accordingly, through the late 1850s he sent engineers to the United Kingdom to study the latest in marine engine technology, and was not above hiring himself out as a mechanic to New York's leading engine builders of the day to spy on their organization, technology and practices.[12]

A model of the mammoth ironclad Dunderberg

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Roach was thus already well prepared to take advantage of the huge demand for marine engines generated by the conflict. He began by contacting the shipbuilder William H. Webb, who had just secured a contract for the huge new ironclad USS Dunderberg. Webb's usual engine suppliers, the Morgan Iron Works and Novelty Iron Works, were heavily inundated with orders and unable to meet his needs. Webb was so relieved to find an alternative source of supply, he not only awarded the Dunderberg's engine contract to Roach, but also became guarantor for the higher line of credit Roach would need to re-equip his works for completing the job.[13]

Roach next travelled to Washington to meet the U.S. Navy's Chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, Benjamin Franklin Isherwood. On October 24, 1862, Isherwood awarded Roach a contract to supply the machinery for the Navy's new gunboat Peoria—the first of a number of such contracts Roach would fulfill for the Navy in coming years. Roach also secured the engine contracts for two new merchant steamships recently ordered by the newly-established Neptune Steamship Company, Electra and Galatea.[14]

Having secured these contracts, Roach set about equipping the Etna Iron Works for its new role. He began by hiring Thomas Main, a leading engineer with experience in a number of the world's most advanced engine works, as the plant's superintendent. Roach then began reorganizing the Works, adding a boilershop, machine shop, coppersmith shop and blacksmith, and equipping the plant with a host of new machines including traveling and swing cranes and the steam engines to power them, along with planers, lathes, boring mills, punches, shears and rollers. Amongst the new equipment was a planer capable of finishing 100-ton iron plates, and a lathe capable of boring a 112-inch-diameter (280 cm) cylinder—the two largest machine tools in the entire country.[15]

Over the next two years, Roach's plant produced the engines for at least fifteen vessels, including return orders from the U.S. Navy and a dozen engines for the Van Deusen Brothers. At its wartime peak, the Etna Iron Works employed almost 2,000 workers and was valued at $150,000, putting it in the front rank of New York's engine builders.[16]

Casting an engine cylinder for either the steamboat Bristol or Providence at the Etna Iron Works, 1866. These were the largest-bore marine engines built in the United States at the time.

Shortly after the war, the U.S. Navy auctioned off hundreds of ships it had requisitioned for the war effort, flooding the market and seriously depressing prices. The resulting slump in the U.S. shipping industry sent many long-established American shipyards and marine engineers to the wall, and New York was one of the worst affected locations, with its maritime industry all but wiped out by the slump. By 1867, most of Roach's marine engine competitors had gone bankrupt.[16]

Roach himself, however, was able to prosper during this time by securing a diversity of machinery contracts. The Navy through Benjamin Isherwood ordered three engines and six large boilers for the Guerriere class vessels, while shipbuilder William Webb contracted with Roach for the machinery for two large new sidewheel steamers, Bristol and Providence. The engines for the latter two ships, with their massive 110-inch (280 cm) cylinders, were the largest-bore ship engines ever produced in the United States up to that time. More importantly for Roach however, he realized that the government was planning to modernize its own shipyards, and he made a timely shift into the manufacture of machine tools in 1866. He was rewarded by the securing of almost a million dollars in government machine tool contracts between 1866 and 1868.[17]

At this point, Roach decided that his business had outgrown its original location. He was keen to establish a plant with direct water frontage, which would both save him the cost of transporting his engines to the docks, and also enable him to move into the potentially lucrative business of ship repair. The obvious target for acquisition was the Morgan Iron Works, a leading ironworks with frontage on the East River, and which like most other marine engineering plants had lain mostly idle since the Civil War. Fortuitously for Roach, the proprietor, shipping magnate Charles Morgan, had recently experienced a setback in his own business dealings, as a result of which he was short of capital. Morgan quickly agreed to sell the premises along with all of its equipment for the sum of $450,000.[18]

At around the same time, two of Roach's former competitors, the Allaire Iron Works and the Franklin Forge, went bankrupt, and Roach purchased the best of their equipment at firesale prices and also hired their best workers. To these he added the best workers and equipment from the Etna and Morgan establishments, and consolidated his operations at the latter, vacating his former premises at Goerck Street. Roach profited further at this time from the sale of his surplus equipment to the U.S. Navy, but on this occasion some rival business interests raised a protest and the deal became the subject of an acrimonious government inquiry (see the John Roach article for details).[19]

Following the consolidation of his business at the Morgan Iron Works, Roach rented out his old Etna Iron Works property to various tenants. The Etna Works continued to operate as a general ironworks under new management until about 1881, when inventor Thomas Edison relocated production for his electrical illumination utility there.[20] Edison renamed the plant the Edison Machine Works, using it to build DC dynamos until 1887. In that year, the Roach family business sold the premises, the Edison having moved their expanding Machine Works to a much larger site in Schenectady, NY. The property, along with the street in which it was situated, was later liquidated in a 1940s redevelopment.

Roach himself went on to establish his own shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania, the Delaware River Iron Ship Building and Engine Works, which became America's largest and most productive shipyard from its establishment in 1871 until the mid-1880s.[21]

At least 27 marine steam engines for 19 ships were produced by the Etna Iron Works. The following tables list those ships, together with basic details of the engines fitted to each.

Table legend—Engine type: BA=back-acting, DA=direct acting, SB=simple beam; Horiz=horizontal, Vert=vertical, Inv=inverted. See marine steam engine for an explanation of engine types.