Making history: Grand opening Sunday at new site of Museum of Our Industrial Heritage

[ Originally published on: Saturday, June 06, 2009 ]

Recorder/Paul Franz

Museum of Our Industrial Heritage has moved into its new home on Mead Street in the old mill building, using the (wooden building and renting out the rest.

GREENFIELD -- A museum that celebrates the industrial history of Franklin County from the 17th century on will have its grand opening in its new location Sunday, with displays of materials from factories that were part of the winning of the West and the winning of two wars.

The Museum of Our Industrial Heritage is now located in one of the oldest factory buildings left in the town, the Greenfield Steel Stamp Works, earlier known as the Newell Snow factory on Mead Street.

'It's the only building on the street. It was originally a foundry,' said Albert Shane, curator of collections.

The oldest part of the factory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was built in the 1820s.

'The brick parts at the back were added in the 1870s and 1880s,' Shane said.

Once part of a huge complex that included a grain mill, the factory used water from a nearby dam to power the engines for the various businesses that used the site.

'The first factory was built on this site in 1690 by a group of people who had come up from Deerfield Village. It was a sawmill,' Shane said.

One of the most prominent businesses to use the old factory building was Wells Brothers Manufacturing Co.

'The Wells Brothers started a tap and die company here in 1876,' the curator said.

At one time, the town of Greenfield was the center of tap and die manufacture in the United States.

'It was all started by John Grant, who came to Northampton from Rhode Island and then to Greenfield where he started working in Luther Pratt's machine shop at 106 Hope St. and invented an entirely new type of adjustable precision die,' Shane said.

Before Grant, dies were mostly made in New York and Chicago, but they were not really adjustable, being made in such a way that adjusting one die in a set changed all of the rest of the die settings.

Taps and dies are the way that, for example, threads are put on bolts and in nuts. Taps carve out the interior of the nuts and dies cut threads into the bolts.

Many Franklin County men learned the tap and die trade working at local factories and went off to start factories of their own.

'At one time there were 20 tap and die businesses in Greenfield alone, plus business like Conant and Donelson in Conway,' the curator said.

Shane wants to impress upon everyone that his museum is not just about industry in Greenfield.

'There were manufacturing and machine companies all over the county.

'In the 1890s, the largest employer in Franklin County was the New Home Sewing Machine Company of Orange. They made 90,000 sewing machines a year,' he said.

According to Shane, there were coke kilns and box makers in Leverett, butter churn and laundry machine manufacturers in Ashfield and knife makers up and down the river.

Most famous among the knife and cutlery makers are Russell knives, of Greenfield, Nicholas Brothers Cutlery of Bernardston and Lamson and Goodnow of Shelburne.

Russell Cutlery is most famous for Green River knives that were used by explorers and buffalo hunters in the 19th century.

The knives made at the Green River Works were among the most popular tools employed by the trappers, explorers, hunters and roustabouts of the American frontier. They are found on archaeological sites from St. Louis to San Francisco and appear repeatedly in the dime novels, and memoirs of the Old West.

One writer, Walter Stanley Campbell, writing under the pen name Stanley Vestal, in his book 'Joe Meek, The Merry Mountain Man,' noted that the Green River knife was as important to the frontiersman as the firearm he carried.

'Give an oldtimer his Hawken (rifle) a powder-horn filled with surefire powder 'to make it crack' and with a Green River blade at his belt, he was ready for Injuns galore,' Campbell wrote.

Mark Twain mentions the Russell-produced Barlow knife in both of his most celebrated works 'The Adcentures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'

In 'Huck Finn,' published in 1884, Twain refers to a 'bran-new Barlow worth two bits in any store.' Like its larger, more dangerous cousin, the Green River hunting knife, the fine steel and expert craftsmanship that went into the Russell Barlow knife made it an indispensable tool to farmers and mechanics in the South and Midwest before the First World War.

John Russell, at the age of 37, began producing knives at his factory in Greenfield in 1834 at the height of the movement of the so-called mountain men into the West. Later, the factory was moved to Montague, but the blades were made in Franklin County throughout the period of western expansion.

Lamson and Goodnow, which has a factory in Shelburne to this day, still produces fine knives and tableware for an international market.

'Because most people think of Lamson and Goodnow as a cutlery maker, they don't realize that during the Civil War they also made parts for rifled muskets,' Shane said.

There is a large selection of items made by local cutlery makers on display at the museum.

One large exhibition section in the museum deals with local factories in World War II when some of the tap and die makers built gauges to check the size of bullets and casings for machine gun ammunition.

'If the ammunition was too long, it wouldn't feed properly through the gun. If the bullet was too wide, it would get stuck in the barrel.

'These devices were essential to keeping the war effort going smoothly,' Shane said.

A part of local history that is probably not well known to the people of Franklin County is the super secret research carried out in Greenfield by the Raytheon Corp.

According to Shane, the Mark 53 variable time 'fuze' is widely regarded as second only to the Manhattan Project in terms of secrecy surrounding its development and bringing technological advantage to the Allies in World War II.

'Most people didn't even know that it was going on here.

'Before the development of the proximity fuse, artillery gunners had to estimate the speed and range of a target and then set a timer on the shell that would hopefully go off near the target. The goal of the new fuse was to detect the target and go off while it was in the maximum killing range,' he said.

According to the curator, to make the 'fuzes' work, the scientists essentially had to build a miniature radar set into every warhead.

But, that wasn't their only problem. It is difficult enough to build a miniature Doppler radar out of vacuum tubes; it's quite another problem to make the unit work after firing it out of a cannon and having the technology subject to a force of roughly 20,000 G.

One G, or one gravity, is the force that the Earth exerts on an object at sea level.

In the end, the various scientists working on the project did succeed in developing a working proximity fuse and such munitions destroyed large numbers of enemy aircraft in the Pacific.

According to Shane, much of Raytheon's work on the project was done in what is now the Lunt building at the corner of Kenwood and Federal streets in Greenfield.

In addition to the machine exhibits, the Museum of Our Industrial Heritage also has a growing collection of paintings, photographs and sketches of local factories and industrial settings.

Because of its small volunteer staff, currently the museum is open only by appointment, save for this Sunday's open house. However, Shane says that members of the museum staff do go out to schools in the area to do demonstrations of industrial processes and to talk to students about the area's industrial history.

The grand opening of the Museum of Our Industrial Heritage takes place Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the museum building. Entry to the open house is free.

For additional information, call Al Shane at (413) 548-9435.

You can reach George Claxton at: gclaxton@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 279

 

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