The newest historic site in the Lehigh Valley

When he was a child, Mark Connar gazed in awe at the towering stone structure on Old Bethlehem Pike in Friedensville as his father drove by.

“What it is?” he would think. “It was like a castle.”

Nearly seven decades later, this thing has become one of Pennsylvania’s newest official historical monuments. And if all goes well, it will eventually be open to the public.

The building that caught Connar’s attention is the only surviving example of a Cornish-style pumping station in the United States. It once housed the world’s largest single-cylinder rotating stationary steam engine. The cylinder was 110 inches in diameter, big enough for even an NBA star to comfortably stand inside.

Known as the “Presidential Pumping Machine”, its job was to pump water out of the Uberroth Mine.

And the boy pumped out the water.

It could remove 17,000 gallons per minute from a depth of 300 feet, clearing the way for workers to mine zinc ore. At the time, Uberroth was the largest of Friedensville’s five zinc mines.

The boiler room in front of the engine room was gone. But the engine room remained virtually untouched. The third floor, which was made of wood, is long gone. The two chimney towers were demolished for safety reasons around 1950. But the first two levels, similar to a fortress, have been preserved.

This is not surprising, since it would take a decent amount of force to bring them down. The back wall is 9 feet thick, the rest 3 feet. A strong structure was required because the walls supported the massive engine.

The property is now owned by Lehigh University. Connar of Bethlehem graduated from Lehigh in 1984 with an MBA. He has worked for Air Products for 40 years in project management, purchasing and other roles. When he retired in 2014, he needed a project to keep himself busy.

He never forgot the castle-like building that mesmerized him as a child. He began researching it and launched a campaign to make sure it got the recognition it deserved.

“The more I studied it, the more I realized how unique it is,” Connar told me recently as he showed me the place.

He partnered with Erin Kinzer, director of Lehigh Real Estate Services, to have the site nominated as a Historic Landmark by the Pennsylvania History and Museums Commission. In December, the marker was provided. It is expected to be installed next year.

The site is fenced and closed to the public. The mine adjacent to the ruins of the engine room is now a water-filled quarry that is up to 130 feet deep in some places. The ruins have been defaced with graffiti, and empty beer cans in the bushes indicate how it has been used in recent times.

Connar and Lehigh officials are trying to protect it from further vandalism and intruders. They say the site is not secure in its current state.

The next step is to raise money to stabilize the ruins and make them a public place. Renderings made by Spillman Farmer Architects in Bethlehem show what it could look like. The engine room provides a walkway with a platform the size of the President’s Pump Engine inside for visitors to stand on.

And outside the engine room will be one of the 22 boilers of the boiler room. When the mine no longer needed it, the boiler was converted into a water tank at Gottlieb Buhler’s furniture factory on Front Street in Allentown.

A 30-foot-long boiler was recently removed from this building, which is scheduled for demolition. This will be the future site for the Riverfront Lofts development by Manhattan Building Co.

“The intention is to refurbish it and return it to where it once stood,” Kintzer said.

“We have a lot of funds to raise funds,” she said. “Ideally, this story should be available to the general public.”

It’s extremely rare to find an intact stationary steam boiler from the 1870s, says Mike Pierce, a historian at the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem. Most of them were melted down due to corrosion or obsolescence. Others went to scrap during the First and Second World Wars.

The museum has an exposition about the Presidential pumping engine. It includes a working scale model built by Anthony Mount of Devon, England.

“The public needs to know about this,” said Kara Mohsinger, president and CEO of the National Museum of Industrial History.

“The engineering aspect, the fact that they were able to save the boiler. This whole area is just chock full of history, and I think it’s important that the people who were born and raised here really understand the importance of Lehigh Valley as a cradle of industry.”

Efforts to have President Pumping Engine recognized for its contribution to American industry are generating a lot of interest in parts of the UK, Connar said.

The engine and engine room were designed by the Cornish, who at the time were world renowned for their expertise in steam engine technology and hard rock mining.

The Uberroth mine opened in 1853. It was named after Jacob Uberroth, a farmer who found strange stones on his property. He conducted research that led to the discovery of zinc ore veins.

The chemist who identified the ore as zinc was Theodore William Ropper. When Lehigh University was founded in 1865, Ropper became its first professor of geology and mineralogy.

Therefore, it was only fitting that the university later acquired the mine. It was part of a 755-acre site donated by Lehigh in 2012 from the Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Foundation.

“It’s interesting that he’s back at Lehigh because Lehigh has been on this site for a very, very long time,” Kintzer said.

Uberroth sold his property to Lehigh Zinc Co. The zinc mined there was transported by mule and cart trains across South Mountain to a plant near the Fahy Bridge in Bethlehem. It was used to produce zinc oxide for paint and metallic zinc for galvanizing iron, and to make brass items such as gun cartridges.

Operations began with mining. As the miners dug deeper, they encountered water. Cornish engineer John West was hired to decide what type of steam engine could be used to pump the water.

He decided that the existing engine would not be enough. The mine was supposed to be “big,” Connar said.

The construction of the engine room from local stone began in 1868. Engine parts were manufactured by Merrick & Sons in Philadelphia and assembled inside the structure. It was first lit in 1872.

Mining company president Benjamin Webster dedicated it by smashing a bottle of wine on one of the moving beams. He named him “President” after President Ulysses S. Grant, “and as a fitting name for the engine that is the chief of all engines,” according to a report in the London Mining Journal.

According to Connar, it is common to see pumping stations in Cornwall with engines that are similar to windmills in the Netherlands.

But while there were once many in the United States, there is only one now, at the former Uberroth Mine in Friedensville.

“Part of the reason we are so keen to preserve it is because it is the only surviving example of a Cornish-style pumping station in America,” Connar said.

He has made presentations to local and international audiences, including historical societies, the Cornish American Heritage Society, and the Trevithick Society in Cornwall, which promotes Cornish industrial heritage. Connar was celebrated for his work by the Cornish government, who recognized him as a bard.

He told me he received a lot of help with his research at the President Pumping Engine site, including from Damian Nance, a geologist at Yale and Ohio Universities; Michael Kaas, mining historian; Jerry Lennon, Lehigh Professor of Engineering; and Robert Lanning, who is familiar with the property because his father was the chief engineer at New Jersey Zinc Co. when it ran mines in the area in the 1950s and 60s.

The president’s pumping machine ran continuously from 1872 until 1876, when the Uberroth mine closed. Subsequently, it was periodically used again to lower the water level in other nearby mines that were at the same water table.

The last time the engine ran was in 1891, and was decommissioned in 1900.

“It kind of got lost in history,” Connar said.

Not more.

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