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Friday, April 14, 2017

The White Clay Creek Supply Company and the Roseville Electric Plant

The early 20th Century was a time of great changes in rural and suburban infrastructure. The rise of the automobile necessitated improvements to roads and bridges. Those same automobiles, along with the earlier introduction of electric trolley lines, helped birth the existence of suburbs. Basic utilities like running water, sewers, telephone, and electricity that had been present in cities for a while were now working their way out to the burgeoning suburbs and beyond. Eventually they would reach even the old farmhouses that had done without such luxuries for generations.

There are undoubtedly stories to be told on all these topics (the Artesian Water Company, for example, was founded by a MCH family), but right now we will focus on electricity. More specifically, on a forgotten, early power provider, the White Clay Creek Supply Company (WCCSC), and one particular installation of theirs. If you don't remember writing any checks to them, it's understandable -- I'm pretty confident in saying that WCCSC was gone long before you were around. It wasn't in operation for very long, but it's a neat insight into the early days of suburban utilities. It was also the final heir to an old mill seat.

If you're reading this in the northern Delaware area, it's likely that your current (no pun intended) electric company is very large -- it covers parts of several states and is owned by an even larger corporation. A hundred plus years ago, it was a different story. The largest power supplier in the area was actually the trolley company. By the early days of the 20th Century, urban electric trolley lines had been around for a decade or more, and their suburban counterparts were beginning to radiate out from the cities. The trolley companies produced their own power for the trolleys, and also sold electricity to the burgeoning consumer market. Initially it was confined to the larger cities, but over time worked its way to smaller towns and, ultimately, rural areas.

In those early days, before electricity production was completely consolidated into large power companies, there was briefly room for smaller companies to try to make headway. In some ways, it reminds me of the situation with the internet in the mid 1990's. Sure, many people had AOL, but there were also a lot of small internet service providers around, too. The window was brief, though, before the phone and cable companies gobbled up the market. It was in the equivalent of this time-frame that the WCCSC was born, lived, and died.

It began in May 1902, when the WCCSC was chartered to "acquire mines, quarries and mining rights and to develop the same". It's hard to tell whether this was a legal sleight of hand or if they truly decided to change directions, because in August of that same year, Philadelphian Elisha Meloney purchased the Tweed Mill north of Newark. Maloney was the president of WCCSC, and he sold the property to it for the purpose of converting it into an electrical plant. Interestingly, as the article below notes, Tweed's Mill was at the time being used as a flint mill. Perhaps that was the connection to the original mining and quarrying charter?

Maloney buys Tweed's Mill
(Evening Journal -- Aug 30, 1902)
Maloney's new power company, at the time, was apparently ripe with capital and looking to expand. In May 1903, it purchased an electrical plant in Kennett to service the Kennett-Avondale-Landenberg area. But more interestingly for us, that same month WCCSC also purchased the water rights at Roseville, just east of Newark. This is the same area where the Roseville Cotton Factory had been located decades earlier. That summer they got to work constructing their new facility.

Evening Journal -- May 9, 1903
As the article below shows, construction was nearly complete by late August. Another newspaper states on September 30 that the company "has completed its large dam covering 30 acres at Rosedale(sic)". What I noticed in reading the different accounts is that every article talked about building the dam, not the power plant. I can only assume that the terms were being used interchangeably, and that references to "the dam" also included the plant, or mill. The plant that the White Clay Creek Supply Company built at Roseville can be seen in the photograph at the top of the page.

News Journal -- Aug 18, 1903
So, you might ask (I know I did), where exactly did the Roseville electric plant sit? I've never read a description that places it exactly, and the photo here is the only one I've ever seen. (I was very excited when I saw it and realized what it was. Yes, that's what gets me excited.) The key is the other structure in the picture, and the one that I think was the main subject of it -- the bridge. The one shown was the second of three to span the White Clay at Roseville in the 20th Century. When the Roseville plant was first built, it was next to a mid-19th Century covered bridge. By 1903, however, the bridge was old and outdated, and the road a dangerous one. The road angled sharply on both approaches in order to bridge the creek straight across. For the better part of a decade, residents sought to have a new bridge erected. In 1911, it was finally done.

Evening Journal -- June 1, 1910
News Journal -- July 29, 1911

A modern, concrete arch bridge was built in 1911, and I think that's what the photograph is documenting. As you can see, there's still a slight turn on the approach, but it does angle across the creek. This is one of the clues as to which direction we're looking in the shot. Judging from the angle, I'm pretty confident that we're on the south (towards Newark) side looking northeast. In terms of the modern road, we'd be looking eastbound, with Newark behind us. In respect to having any hopes of finding remnants of the power plant, this is very unfortunate. In 1954, DelDOT replaced the 1911 bridge with a much larger, four-lane bridge. They straightened out the road even further, and positioned the new span on the west side of the old one -- right where the plant was.



The photos above show the 1954 bridge under construction and newly completed. The first shot is in the same direction as the old power plant photo, the "After" photo is looking west towards Newark. You can see the remains of the old bridge abutments to the left in the bottom picture. The electric plant would have stood right where the eastern approach is to the new bridge. Quite obviously, the plant was long gone by the start of construction in '54. When exactly it ceased operation, I'm not sure...But I have at least one clue to narrow it down.

Evening Journal -- August 6, 1920

The article above about the death of an electrician working at the plant appeared in the Evening Journal in August 1920. The plant was obviously still there then, but the wording of the piece makes me think it was on the way out. I could be reading it wrong, but it states that the electricity for Newark is "brought in through the Roseville and local plants." "Through", not "from". To me, it makes it sound like the plant was more of a substation than an electric-generating plant by that point. And if you read the article, there's one name that might be unfamiliar to you -- the unfortunate electrician's employer, the Wilmington and Philadelphia Traction Company.

The Wilmington and Philadelphia Traction Company (WPTC) was, at the time, the primary trolley company in northern New Castle County. It had a habit of gobbling up smaller companies, including, a few years earlier, the Peoples Railway and Brandywine Springs Amusement Park to which it ran. Around 1913, WPTC had purchased the Chester County Electric Company, which had bought out the White Clay Creek Supply Co. sometime before 1911. The 1911 date comes from the article below, which ran on August 28th of that year. (This is the last article, I promise.)


If nothing else, we get a feel for how dangerous electrical work was in the early days. In the grand scheme of things, the Roseville Electric Plant was not around for very long -- probably little more than 20 years, perhaps a bit longer. Its original owner, the White Clay Creek Supply Company, was around for far less. Again I'm drawn back to the analogy of the early days of the internet in the 1990's. We started with lots of small providers connected by old telephone technology. Few expected it to blossom so quickly, as the electric market had done 90-odd years before. Small, water-powered electric mills like Roseville soon became as obsolete as a 56k modem. The wonderful photograph at the top of the page is but a small reminder of the early entrepreneurial days of the electric power industry.

9 comments:

  1. I have info from a Poor's Manual that Chester County Electric was in receivership & bankruptcy in 1911 and wound up as part of Philadelphia Electric Company. Perhaps PEC bought Wilmington and Philadelphia Traction Company (WPTC) at the same time.

    The Chester County Electric Company's total generating capacity by 1911 was 450 killowatts using a 5,500-2,200 volt, 3-phase Wye AC, 60-cycle distribution system. White Clay Supply Company's electrical grid supplied power for 4,080 incandescent lamps and 20 electric arc lamps operating at 110 volts, which was the voltage supplied to homes/businesses at that time. It is interesting to note that electric companies of the era didn't rate their power generating capability in megawatts as done today, but rather the number of incandescent lamps that they could power. Each of those incandescent lamps was 16 candlepower (luminous intensity rating) or roughly the equivalent of a 50 watt (power rating) lamp. The electric rate was 5-cents per kilowatt hour for lighting and 10-cents per kilowatt hour for motor circuits.

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  2. Fascinating. What happened to the dam itself?

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    1. Thanks. I can't find any specific mention of the dam after a legal dispute over it in 1912. The way these creeks flood, the dams need constant maintenance. My guess is that after the plant was abandoned the dam either slowly broke apart over the years or (as was the case of a dam near Brandywine Springs) intentionally destroyed at some point. I do believe that there are probably some remnants of it still to be found in White Clay Creek. Someday I'll have to get down there and take a look.

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  3. A friend and I went looking for signs of the Roseville factory last week (thank you for your article on that!) and now we're working our way through property deeds dating back to Arthur Chillas' purchase of the farm and mill in 1843. If we can pin down any locations, I post the results here.

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    1. Great! Keep us updated!

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    2. I looked at about fifty property deeds and found many references to mills, channels, dams, races and other physical components of a water-powered factory, but none that said "here's where the mill was located." So I went to the DelDOT archives for road and bridge construction plans, the Newark Post archive for articles about Chillas and Roseville, and even found Arthur Chillas last will and testament. Here's what I think I know:

      Locating the dam turned out to be fairly easy. Although none of the 19th century maps after the 1849 map showed a dam, the 1920 US Geological Survey map (based on 1904 data) showed a dam at the same location as the 1849 map. Walking along the northeast bank of White Clay Creek, it must have been about 275' upstream from the northeast corner of the Capitol Trail bridge, which is very close to the end of the long earthen embankment described in other comments.

      As for the mill race, it appeared on the 1920 US Geological Survey map, running parallel to the northeast side of the creek as far as Capitol Trail. The intersection of the mill race with Capitol Trail also appears in several sets of DelDOT plans including Contract #RM2 for State Route 2, "Section 5A Roseville to Pikes Creek" (New Castle County Highway Department, 1920), which shows the mill race passing under the new (1920) road, parallel to the creek bank, and continuing south of the old (1881) road towards Muddy Run. It also shows three houses along the south side of the "new" road and a “power station” on the north side of bridge between the mill race and the left bank of White Clay Creek.

      None of these documents show the precise location of a mill. One reason may be that, as reported in the 1938 WPA Guide to Delaware, the only thing that remained was a two-story stucco house (presumably the house at the end of Last Lane). In any case, the mill must have been located on the north side of the 1881 road (and thus south of the 1920 and later roads), and within 100' of the left bank of White Clay Creek (in order to use the mill race). That would put it either under the modern road itself, or perhaps on the site of what I remember as “Windy Hill Liquors” (now “Rainbow Spa”) or the Possum Park apartments.

      What’s next? I’d go back to the parking lot of the Rainbow Spa and make my way down to the left (northeast) bank of White Clay Creek under the Capitol Trail bridge. Then I’d try to go downstream and keep a eye open for signs of the ‘tail race” – the channel that returned spent water from the mill to the creek. Given the amount of construction and flooding that has taken place in the vicinity in the last 80 years, it’s hard to say what you might find. But since the inlet to the mill race was roughly 12' x 6' (96 sq. ft.), I’d look for a depression that might have once been big enough to hold such a channel. Also, based on various deed references, I’d expect to find it in the first 250' feet. If you reach Muddy Run without seeing anything (1000' from the bridge) then you’re probably not going to find it, but you can still see the stone abutments on either side of Muddy Run where the original road used to cross.

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    3. Wow!!! Thanks for all your work, and for your insight. I think we might be close to finding where this sucker was. I will definitely have more for you shortly. I'll say this for now, though -- I went back and looked more closely at the old aerial photos, and in the ones from the early 50's you can still see the 19th Century road. Looks to run directly through the apartments' parking lot. I'm also pretty sure I can see the remains of the power plant. My best guess, looking at the 1849 map (which is, admittedly, not GPS accurate), could put the factory right about where the house is at the near end of Last Lane. Do we know how old that house is? The race would have been under the current road right in front of the house. I'll have to look at it more, though. In case you don't have it, here's a link for the historic aerials: https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer

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    4. I am looking for information on Jacob Shew. See the electrocution article above. I believe he was from Baltimore County. He eventually ended up in Ellicott City MD. There was an association with mills. He was an electrical engineer. I found this to be a theme in the family. His son was an electrician and several brothers also.

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    5. Actually this Jacob Shew was the son of Jacob Shew who moved to Ellicott City, MD.

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