Best Made Guide to Urban Archaeology Jeremy Blakeslee on The Watts-Campbell Factory, Part 1

When I asked a friend working with the National Museum of Industrial History what the most endangered industrial site in the country was, he replied, “Watts–Campbell”. That was three years ago.

I don’t shoot every industrial building I see. I do research, prioritize, and often find people that know far more than I do to guide me. It’s a bit of an adventure every time. When we were finally given access to Watts–Campbell steam engine manufacturers in Newark, NJ I couldn’t believe that such an impressive collection of historic artifacts—unique tools, extinct equipment, and original drawings—had been left intact. It’s much more usual for this kind of collection to have been slowly weather-beaten, vandalized, and scrapped as it has been in places like Detroit.

The factory is in a neighborhood where you want to keep your wits about you. Outside in the cold morning air sitting next to the factory was a rough–looking car lot dotted with an anemic selection of cars, each worth a few hundred dollars. Mr. Watts had removed the guard dogs for us himself that morning. Inside, we found a living repository of some of the best made and ancient machinery not found anywhere else in the world. Thousands of wooden patterns, stationary steam engines, planers, vertical boring mills customized to accommodate large-scale jobs, steam engine indicators and thousands of original engineering drawings for the famed Corliss steam engines. There were staggering amounts of documentation still present at the site, including sales records to figures as significant to the industrial revolution as Thomas Edison. Everywhere we went, the dogs followed outside, looking in through windows fortified by iron bars.

Founded in 1851, before Lincoln was president and the Civil war had ravaged the country, Watts–Campbell Company became the foremost supplier of big steam engines, and at its peak it employed 300 people. It’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places, but that doesn’t protect it from time or demolition. In fact, all of these historic artifacts are very much in danger of being destroyed. The owner, Charles Watts, was forced to sell the building, but not the artifacts inside. This means the clock is ticking to find a way to move and somehow preserve this equipment somewhere else before it is scrapped.

—Jeremy Blakeslee

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