Machine Shop to Foundry
PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Around 1890, when Farrel Foundry & Machine Company acquired the land beyond the old factory road north of their original buildings, it was to build a new foundry to handle demand for new and larger rolls and calenders. With the new foundry, people and materials were continually crossing the old factory road. Growth on the site over the next thirty years is well documented in the maps of Ansonia, and it is easy to imagine each expansion adding bridges to carry people, materials and utility lines over the factory road.
However, from the start, the most important passage was across the small yard where the tunnel comes out of darkness. Along this axis heavy castings were regularly moved from the foundry to the machine shops where they were finished and assembled and readied for shipment. Several of the cranes on the foundry side are rated at 60 tons; the castings were huge.
Expansions would soon include new, larger roll mills parallel to the new foundry and lower on the hillside, and other axes would carry materials up from the rail line and down to the new roll sheds. Men working at the mill today tell me it was the largest machine foundry east of the Mississippi. It was becoming a machine-making machine.
Foundry to Machine Shop
Back down the Tunnel
Top of the Tunnel
