The red diaries showed up on eBay a couple of years ago. They were jammed into a cardboard tomato box and offered for sale by a junkman.
Handwritten on thin paper in the ad-packed diaries once offered annually by the Wanamaker department store, they chronicled 44 years in the daily life of a housewife in the company town of Roebling, New Jersey.
To Lynne Calamia, they were a once-in-a-lifetime find, the sort of treasure of which historians dream.
Calamia is executive director of the Roebling Museum, a small nonprofit that preserves and tells the story of the family of John A. Roebling, best known as the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge—and of the wire rope that made those iconic spans possible—and of the company town where the wire was produced.
Calamia calls herself a public historian. Since joining the museum in 2020, she has expanded its focus to include the lives of the men and women who worked at the mill and raised families in the town. She brings that history to as wide an audience as possible, not only through museum exhibits, but through walking tours, special programs, and the ongoing restoration of a worker’s home and garden.
Her work joins efforts by other historians in recent decades to uncover and bring to public attention previously unrecognized stories about the contributions of immigrants, Black people, women and other marginalized groups in American history.
The diaries fit that mission perfectly. Calamia jumped at the chance to buy them for the museum.
“We want to tell the story beyond the steel mill—of the community, what it would be like to live here, the life cycle of the workers,” she says. “These are not people who would have had biographies written about them.”
The story of the Roebling steel mill and town—of industry and immigration, decline and adaptation—in many ways echoes the story of New Jersey.
Patriarch John A. Roebling invented the process for manufacturing wire rope to tow canal boats in Pennsylvania, where he had immigrated from Prussia. He soon recognized its potential use in suspension bridges, which he designed and built. His plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, implemented by his son and daughter-in-law, Washington and Emily Roebling, after his untimely death, were a highlight of The Gilded Age’s second season on HBO.
When the family company, headquartered in Trenton, needed a place to produce its own steel in 1905, it built a mill and a town to house its workers a few miles south along the Delaware.
Giant spools of wire rope from the mill served as suspension cables on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, submarine nets in World War I, and elevator cables in the Empire State Building. Its jobs provided a launchpad to the middle class for generations of immigrants from Europe, as well as Black people who had joined the Great Migration. “Once you had a job at Roebling, you were set for life,” was the workers’ refrain.
The town offered 750 well-built houses with reasonable rents and a convenient walk to the mill. Its streets reflected the hierarchy of the factory: executives lived in spacious homes along the river; recent immigrants in narrow row houses closest to the mill yard’s clanging metal; and skilled American workers in between.
But steel production moved overseas after World War II. The mill was sold in 1953, shuttered in 1973, and demolished in 1975. It soon became a U.S. Superfund site, now mostly cleaned up. All that remains is its gateway and administration building, which houses the museum, and the mill yard, which holds a craneway, a flywheel, and a few huge pieces of industrial equipment.
The surroundings have escaped the fate of many once-thriving factory towns. Nearly all of the town’s original buildings—including houses and a handsome brick commercial block—remain intact.
The unincorporated community in Florence Township, Burlington County, today is home to about 4,000 people.
After the mill closed, a group of local residents banded together to preserve Roebling’s history. With help from descendants of John A. Roebling’s sons, the museum opened in 2010.
Many significant items in the museum’s collection come from the attics and garages of those museum founders. Their photo albums, scrapbooks and memories—recorded in oral histories—have helped to recreate what life was like in the factory town.
One of the greatest treasures came from Lou Borbi, an avid historian and retired school teacher whose grandfather, father, uncles and brother worked at the mill, as he did during summer vacations.
When the mill was demolished, he rescued the employment records of more than 13,000 Roebling employees. The 5-by-8-inch cards date from 1910 to 1950, with ID photos and notes about hirings and firings, languages spoken, skills learned, disciplinary records and injuries.
Each card “gives a name and a face to the people who worked here,” says Calamia. Like puzzle pieces, they can be grouped to produce different pictures, such as of the ethnic groups that comprised the workforce, the family connections that linked employees, and the injuries they suffered.
Their details might make today’s HR managers blush.
One notes that a laborer, hired at 17, should not be rehired: “Insubordination (the boy is no good),” it reads, later noting that he was “always late for work.”
The young man’s tardiness was startling, says Calamia, given his address—directly across the street from the mill entrance.
The museum recently purchased that row house, with plans to eventually offer tours. Descendants have provided a trove of photographs, some of which have been enlarged to life size and are on display in its living room. Calamia is perusing vintage Sears Roebuck catalogs to identify the right furnishings.
“I love the treasure hunt of history,” she says.
One day, she hopes, the row house will be the factory town’s equivalent of New York’s Tenement Museum—and the village of Roebling will be industrial America’s Colonial Williamsburg.
Roebling Museum is open Thursday-Saturday, March to December; 609-499-7200.
Lindy Washburn, a longtime reporter for The Record/northjersey.com, was twice named the New Jersey Press Association’s Journalist of the Year.
[RELATED: Ultimate Guide to NJ’s Under-the-Radar Museums]
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The post Meet the Woman Who’s Uncovering the Untold Stories of NJ’s Roebling Steel Mill appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.
