PRINCETON: Historian tells the story of the Roebling family

By Amber Cox
   PRINCETON — One of America’s greatest icons, the Brooklyn Bridge, was built by a family company that created the small village of Roebling.
   ”The people in Roebling have a fondness for the company that is just remarkable,” author and Roebling historian Clifford Zink said.
   Mr. Zink, of Aiken Avenue in Princeton Borough, recently published a book, “The Roebling Legacy,” discussing the Roebling family and its enterprises.
   ”I call it the Roebling legacy because it’s about the family, it’s about the company, it’s about all of the things that have resulted from the whole Roebling business and the town of Roebling,” he said.
   Mr. Zink, 60, co-authored a book in 1992, “Spanning the Industrial Age,” which told a brief history of the company. He said people began approaching him to do an updated version, or at the least release it again.
   ”I started to give it some serious thought,” he said. “I realized there was a lot more research available than there was when I wrote the first book.”
   Mr. Zink said when he wrote his first book he had to get all of his information from libraries and old newspaper clippings, but now there are a number of other outlets available, including the Internet.
   ”I’ve always been fascinated by the whole Roebling story, because of the most prominent aspect of it, the best known aspect of it, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.
   Mr. Zink said the wire rope that helped create the bridge is a pretty mundane invention today but 100 years ago “it was like the fiber optics of the 19th century.”
   ”It was an essential component of all these new technologies, like elevators,” he said. “You couldn’t have skyscrapers unless you had elevators and you couldn’t have elevators unless you had wire rope.”
   The Roeblings had factories in both Trenton and Roebling and even the area around Trenton became a sort of “Chambersburg” section.
   ”A lot of the development in that area was tied to the Roebling company,” Mr. Zink said.
   Mr. Zink said at that time there were hundreds of company towns in America but none could compare to Roebling.
   He quoted Roebling Mayor Kenneth Wilkie from 1975 when he told a Trenton Times reporter, “When the plant closed, we had some Philadelphia newsmen come to ask us what was going to happen to the town, but I couldn’t get them to understand that we weren’t going to fold up and go away. The people here are ambitious and industrious. There is a strong family life. People own their homes. No one is going to leave.”
   Mr. Zink said his latest book is full of original language and extensive quotes from the Roebling family. The company was started by John Roebling and later left to his three sons, Washington, Ferdinand and Charles.
   John Roebling died from tetanus after receiving an injury while working on the Brooklyn Bridge.
   ”He had proposed building this huge bridge, much bigger than anybody else had thought of ever before,” Mr. Zink said. “It took him 12 years to get it approved. When he got it approved and he was finally ready to build it amidst great skepticism, he gets his foot injured and dies. It was like Moses looking at the Promised Land and never getting there.”
   Mr. Zink said Washington Roebling had to take over and became the chief engineer at the young age of 32.
   ”The reason they appointed him as chief engineer was he had worked with his father and knew more than anybody else, even though he was only 32,” he said.
   The Brooklyn Bridge was built with caissons, which Mr. Zink described as hollowed out boxes.
   ”It was all made out of wood and very big, maybe half the size of a football field,” he said. “They floated it out to where the tower was going to be and sunk it. There was a hole in top and the men would climb through the top and they kept digging out the inside.”
   Mr. Zink said the more the men dug the more the caissons would sink and they also kept piling stone on top.
   ”Those massive towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are on top of a wooden box, the towers are sitting on oak,” he said.
   Washington Roebling became injured while building the bridge and his wife, Emily, began serving as his liaison to the men.
   ”For five years, nobody saw him,” Mr. Zink said. “He was the chief engineer but he never left his house. He would write instructions and Emily would take them to the assistant engineers on site and she would come back with questions from them.”
   Mr. Zink said everyone thought Washington was going to die from his illness but he ended up outliving both of his brothers and didn’t die until he was 89 years old.
   ”The Roeblings lived in the town and their business was their identity, not only as businessmen but socially and culturally in the community,” he said. “Everything they did reflected that because they were prominent members of the community, providing employment, making quality buildings, making a decent work experience. All of that was done because it was the period when the factory owners lived in the town where the factory was.
   ”Inspired innovation, bold entrepreneurship, continuous reinvestment, superior quality and company employee loyalty all characterize the Roebling enterprise.”