A Solvay Palimpsest: The Tracks That Ran Through All of Us

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When you walk the streets of Solvay, you are walking on layered history, and sometimes those layers intersect directly with your own bloodline. 

William Haney was a coke oven worker in 1906 who moved his family to Second Street to escape a crumbling life, only to lose it to a locomotive. When I read his story, it is not abstract history to me.

Half a century after Haney's death, my family lived just doors down at 500 Second Street. Decades before I found my own refuge in a $25-a-week rear apartment at 907 Willis Avenue, Haney was trying to escape 907½.

When his grueling 11:00 PM shift ended, he walked out of the soda ash factory. 

Long before it was Allied Chemical, it was the same plant where I would eventually spend twelve and a half years on the floor before it closed for good.

There is a word for this: palimpsest — a manuscript page scraped clean and written over again, but where the old text bleeds through beneath the new.

Solvay is that kind of place. 

The Solvay Process Company hired men like Haney the way it hired so many others: immigrant labor, first-generation muscle, bodies traded for tonnage.

The plant's ledgers closed. The men's names did not make it into the histories. They made it, if they were unlucky enough, into the newspaper.

My grandfather was a first-generation immigrant who arrived in 1907, the year after Haney died on those tracks. He went to work at Halcomb Steel, part of the same tight web of industrial Solvay.

He was killed on railroad tracks near there in 1926, twenty years almost to the decade after the same kind of iron and speed ended William Haney. 

Their paths could never have crossed. But they breathed the same air, worked the same kind of shifts, and were killed by the same stretch of track.

I found this clipping by accident, the way you find most things that matter. 

A digitized archive, a headline that reads like a shout. 

HANEY'S HEAD CUT OFF. The bluntness of 1906 newspaper language.

Underneath it, a story about a man who owed money, who moved to escape it, who worked the late shift, who did not make it home. 

A story that turned out to be partly mine.

The tracks that killed William Haney in 1906 killed my grandfather in 1926. 
Solvay doesn't forget. It just waits.


 Full account and original text with newspaper clip image here