The Vacation That Built a Village
By the winter of 1879, William Cogswell was done.
Not quit-your-job done. Not give-up done. Just bone-tired. The kind that five years of hard work and personal loss grinds into you when you never stop long enough to let it out.
He'd spent those five years managing Mine LaMotte in Missouri for a Rhode Island industrialist named Rowland Hazard. Mine LaMotte was the oldest and largest lead mine in America. Running it meant never stopping.
Cogswell was good at the job. Maybe too good, because the better you are at a place like that the more it owns you.
He said later that when he finally walked out he hoped he'd never have to go back. The work was grinding. Living conditions were rough. There was nobody worth talking to and nowhere worth going.
The mine wasn't the only thing that had worn him down either. In 1877, while he was flat on his back with congestive chills bad enough that the people around him weren't sure he'd pull through, his wife died. Both things at once. That's the kind of year that rewrites a man.
So by early 1879 he'd made himself a promise. He was going to Europe. First real vacation in five years. He was going to breathe different air, be somewhere that wasn't Missouri, and let his body and head catch up with each other for a while.
Before he left, almost out of habit, he stopped in Baltimore.
The American Institute of Mining Engineers was holding its regular winter meeting there in February of 1879. Cogswell was a member. These gatherings were familiar territory.
Engineers packed into hotel rooms and lecture halls. Technical papers got read out loud. Arguments broke out over things like how to calculate airflow through a mine shaft to prevent deadly gas buildups, or the best chemical methods for testing ore samples to figure out what you were actually pulling out of the ground.
Cogswell had been to enough of these meetings to know how they went. He wasn't expecting anything new.
Then Oswald Heinrich stood up to speak.
Heinrich was a hard man to ignore. He'd grown up in Dresden, the son of the personal secretary to the King of Saxony. That background gave him a real education and a high social standing. He came to America after the political upheavals that swept Europe in 1848 and rebuilt himself completely.
He taught architectural drawing in Richmond, Virginia. He created the detailed rendering of President James Monroe's tomb at Hollywood Cemetery — a drawing considered significant enough to eventually end up in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
He mapped collapsing mine shafts while the ceiling was literally coming down around him. He took over the Midlothian Colliery in Virginia, one of the most dangerous coal mines in the country, and spent years redesigning its ventilation systems.
In a coal mine, bad ventilation doesn't mean stuffy air. It means coal dust building up until a spark touches it off and takes out an entire shift. Heinrich fixed that problem at Midlothian.
By 1879 he was running a school in Drifton, Pennsylvania, teaching miners' kids the engineering and math the mines needed but that nobody had ever bothered to teach working people before.
He was the kind of man who looked at a problem everyone else had accepted and asked why they were all just living with it.
His paper that evening covered something called the ammonia-soda process. A method for manufacturing soda ash that a Belgian entrepreneur named Ernest Solvay had spent nearly twenty years perfecting.
Soda ash sounds like something you'd see on a label and ignore. But it's sodium carbonate. The glass industry needed it. The soap industry needed it. Textile mills needed it. Paper manufacturers needed it. The whole industrial world ran on the stuff.
And in 1879 America was importing almost all of it from Europe. Sending close to five million dollars a year across the Atlantic for something Heinrich was now arguing could be made right here at home.
The process needed three basic things. Salt brine. Limestone. Good transportation to move materials in and finished product out.
Here's where Cogswell's particular history starts to matter.
He was born in Oswego, New York, right on Lake Ontario. His family moved to Syracuse when he was four. His first real job at fourteen was as a surveying assistant for the Oswego and Syracuse Railroad and the Syracuse and Utica Railroad.
That work wasn't glamorous. But it was an education no classroom could match.
For years he was out in the field measuring terrain and mapping routes across central New York. Learning the actual ground. The rock formations. The soil. The way water moved through the region. Where the salt springs surfaced and where they went back underground.
What he saw over those years shaped a theory. The weak salt brine springs scattered across the Oswego and Onondaga region weren't isolated pockets. They were surface leakage from something much bigger buried deeper down. A massive underground bed of rock salt sitting further south. The springs were just where it ran off at the edges.
He also grew up watching Oswego work as one of the first major shipping ports on the Great Lakes. Ships moving raw materials in. Onondaga salt moving out by the millions of bushels through the Oswego Canal and onto the Erie Canal heading east.
He understood from boyhood how water transportation turned raw materials into profitable industry.
So when Heinrich listed what the ammonia-soda process needed, the map that formed in Cogswell's head wasn't abstract. It was specific. It was places he'd walked and waterways he'd studied and geological formations he'd spent years turning over in his mind.
Syracuse had been called Salt City since before the American Revolution. The salt brine deposits under the city had been supplying the region since the 1790s. Limestone quarries sat within reasonable hauling distance. The Erie Canal ran directly through the area, connecting any factory built there to markets across the entire eastern seaboard.
Rita Cominoli spent more than a decade researching the history of the Solvay community.
Her book Smokestacks Allegro is the most thorough account of that world ever written. She notes that after Heinrich specifically mentioned Syracuse during the presentation, Cogswell probably stopped hearing the rest of the paper entirely.
He'd already made up his mind. He was still going to Europe. But the trip had just gotten a new purpose.
The vacation part didn't last long.
Cogswell arrived in Germany carrying letters of introduction from Heinrich to several German chemical engineers. He tracked down a German manufacturer who seemed like the right partner to license the process for an American plant. They started talking seriously.
Then the German manufacturer went insane before they could finish the deal.
That line comes straight out of Edward Trump's handwritten history of the Solvay Process Company. Trump was one of the company's first engineers and wrote from personal knowledge. He recorded the German manufacturer's breakdown in one plain sentence and moved on.
You get the sense he'd seen enough in the industrial world that a business partner losing his mind mid-negotiation didn't require much commentary.
A German friend told Cogswell that the best ammonia-soda operation in the world wasn't in Germany anyway. It was run by two brothers named Solvay over in Brussels, Belgium.
So Cogswell went to Brussels.
Ernest and Alfred Solvay said no.
What Cogswell didn't know when he walked in was that another American had already visited the Solvays with the same basic idea. That man had walked into their office, put his boots up on Alfred Solvay's desk, leaned back in his chair, and started explaining the terms on which he was going to make them both fantastically rich.
The Solvay brothers were careful, patient men who had spent twenty years building something real. They had no use for loud promoters who treated their furniture like a footrest.
By the time Cogswell arrived with his letters and his engineering knowledge, the Solvays had already decided Americans who came knocking with big ideas weren't worth their time.
Cogswell went back to Hanover, the German city where he'd been staying during his travels, empty handed.
Then he wrote them a letter anyway.
Two or three months after getting turned down face to face, he wrote to the Solvay brothers asking them to take another look. Edward Trump's company history records his state of mind at that point in one short phrase. He wanted it more than ever.
That's the line that tells you who William Cogswell was.
Not the flash of recognition in Baltimore. Not the geological knowledge he'd built over a lifetime. It's that letter. Written from a hotel room in Hanover to men who'd already said no. By a man whose best alternative had just collapsed when his German contact lost his mind.
Most people in that situation start reconsidering the whole thing. Cogswell sat down and made his case again.
The Solvays wrote back asking for references. Cogswell knew how that game worked. He assembled letters from Andrew D. White, President of Cornell University. From Abram Hewitt, one of the most prominent iron manufacturers in America. From Judge Charles Sedgwick of Syracuse. From Rowland Hazard himself, whose name carried weight in European business circles. He packaged everything up and sent it to Brussels.
Three months later the reply came. The references checked out. The Solvays would see him again.
On the second visit Cogswell got what he'd come for. The Solvays gave him a formal commission to go back to America, study the potential plant locations, and report on raw material quality, costs, and how finished product could reach market. It was their way of saying we're not agreeing to anything yet but we're willing to look at the facts.
Cogswell went back to central New York and looked at the facts. His report on Syracuse confirmed everything he'd believed since he was a teenager surveying railroad routes through the salt country south of the city.
His report was favorable.
In June of 1881 Cogswell and Hazard traveled to Brussels together for a final week of negotiations. Hazard wrote in his diary that the sessions were long and exhausting. The contract they came out with was built phrase by phrase. Hazard described it as so carefully worded and so thorough in its terms that once both sides signed it the document could go in a safe and stay there.
On September 21st 1881, in the downtown Syracuse office of Judge Sedgwick, the Solvay Process Company was incorporated under the laws of New York State. Three hundred thousand dollars in capital. Three thousand shares at a hundred dollars each. Cogswell was named Treasurer and General Manager.
He was forty-seven years old.
A man named E.B. Judson was president of the First National Bank of Syracuse at the time. He'd been offered the chance to buy stock in the new company early on. He turned it down. His reason was straightforward. He thought Cogswell was much too old to pull off something this ambitious. A forty-seven year old man starting a pioneer industrial venture from scratch. Judson didn't see it working.
The factory opened in 1884. By 1886 it was producing twenty percent of all the soda ash used in the United States. By 1902 it was putting out twenty-two and a half times its original output. The village that grew up around it was incorporated in 1894. The first postmaster suggested the name. Everyone agreed.
They called it Solvay.
William Brown Cogswell died on June 7th 1921 at his home at 320 Park Avenue in New York City. The New York Times ran a short obituary the next morning. It covered his career in a few paragraphs and got to the central moment in one sentence. He'd attended a mining engineers meeting in Baltimore, heard a paper, seen what it meant, gone to Europe, met resistance, and kept pushing until it worked.
He saw it anyway. And he didn't let go until it was built.
I know this story from a particular angle.
I grew up on Hall Avenue in Solvay in the 1960s and early 1970s, two blocks up from Summit Avenue where Rita Cominoli's family lived. I knew her brother Joe who had a paper route in the neighborhood. I'd been a paperboy myself. And I worked at that factory.
The first time I got hired, I was eighteen years old. I didn't have engineering credentials or Ivy League references.
What I had was Flora Malpocher, who co-owned the Lamont Grill on Lamont Avenue with her husband Ernie. I used to stop in there even as a kid, underage, for a hamburger and conversation. Flora would often be sitting at the end of the bar.
One evening she asked a patron named Bob Lawrence, who was a supervisor in the calcium chloride section, if he could help me get a foot in the door. He did.
That's how I got my first job at the Solvay Process Company. Not through a letter from the President of Cornell University. Through a woman at the end of a bar who thought I deserved a chance and knew someone who could make it happen.
Years later, after a stint in the US Air Force, I came back to Syracuse. My Uncle Rich Bordonaro helped me land a maintenance job at the Syracuse Housing Authority.
That kept me going for a while but the factory was still there, and by 1974 my Uncle Amos Speziali knew a man named George Kinder, who supervised the machine shop and mechanical repair section. George got me into Gang 7.
That was the night and weekend emergency repair crew. We rebuilt pumps. Did light piping work. Replaced sheet metal parts and metal support framing. Got called out to inspect jammed conveyor systems at all hours, whether it was a line of metal buckets that had locked up or a large screw conveyor that needed pulling apart and fixing in the middle of a shift.
It wasn't glamorous work. But it was real work in a real place.
And that place existed because a tired engineer stopped in Baltimore on his way to a vacation he badly needed, heard one presentation, and spent the next two years refusing to take no for an answer.
Cogswell got his references from the President of Cornell and an iron magnate and a Rhode Island industrialist.
I got mine from Flora Malpocher and my Uncle Amy.
A hundred years apart and the same basic truth. In Solvay, who you knew and who was willing to vouch for you was how things got done. Cogswell built that into the company from the very beginning. It was still working exactly that way when I walked through the gate.
Sources & Further Reading
Trump, Edward N. Early History of the Solvay Process Company. Solvay Public Library digital archive. solvaylibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TRUMP1.pdf
Cominoli, Rita. Smokestacks Allegro. 1990. Center For Migration Studies, Pdf files, OnlineLibrary.Wiley.com
New York Times, June 8, 1921. Obituary: William B. Cogswell.
Gallery:
William B. Cogswell Obituary, New York Times, June 7, 1921
Here is the full transcribed text of the Oswald Julius Heinrich death notice from the Richmond Dispatch, February 5, 1886:
Death of Oswald J. Heinrich.
Oswald Julius Heinrich, formerly a well-known resident of this city, died at Drifton, Luzerne county, Pa., yesterday morning, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. The deceased was born in Dresden, and was a son of Joseph Heinrich, First Secretary of the King of Saxony. Oswald Heinrich received a liberal education at Freiburg, but having made mining engineering a specialty, removed to this country in 1849, coming to Richmond in 1855. Prior to the war there being but little demand for the services of mining engineers, he turned his attention to architecture, in which he was thoroughly proficient, and established quite a lucrative business. He exhibited great interest in the Mechanics' Institute, wherein he was a teacher, and here, as well as in the private classes he taught, he was noted for his thoroughness, his patience, and his absolute conscientiousness. When the war broke out the deceased accepted a position in the Confederate States Nitre and Mining Bureau. Here his talents found a field worthy of them, and he proved a most faithful and valuable officer. At the close of the war he was made mining engineer of the Midlothian Coal Company, but some eight or ten years ago removed to Drifton, Pa., where he became principal of a mining school. Many of our older citizens will read the announcement of his death with deep regret. He was a charming companion, a sympathetic friend, a good man. He had a kind word for every one, and Richmond always had a warm place in his heart. Deceased was a brother of Mr. B. Heinrich, of this city. He leaves a wife and four children.
William B. Cogswell 74 Years of Age Birthday Announcement - Syracuse Herald Journal, September 22, 1908
