{"id":362,"date":"2013-07-22T04:03:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T04:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/?page_id=362"},"modified":"2013-07-22T04:15:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-22T04:15:49","slug":"the-t-a-gillespie-loading-company-power-house","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/sample-page\/t-a-gillespie-shell-loading-company\/the-t-a-gillespie-loading-company-power-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The T. A. Gillespie Loading Company Power House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Morgan Munitions \u2013 The T. A. Gillespie Loading Company Power House<\/h3>\n
\"Gillespie<\/a>

The T. A. Gillespie Loading Company Power House as of July 3, 1918.<\/p><\/div>\n

While on a trip visiting Mom in Morgan back in 2005, I took a side trip to the place where the family of my childhood friend Rick kept their boat. When we were teenagers, we used to water ski on Cheesequake Creek and in Raritan Bay.\u00a0 One time one of our high school gym teachers, who we called \u201cMeatball\u201d, came along with us. That was a good trip and he was actually a pretty good water skier. Other times when we went in the bay we would stop right over the place where the sewage pipe emptied out into the bay much to the distaste of the person skiing who then sank into it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not knowing anything, and I mean anything, about the history of Cheesequake Creek at the time, I always wondered about all the pier pilings we saw on it while water skiing. It seemed that something big used to be there. During my 2005 visit to Brown\u2019s Boat Yard, where Rick\u2019s boat was (and still is) moored, I noted an old brick building and wondered if that had anything to do with the old munitions factory which people would mention on occasion.\u00a0 It looked like it was from the early 20th<\/sup> century and was previously part of a larger structure so I took a photo of it.\u00a0 On one side of the building, the unevenness of the brick endings looked like there used to be a longer brick wall.<\/p>\n

In the early summer of 2009, my Jesse Selover Elementary School Phys Ed teacher, Mr. Baumann, was kind enough to provide me with some US Army Corps of Engineers diagrams showing where the buildings of the expansive T. A. Gillespie Loading Company were originally located.\u00a0 I have to say that this was an amazing thing to finally see since no one had ever seemed to have any idea of the plant\u2019s layout or even exactly where it was located.\u00a0 I analyzed these diagrams for hours.\u00a0 Upon close examination of the diagrams, I noticed that the Power House and wharf were located where Brown\u2019s Boat Yard has been since 1952. It occurred to me that perhaps the building I saw in 2005 might actually indeed have had something to do with the Power House.<\/p>\n

\"Remains<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Later that summer, I went back to look at the old brick building and saw that it had in the mean time had an extremely well done make over. My school buddy Ken and I walked around the building and examined the remains of the near by brick walls which appeared to be the walls of a prior larger building. We both concluded that this probably was actually the remains of the Power House. We were pleased to discover that it was composed of bricks from the Sayre & Fisher Brick Company previously located a few miles away in the northern part of Sayreville and once the largest brick manufacturer in the world.<\/p>\n

Well at long last I located a photo, dated July 3, 1918, of a mostly and then recently constructed Power House.\u00a0 It also showed the elevated Pumping Tank in the background. If you compare the 1918 photo to the 2005 photo of the brick building at Brown\u2019s Boat Yard, you will see that indeed that brick building was part of the T. A. Gillespie Loading Company\u2019s Power House building.\u00a0 Some think this is the sole remaining structure from the T. A. Gillespie Loading Company but I believe there is one other building (see the \u201cThe Last Remaining Gillespie Buildings\u201c<\/a>).\u00a0 I used to have suspicions that were a few other buildings remaining but now I really don\u2019t think so, just these two.<\/p>\n

\"Diagram<\/a>

Diagram of the Portion of the T. A. Gillespie Loading Company Located Nearest to Cheesequake Creek. Source: US Army Corps of Engineers.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Power House is located on the right side of the diagram above the arrow marked \u201cJ-22\u201d. It is the rectangle with the big \u201cX\u201d.\u00a0 On the lower right is Cheesequake Creek and the wide gray segment in the bottom left corner is where the Garden State Parkway is today.\u00a0 This portion of the facility was known as Plant 47 and contained the Power House, the wharf on Cheesequake Creek, buildings making up some of the production lines for the loading of explosives into 75mm artillery shells (featured in some other to-be-reposted pages), railroad tracks connecting the facility, and the elevated Pumping Tank.\u00a0 I don\u2019t yet have specifics on which portions of the facility utilized the Pumping Tank, i.e., whether it was used to supply water for steam or if it also supplied water for the shell loading production lines. Hopefully that will be determined in the near future.\u00a0 Today, of course, the remains of the Pumping House and the wharf area are occupied by Brown\u2019s Boat Yard.\u00a0 Where the diagram shows buildings named with the prefix \u201c4-1-\u201c is today a relatively new neighborhood located in the area to the east of the Garden State Parkway and circled by Gondek Drive. I remain very amused at one of the names of the streets which intersects Gondek Drive.\u00a0 How do you pronounce \u201cWlodarczyk\u201d? It is so much easier now to get to Brown\u2019s Boat yard since there are paved streets.\u00a0 When we went water skiing as kids, it was a hilly, long and dusty dirt road between Ernston Road and Brown\u2019s Boat Yard.<\/span><\/p>\n

Originally posted on June 26, 2010.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morgan Munitions \u2013 The T. A. Gillespie Loading Company Power House While on a trip visiting Mom in Morgan back in 2005, I took a side trip to the place where the family of my childhood friend Rick kept their boat. When we were teenagers, we used to water ski on Cheesequake Creek and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":238,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-362","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":374,"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/362\/revisions\/374"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morgan-nj.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}