Remembering Conshohocken and West Conshohocken by Jack Coll Read Free Book Online

Lee started to experiment with the possibilities from the use of vanadium in rubber. A year later, in September 1913, vanadium rubber proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lee could produce the cheapest rubber available. Treated with the vanadium process, it was twice as durable as the finest rubber on the market.
    As the tire factory started producing tires at a rate of 2,500 per day, Lee and his wife, Jennie, lived in a modest house located at Eighth Avenue and Fayette Street. In May 1893, Lee awarded a contract to Alexander Martin and Son to erect a handsome pointed stone mansion on the property Lee had purchased. The three-story, twenty-three-room mansion, when completed, was a beautiful building located just one block from his surgical supply business and a block and a half from his parents’ home. The mansion was called Leeland and had a state-of-the-art carriage house, complete with a bowling alley, swimming pool and gym. (Lee was an avid sportsman.) Lee also built a golf course behind the mansion on property he owned, located between Seventh and Twelfth Avenues from Forrest Street down to Wood Street.
    John Elwood Lee passed away on the evening of April 8, 1914. He was fifty-four years old. His wife, Jennie, lived until 1945.
    Lee Tires of Conshohocken would go on making tires for the next half century until a bitter strike by the union employees kept the doors closed for two years, from 1963 to 1965. When the plant reopened in 1965, Goodyear exercised its right to purchase the company. All of Lee’s assets, trade names, patents, tires and tubes were now property of Goodyear.
    The Hector Street factory continued to make tires under Goodyear ownership, and in 1974, a milestone was reached at the Lee plant when the twenty-five millionth tire was produced. Three years later, the plant surpassed thirty-six million tires. In the late 1970s, Goodyear executives decided the tire factory was outdated, and in 1979, the decision was made to close the plant for good. On February 10, 1980, the last tires were made at the Spring Mill plant. The closing was due largely to the declining market for bias ply tires, caused primarily by the increased popularity of radial tires, many of which were produced overseas.
N EWTON AND H ERVEY , THE W ALKER B ROTHERS
    When you say the name Walker Brothers, one might think of an American pop group formed in 1964 that sang songs like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” or “Make It Easy on Yourself.” But in Conshohocken, if you say “Walker Brothers,” most old-timers would tell you about a couple of brothers who formed the Walker Brothers of Conshohocken and became the leading manufactures of under-floor electric distribution systems in the country.
    The Walker brothers, Hervey and Newton, founded the company in 1912 and, by 1958, employed more than 650 production workers and more than 200 administrative employees, most of whom were Conshohocken residents. The company operated on eighteen acres of prime riverfront property, much of it later purchased by Quaker Chemical.
    Early contracts for Walker Brothers included the designing and installation of switchboards for the United States naval vessels, notably the USS Wyoming . The Wyoming was a battleship weighing twenty-seven thousand tons and was built at the William Cramp and Sons Shipyard in Philadelphia and commissioned in 1912 at League Island Navy Yard. It was for a time the flagship of the Atlantic Fleet’s commander-in-chief, Rear Admiral Charles J. Badger. Badger served with the fleet during World War I and was present at the surrender of the German Grand Fleet off May Island on November 20, 1918.
    By the early 1920s, Walker Brothers had begun making and installing under-floor electrical distribution systems and, in 1923, landed its first installation at the Jefferson Standard Building of Greensboro, North Carolina. Once Walker installed the system in that first building, the company had trouble