Made in Washington
The natural gas boom – not the current Marcellus Shale development but the one occurring in the last two decades of the 19th century – caused factories requiring a large and reliable source of energy to sprout like mushrooms around Washington. Once wells were harnessed, the borough quickly grew from a sleepy agricultural community to an industrial city and major producer of glass and steel.
Local residents take pride in the fact that Duncan & Miller glassware was manufactured here. Few might suspect, however, that automobiles were once made in Washington, too.
From 1912 through 1914, the Croxton Motor Co. manufactured cars, including its snazzy French-type and German-type roadsters and five-passenger taxi cabs, at its factory along the Baltimore & Ohio tracks, just over the city line in North Franklin Township. The three-story, steel-frame and brick building Croxton constructed was 120 feet by 500 feet, requiring 500 tons of structural steel.
The building still stands today. It has been home to Famous Supply since 1975, and for half a century before that it was the Washington Annealing Box plant.
The Croxton brand may not be familiar, but neither are the Flanders, the Clarkmobile, the Zimmerman or the eight-wheeled Reeves Octoauto. A century ago, the United States was home to hundreds of automobile manufacturers, all fighting to survive in the competition for the American motorist’s heart and wallet. Some of those early brands, like Ford, Buick and Cadillac, are with us today. The Croxton is not.
The strong – General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors – survived by controlling their suppliers and keeping their products affordable. The weak were either gobbled up or died.
An article on Croxton in Automotive Industries, a trade magazine, reported in the autumn of 1912:
”The company has been operating in Cleveland, manufacturing a line of taxi cabs, touring cars and motor trucks. Outgrowing its facilities in that city, a new plant was decided upon, and the company was reorganized recently, when a number of Washington capitalists became interested. The company was incorporated in Pennsylvania with a capital stock of $300,000, and a contract was awarded for a $40,000 building.
”The old plant at Cleveland is being dismantled and the equipment will be shipped next week to Washington. New equipment will be installed, which will increase the output of the works to 1,000 cars a year. A contract had been made with the West Penn Light & Power Company for electric power, and all machines will be motor-driven.”
The “Washington capitalists” who invested in Croxton were the city’s leading bankers, lawyers and businessmen: law partners James I. Brownson and John H. Donnan, Charles S. Caldwell of Caldwell’s department store, glass industrialists J.D. Bigger and G.W. Danderer and bankers Andrew M. Linn and Allen Clarke Warne.
J.P. Stoltz, of Cleveland, was the president and general manager of the reorganized Croxton Motor Co. Stoltz purchased a house on LeMoyne Avenue in Washington from George B. Robinson. With 13 rooms and impressive neoclassical columns, the house, built in 1904, cost $20,000.
”Mr. Stoltz has already taken possession, and will at once remove his household effects from his former residence in New York City,” the Washington Observer reported on Sept. 27, 1912. “Mr. and Mrs. Stoltz and his family will in the future make their permanent home in Washington, Mr. Stoltz having active management of the new Croxton motor car factory, which is in the course of construction here.”
”Permanent” was not to be, however. The factory opened in October 1912 and shut down operations less than two years later. Stoltz and his company were gone from Washington, and the plant was sold to Angldial Computing Scale Co. in September 1914 for $52,500. The plant, however, was sold at sheriff’s sale for $25,500 to Brownson, Linn and Bigger – three of the capitalists who brought Croxton to Washington and who served as trustees of the guarantee fund of the Washington Board of Trade.
The plant was acquired in 1917 by National Wrought Iron Annealing Box Co., which operated the factory into the 1970s.
Brownson was later became Washington County’s president judge. In 1937, he purchased the former Tyler Tube and Tin Plate administration building in Tylerdale for the Neighborhood House Association. The building and association, after his death, took the name Brownson House.
Another of the original investors, Allen Clark Warne, who was founder and treasurer of Washington Trust Co., would have an untimely death not unrelated to his failed investment. On July 25, 1923, he returned from work to his home at 125 S. College St. at 5 p.m. and told his wife that he would be working on his car in the garage. An hour later, she found him there, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, his car’s engine running.
Noted earlier was the fact that 500 tons of steel went into the Claxton plant. The value of that metal on the scrap market today coould be $80,000, or twice the original cost of the entire building.