Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509180100
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You'd never have known it, but there was a ton of history in a burned-out old industrial hulk down along the railroad tracks in Southeast Roanoke.
Years ago in that grimy workplace, men created some of the cast-iron fencing that encircles the White House, as well as the fence around the Smithsonian Institution.
They made the supports in the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel in Bland County. Not to mention the ornamental horseheads around the Greenbrier resort, the historical markers along Virginia's roadways and the gridded stair treads and platforms that kept you from slipping that time you climbed to the top of the Washington Monument.
For most of this century, the White Foundry Co. Inc. turned out hundreds of metal contraptions that made homes and cities across the country ring with life. Manhole covers, machine gears, iron grates for wood cookstoves, motor casings, iron skillets, cornstick pans, trivets with stars on them, decorative columns and downspouts.
Only the men who sweated out their careers there thought much about the foundry's significance - until this summer, when a new property owner and a Roanoke history lover found piles of old wooden patterns at the abandoned plant on Norfolk Avenue Southeast.
Amateur historian Joel Richert spent the hottest days of August digging through the foundry's dust and soot and hauling away truckloads of the patterns. She found 1,000 of the smooth, oddly shaped pieces of wood - big, small and all handcrafted to make metal castings. She's put them in storage.
"They did so many things that had art to them," Richert said as she ran her hand across some of the patterns she's cleaned up. "This to me is candy, truly marvelous stuff."
Property owner Paul Crawford is donating them through Richert to a nonprofit organization, yet to be decided on. Some patterns may go on public display and the least valuable may be sold to raise money for whatever group gets them.
Roanoke's flood of 1985 filled the foundry with nearly 8 feet of water. When water reached the electrical boxes, an explosion sparked a fire in the still-dry upper structure.
The foundry closed the following year. Cheaper foreign products had begun to flood the market anyway. There's been another fire in the foundry in the past few years.
Though its furnaces never will be heated up again, the foundry is coming back to life in the stories of old workers, whom Richert is rounding up to learn how they created the intricate metal castings.
To her, the foundry was not just another gritty workplace cranking out tons of basic American hardware. Richert wants whoever gets the patterns - museums, private collectors - to know how and why these things were formed and how important they've been to people.
Roy Atkins is one of the people educating her. He was 18 when he went to work at the White Foundry on Sept. 1, 1950. His father and brother worked there before him.
While larger mechanized foundries turned out brake shoes, pipe fittings and other things thousands at a time, White was a "jobbing foundry" that did smaller custom jobs by hand.
Former foundry vice president Calvin Reynolds, hired as an apprentice molder in 1946, said a contractor hired the foundry to replace White House fence parts, some 6 or 7 feet high and topped with spear points.
Companies sent drawings of something they needed and men like Atkins created a wooden pattern for it. He'd lay that pattern in especially fine sand to make a mold. Iron, bronze or aluminum, often 3,000 degrees or hotter, was poured into the sandy mold to make the casting.
Sand-casting is rarely done anymore, according to Reynolds. "It's almost a lost art."
Atkins has tiny scars on his hands and arms and a big one on his back from the metal that spit out and burned through his skin.
He worked at the foundry 36 years and stayed on to shut it down. A truck driver now, he misses the place.
His work is all over Roanoke. It's in the metal grates around trees downtown. It's in the swan birdbaths in a few yards. It's in the metal treads on the steps at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Atkins and his wife, Joyce, found Atkins' old locker and his canceled paychecks on a visit to the cluttered foundry with Richert last week.
The late Joseph Keith, the foundry's last owner, was his boss. Joyce Atkins grew quiet as she stood before Keith's littered old desk, still in his office. "I can see Mr. Keith sitting here making deals on the telephone," she said.
Atkins seemed surprised that after all these years he was getting public recognition for his work.
But the routine work of Atkins the 18-year-old metalworker is a dying craft now that he's 63; the junked wooden patterns he made have become pieces of industrial folk art.
Now he and his wife are talking with Richert about holding a reunion, maybe in a park, and getting all the old foundry workers together again to talk about what they made there.
by CNB