Ohio Archives

January 15, 2015December 20, 2021

Pumpjacks in Athens County

I was all excited back on September 18, 2014, when gas in Jackson dropped to $3.03. On December, 14, I celebrated that gas in Florida had fallen below $2.50. This week, I gassed up for $2.13, and Neighbor Jacqie got it for seven cents less two days later

That got me to thinking about this pumping rig I spotted in Athens County last summer. I was hoping I would run across one because they used to be pretty common in that area.

Other names for pumpjack

In case you aren’t familiar with the term “pumpjack” (I wasn’t), it is also called “oil horse, donkey pumper, nodding donkey, pumping unit, horsehead pump, rocking horse, beam pump, dinosaur, sucker rod pump (SRP), grasshopper pump, Big Texan, thirsty bird, or jack pump). It is the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well.”

In the old days, you’d drive by a field that was covered with a thick sludge of oily goop and see pipes running to a central collection point. For some reason, I don’t think I ever shot one. Maybe it was just too ugly in a not-neat way.

Here is a site that explains how those old “jackline”operations work, along with a lot of other interesting history. That sounds like what I remember. They’ve pretty much become obsolete.

Drilling rig hit gas

The closest I came to photographing anything like that was this fire. I don’t know why this drilling rig was working right next to the road on a chilly day in March of 1969, but it must have hit a pocket of natural gas, and all it took was one spark to light it off.

How does thing work?

Curator Jessica and I found this while we were running around looking for neat stuff. I asked her how it worked.

Curators are supposed to know everything, plus, she’s married to T.J., who is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio University. I figured she’d have picked up this kind of knowledge through osmosis.

Instead of breaking a stick off a tree and sketching out the whole thing in the dirt alongside the road, she said, “Wait until dinner and have T.J. explain it to you.”

Natural gas is the target

T.J. is an effective teacher. The first thing he explained was that the target is natural gas, not oil, as I had always thought.

His description pretty much matched this explanation given on Wikipedia. He’s known on campus as a tough grader, so rather than try to parrot what he said, I’m going to let this illustration explain it. (He doesn’t tolerate students who copy the work of others, so I may STILL be in trouble.)

When I asked why they went to all the trouble to use the walking beam with its horse head for a small operation like this (I’ve seen giant ones out West), he explained that the walking beam with a counterweight can do all the heavy lifting, enabling the use of a much smaller motor than if it was connected directly.

I don’t have any idea what kind of volume the wells produce nor how many of them are in operation. A lot of them were sitting idle when we passed by, but we saw one large one that looked like it was fairly new.

January 13, 2015

A Face in the Crowd

Sarah Boumphrey, assistant to the office of the president of Ohio University, contacted me this afternoon. I thought it might be to let me know that they were finally going to give me my degree, but that wasn’t it.

She said that one of the faces in the crowd in my Martin Luther King, Jr., National Day of Mourning photos belonged to a young man who would eventually become the president of the university, and she wanted permission to Tweet it to commemorate Martin Luther King Day.

Here it is in context

The man who would become president, Dr. Roderick J. McDavis is on the right side of the photo. Follow the brick column straight down until you see a man in a white coat (Sarah thought he looked a little like Sean Penn). Dr. McDavis to behind and to his left.

You can click on the photo to make it larger.

Who would have thought?

The young man at the podium, James Steele, led a peaceful sit-in at the intersection of the town’s main drag, Court and Union Streets at the close of the memorial service.

He told the Ohio University Post in 2012, “It would have been hard for me to be persuaded that there would be a black president of OU (today). We can talk so much about the remaining problems and difficulties that we can lose sight of how profound some of the progress has been.”

Where do we go from here?

After the sit-in broke up, a few tattered signs remained behind, including one that is asking the question we’re still asking today, “Where do we go from here?”

The tight head shot of Dr. McDavis will be linked to this 2012 post which contains more photos and a more complete description of what happened on that Sunday, April 7, 1968, day when the nation was reeling in shock.

In 2013, the photographs were part of “Dawn of Mourning,” presented by Sigma Gamma Rho, Inc. in conjunction with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, the Foster and Helen Cornwell Lecture Series, University College, the Campus Involvement Center, The Athens Messenger and The Post. Here is a catalog of the photos in the show.

December 16, 2014

Silver Bridge Collapse

Chuck Beckley, who was a high school kid working as a lab tech at The Athens Messenger 47 years ago, posted a photo to Facebook of a roadside marker that read:

Silver Bridge Collapse

Constructed in 1928, connected Point Pleasant and Kanauga, OH. Name credited to aluminum colored paint used. First eye-bar suspension bridge of its type in US. Rush hour collapse on 15 December 1967 resulted in 31 vehicles falling into the river, killing 46 and injuring 9. Failed eye-bar joint and weld identified as cause. Resulted in passage of national bridge inspection standards in 1968.

The model above is one that was exhibited at a fair I covered in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Who covered it?

Churck asked Bob Rogers, “Did I pick up film from the bus station for you and Jon [Webb], or Ken for this?”

It wasn’t me. I didn’t start working for The Messenger until the summer of 1968. On that particular day, I was on a train about half-way to Cincinnati headed back to Cape for Christmas break. At one of the stops, a passenger got on and started spreading the word about a big bridge collapse in Point Pleasant. He didn’t have a whole lot of details, and I was anxious to get home to see family and Girlfriend Lila, so I didn’t give it much thought.

I spent a lot of time later covering the building of the new Silver Memorial Bridge. Here are the piers of the old bridge. If the railroad bridge in the background is indicative of how well bridges were maintained in those days, it’s no wonder the bridge went down.

Over in less than a minute

Even though I didn’t cover the actual tragedy, I’m haunted by the gouges and scars on this pier. In other photos on that roll, you can still see cables and wires dangling down into the water.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology website explained it in chilling detail:

On December 15, 1967 at about 5PM the traffic signal at one end of the Silver Bridge turned red. The rush hour traffic, together with the Christmas shopping traffic, completely occupied the main span of the bridge connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia with Kanauga, Ohio. Suddenly a loud cracking sound was heard and one of the main towers began to twist and fall.

In less than a minute, all three spans of the bridge collapsed into the icy Ohio River, carrying with them all the cars, trucks, and people. Forty-six died.

[The failure of an eyebar set the chain of events in motion] Once this eyebar failed, the pin fell out, unpinning this part of the suspension chain. The adjacent tower was subjected to an asymmetrical loading that caused it to rotate and allow the western span to twist in a northerly direction. This span crashed down on the western shore, folding over on top of the falling cars and trucks. Loaded by the whole weight of the center span, which had now become unsupported on its western end, the east tower fell westward into the river along with the center span. Finally, the west tower collapsed toward Pt. Pleasant and into the Ohio River, completing the destruction of the Silver Bridge.

Two bodies were never recovered.

Silver Memorial Bridge

I took this photo of the new Silver Memorial Bridge on December 6, 1969. The replacement bridge opened on December 15, 1969, exactly two years after the collapse.

When I went through that area last summer, I looked for any remnants of the old Silver Bridge. Either I was in the wrong place or every trace of it has been removed. I still think about what it must have been like to have been stuck in that traffic jam nearly half a century ago.

James Baughn’s Bridgehunter website has more information on the bridge and its collapse.

November 27, 2014

You’re Getting a Rerun

I did a post yesterday about a football game played in a concrete stadium built built by the depression-era WPA in Glouster, Ohio, in 1940.

The town of Glouster, where the Glouster Memorial Stadium is located, and Trimble, the home of the Tomcats who play there, are part of an Appalachia that has been dying since the coal mines closed down and the railroads pulled up their tracks: about 25 percent of the roughly 2,500 residents of Glouster and Trimble live below the poverty line. What they DO have is a pride in and a passion for their football team.

Win, but win right

Homemade spirit signs encouraging the Tomcats peppered yards and were displayed by businesses.What I really liked was the way they emphasized sportsmanship, team and town.

Hundreds of towns people tried to keep the field dry with tarps a few days before the big playoff game. When it looked like they might have to move the game off the home field, they brought in a helicopter to blow it dry.

While I was editing the photos, I was listening on the Internet to police calls out of a Missouri community coming apart, while being moved by heartwarming pictures of a community coming together.

Category: Ohio