First Cement, Coplay, Lehigh County

The subject of this blog post is unique in that it's the only one of these historical markers which I can visit by taking a fairly short and safe walk. The back of my residence is connected to Saylor Park, home of the Saylor Kilns, by the Ironton Rail Trail, where I've spent a lot of time since I moved here. A quick walk, or an even quicker bicycle ride, brings me into the little community of Coplay.

Despite the way it's spelled, Coplay is pronounced COP-lee. I recently learned the origin of the name; the borough is named for the Coplay Creek, which runs near it, and the creek in turn was named after Kolapechka, the son of Native American chieftain Paxanosa, who lived near the creek's origin point in Schnecksville. (As you might guess, growing up in the Lehigh Valley sort of requires you to be a very good speller.) Anyway, Coplay is a very small borough, with a strong industrial history that's partly due to the influence of our old buddy David Thomas. But that's for another day; today we're not talking about iron, but cement.

(Thanks to Facebook's Scott Nagy for pointing out a small error in this article.)

The marker is actually located not at the kilns
themselves, but about a block up the road,
near the Saylor Park Apartments.

The Saylor kilns stand in what's known today as Saylor Park. Like a number of other places I'll be visiting in the course of this blog, it's the property of the Lehigh County Historical Society, and is the only one of their historic sites which is open all day, every day, year-round. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980.

I first visited the kilns in the fourth grade, which is the year that we did an extensive unit on Pennsylvania history. Back then, visitors could actually walk up to the kilns themselves, and be given a tour through them. This is no longer an option, because the kilns are in a pretty bad state of disrepair and it's too dangerous; they've been fenced off, and in lieu of tour guides, a series of little monuments have been established which explain the history of the place and the man who built it. David O. Saylor was a native of the Lehigh Valley, having been born in Hanover Township. In 1866, he created the Coplay Cement Company with the plan to make natural cement, and a few years later he started experimenting with making Portland cement. 

Of course, if this isn't your area of expertise, your first question is probably the same thing that mine was: what exactly is Portland cement? Well, it was discovered in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer, who discovered that he could make a new kind of cement by burning a mixture of chalk and clay at much higher temperatures than were usually employed to make cement. When the burned mixture hardened, it resembled limestone found on the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel, and so he called his creation Portland cement.

Saylor figured he could do the same sort of thing here in the United States, since the Lehigh Valley is rich in many things, one of which is limestone. Specifically, our limestone contains three ingredients needed to properly manufacture Portland cement - lime, silica, and alumina. In 1871, Saylor got the first patent to make the stuff in the United States, and after a series of experiments, he worked out the formula. He would burn our limestone almost to a melting point, then subject it to additional refining, and the result was Portland cement. The process was improved with the help of John W. Eckert, leading to an award at the Centennial Exposition in 1876.

Panorama of the Saylor Kilns as they appear today

Saylor died in 1884, so he didn't actually get to see too many of the fruits of his labor, but he's still remembered as "the Father of the American Portland Cement Industry." During his lifetime, the cement was made in a dome kiln, which looked exactly like you think it does, but these were considered extremely inefficient; they frequently had to be shut down for maintenance. 

Click here for a full-size version of this image.

The kilns seen in Coplay today were constructed in 1893. They were originally 90 feet tall and are of a style called either Schoefer kilns or Aalborg kilns, depending on who you ask; whichever name you prefer, they were the first of their kind in the United States. Instead of the open-air setup we see today, there was a building which encased all of the kilns, with only their upper chimneys protruding through the roof. This building was known as Mill B, and was demolished sometime in the 1950s, leaving just the furnaces. The sign pictured here is part of the outdoor museum, and shows an image of the kilns as they once looked as well as their layout.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the Saylor Kilns were producing more than 70% of the country's Portland cement. However, by 1904, they were - like their dome kiln predecessor - deemed inefficient for their purpose and their use was discontinued. They were replaced by rotary kilns, and Mill B was used for storage. In the 1920s, the upper thirty feet of the kilns were removed, reducing them to 60 feet tall. The Coplay Cement Company continued operations until 1976, when it was purchased by and absorbed into the Essroc Cement Company, based out of Nazareth; Essroc itself was purchased and merged with Lehigh Hanson, Inc. into the Lehigh Cement Company in 2017.

Saving these pillars of the community

So the modern question is, of course, what's going to happen to the kilns? The Ironton Rail Trail wraps around them, inviting visitors to view them from all sides; there's something strangely beautiful about the way they're slowly succumbing to the effects of time, with bits and pieces of the bricks breaking away from each other and little plants taking root in the cracks. They feel somehow older than they are. Or maybe that's just me. In any case, there's a joint effort between Lehigh County and the National Park Service to keep the kilns from deteriorating farther, so that future generations can see them and maybe even walk up to them again like I did when I was a kid. As the sign says, Coplay made cement and cement made Coplay.

I guess you could call it... a solid foundation.

---

Sources and Further Reading:

Fox, Martha Capwell, Images of America: Whitehall and Coplay. Arcadia Publishing, 2004.

Official website of Saylor Park

Coplay Cement Company documentation in the Library of Congress

150 years of Coplay Cement at LehighValleyLive.com, March 2016.

Wojcik, Sarah. "The quest to save Coplay's Saylor cement kilns" in the Allentown Morning Call, June 18, 2016.

Nagy, Scott. Coplay Kilns - David O. Saylor. YouTube video, published January 15, 2018.

First Cement at the Historical Marker Database

Front, Carol M., Joan Minton Christopher, and Martha Capwell Fox. Images of America: The Lehigh Valley Cement Industry. Arcadia Publishing, 2005.

If you've enjoyed this, please leave a comment!

---

Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.