This week's Hagley Vault is visiting Ohio to take a look at the Austin Powder Company's mills under construction in Glenwillow, Cuyahoga County, on the southern end of Solon, Ohio.
The company, now the oldest manufacturing enterprise in the Cleveland area, produces industrial explosives and detonators, as well as blasting services. But back when it was founded in 1833 by brothers Daniel Hudson Austin (1804-1878), Alvin Austin (1806-1872), Cyrus Austin (1809-1842), Lorenzo Buchard Austin (1812-1886), and Linus Austin (1817-1887), it produced black powder explosives.
The brothers had traveled from Wilmington, Vermont in search of a suitable place to build their mill before settling near Akron, Ohio, where they began production in 1833. By 1891, the company had expanded enough that it had purchased the Cleveland Powder Company, closed its original, smaller mill, relocated to the new plant at southern edge of Cleveland, and was still seeking to expand.
To meet this need, the brothers (by then numbering four, following the death of Cyrus Austin in 1842, who drowned while trying to siphon from the mill dam), purchased a rural property in Glenwillow, and began building new mills, as well as an entire community for the workers who they would need to relocate to the enterprise; homes, a town hall, a school, and a general store in the village.
Altogether, the brothers built about seventy-five buildings, arranged so as that an explosion in any one part of the facility would not destroy neighboring buildings. This design was soon put to the test in April 1902, when three tons of powder exploded, killing two workers and wrecking the building of the compressing department. Not long after, in 1907, the glaze mill at the company's plant in Cleveland also exploded, also killing two employees, and production moved entirely to the Glenwillow site.
By 1922, the Austin Powder Company was producing 480,000 kegs of blasting powder annually and, in 1931, the company diversified into dynamite production, manufactured out of a new plant, "Red Diamond", in Vinton County, Ohio. Black powder production continued at Glenwillow; during World War II, the Glenwillow plant converted entirely to military explosives and the government was the sole customer. The workforce doubled to 200 employees at this time, and torpedoes, demolition charges, land mines, and flares were produced. Following the war, the company began manufacturing detonating cords and mining charges at Glenwillow, where production remained until the entire line was moved to Red Diamond in 1972. The Glenwillow plant was closed in 1979 after eighty-seven years of continuous operation.
This ca. 1900 photograph comes from Hagley Library's Austin Powder Company album (Accession 1973.231). The album contains early maps and photographs of the Glenwillow powder mill. To view the digitized album online now, just click here!