The Roebling Company Town

South of Trenton, along the Delaware River in Burlington County, sits a small borough that still carries the family name: Roebling. It is a company town, one of the relatively complete examples left in the Northeast, built from scratch by Charles Roebling, son of the Brooklyn Bridge's designer, to house the workers of the Kinkora Wire Works.

Charles laid out the town around the turn of the twentieth century with the same engineering precision his father had brought to bridges. Streets ran in grids. The company built houses, a school, a bathhouse, a park, a clubhouse, and a church. Workers who rented from the company shopped at the company store. Their children went to the company school. When they were sick, they could go to the company medical facility. It was paternalistic, deliberately so, and by the standards of industrial housing in that era, it was considerably better than what most workers got elsewhere.

The Roebling complex eventually employed thousands of workers and produced steel wire rope for an extraordinary range of projects: cables for the Golden Gate Bridge, elevator cables for the Empire State Building, wire for the original Slinky toy, structural material for the Chicago Board of Trade.

The historic district, seventy-six acres of company housing and industrial buildings, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight. The mill itself later closed, part of the same manufacturing collapse that hit Trenton proper. The houses remain, occupied by the descendants of the workers who once filled the Roebling factory floor.