An Engine for Henry Clay's Fan

In March 1871, the Sunbury Gazette reported a finished piece of machinery from Shamokin Iron Works: a twenty-horsepower steam engine for Henry Clay Colliery. Its destination was the mine's fan, placing the work of a local machine shop within the equipment of a working colliery.

The notice gave the engine a ten-inch cylinder and a twelve-inch stroke, and described the fan as twelve feet across. Those measurements made the little industrial item unusually concrete. Readers were being told about a particular engine built for a particular job, not simply that an ironworks was doing business in town.

The Gazette celebrated the machine as the first steam engine built in Shamokin and the second in Northumberland County. That was the paper's claim, rather than an established survey of every earlier workshop. The better-grounded achievement in its account is the reported completion of a locally made engine intended to power Henry Clay's fan.