Readers respond to recent columns
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 03-04-2017
Several readers have responded to the column that dealt with how Amsterdam’s carpet mills, Mohawk and Bigelow-Sanford, shifted much of their production from floor coverings to textiles needed by the military during World War II.
The armed forces did not need carpets but did need cotton duck, also called canvas, and woolen blankets. Duck was used for tents, gun covers and sturdy work clothes.
Some carpet looms were converted to weaving duck while other looms wove thousands of woolen blankets a week. The mills ran around the clock.
Richard Ellers of Ohio, who was an Amsterdam High School student at that time, wrote that the school was put on an eight a.m. to one p.m. schedule so students “could split eight hour shifts in war work at the mills.” Some of the duck was used to make squad tents for the Army, big enough to sleep a squad of soldiers.
“Sometimes we wrote good luck notes which were sewn into the panels.” Ellers said. “The women (mill workers) used humongous sewing machines, and us guys' job was to help pull the canvas through the machines as the women sewed.”
Since so few rugs were being made, Mohawk Carpet “cut out half of their dealers,” according to David McKeon of Pattersonville Rug Store. That store, then operated by McKeon’s father, was one of the outlets dropped by Mohawk during the conflict.
Amsterdam native Lou Mosher said his father, Clarence Mosher, was one of the Mohawk workers making blankets and canvas. Clarence Mosher also had family access to a Caterpillar tractor and plowed an area set aside for Mohawk employees to grow produce in what were called Victory Gardens. The land used was off upper Market Street and homes were built there in later years.
Amsterdam resident Nick Zabawsky has a connection to Brigadier General Allen R. Kimball, an Amsterdam High graduate, who visited the city when Mohawk Carpet received an award for war production in 1943. General Kimball was a West Point graduate and became head of the Army’s quartermaster corps in Europe, handling supplies and provisions.
In 1946 he retired from the Army and returned to Amsterdam as personnel manager at Mohawk Carpet. He died in 1951.
Zabawsky now lives in what was General Kimball’s house on Guy Park Avenue. Some military trunks were left behind in the attic along with a copy of Kimball’s will, directing that his body be buried at West Point’s National Cemetery.
FORT JOHNSON TRANSFORMED
Former Fulton County historian Peter Betz had more information on how Fort Johnson was transformed in the early 1960s when two-lane Route 5 was converted into a four-lane limited access highway, the subject of another recent column.
Betz said, “You don't mention the infamous “S” curve bridge the trolley line passed under that was right at the intersection of Routes 5 and 67.” Betz said Old Fort Johnson historic site has a picture showing the road, trolley line and railroad tracks.
Mention was made in the Fort Johnson column of the Lepper family, immigrants from the Palatine area in Germany, who fought in the American Revolution.
In the last century, Floyd Ellsworth Lepper was known for making polishes for cars, furniture and stoves. Lepper also was pastor of the Pilgrim Holiness Church.
Family historian Patricia Finch Bush of Rotterdam wrote, “Floyd Lepper and my grandfather Frank L. Bush were very close friends, and Floyd was one of his pallbearers at his funeral in the Amsterdam Pilgrim Holiness Church in July, 1930.”
Frank Bush, a sign painter with artistic training, died when a scaffold he was working on in Amsterdam collapsed.
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