Worthington Works

The information on this page has been reproduced from the book New Jersey: Life, Industries and Resources of a Great State published in 1928 by the New Jersey State Chamber of Commerce. It is included on this site because of its historical interest to those who grew up in Kearny, New Jersey

Worthington Works

THE Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation, Worthington Works, is at the easterly end of Harrison, on land comprising 36 acres. The original factory was started in Brooklyn in 1845 by Henry R. Worthington, and the business developed so rapidly that a new location was imperative. The Harrison site was selected, and in 1904 an assemblage of factory buildings was erected, with a floor space of 750,000 square feet. Since then additional buildings were needed to accommodate increases in business, so that now the plant floor space has increased to 1,000,000 square feet.

The Worthington Works is equipped with modern machinery for quantity production. It includes foundries, machine and erecting shops, testing shops, shipping houses, pattern making, carpenter and paint shops, stock and storage houses, power plant, restaurant, and welfare departments. It has more than three miles of standard-gage railroad trackage.

Among the lines manufactured at the Worthington Works are duplex pumping machinery of direct-acting and centrifugal types, built from the smallest commercial sizes up to the huge machines required for water works, irrigation, sewage, and other large volume purposes; surface and barometric condensers, from those for small evaporative service to the largest super-power plant needs; steam-air ejectors for air-removal service; feed-water heaters for locomotive and for stationary power-plant use; and meters of varied types for cold and hot water and oil. The normal operating force of the works consists of 2,000 employees.

The Worthington Works is one of four plants, the others being the Laidlaw Works at Cincinnati, the Snow Works at Buffalo, and the Deane-Blake-Knowles Works at Holyoke.

Henry R. Worthington, in inventing the direct-acting pump, revolutionized water-handling practice.