The Townsend / Wheatland clay operations, and the Brooksbrae operations all utilized small steam-powered narrow gauge railroad engines called either "mule" or "donkey" engines. These were small engines that ran on narrow rails (easier to pick-up and move when necessary) whose main utility was to convey raw clay and sand from local areas nearby to the factory. The raw materials were even moved around the factories by these small railroads. In addition, due to the later date of the Brooksbrae Works (ca. 1905), the company utilized an internal rail system that would convey raw materials as well as green, dry, and fired bricks around the operation. These small rails would even carry the bricks to a siding for loading onto rail cars. Scott W.
Folks:
Narrow-gauge locomotives such as those that A.A. Adams used to haul clay from Old Half Way to Woodmansie (the ties of which Beck described driving on in
Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey) were often known as dinkys or dinkeys, but never donkeys or mules. A donkey or mule is a portable boiler (usually upright) and engine mounted on a skid that could be dragged from location to location as needed. Often these donkey engines would be used in logging operations with a winch to drag logs to the sawmill or a nearby stream. Obviously, these donkey engines had many other applications beyond the lumbering industry. As described, some brick production plants used locomotives to haul dump cars with clay and/or sand from the clay and sandpits back to the plant for processing. However, the narrow-gauge tracks within the Brooksbrae plant operated with specialty pushcars and locomotives did NOT run on these rails. The Philadelphia-based Chambers Brothers Company, a manufacturer of brickmaking equipment and the company that furnished the Brooksbrae plant, fabricated a wide variety of pushcars for brickyards. Workers would stack these cars with brick at the continuous extruding machine and then push the cars into the drying tunnels before being moved into the kilns. If the workers created trains of cars, then they employed a horse or mule to pull the train into the tunnels and to the kilns, but not a steam locomotive. Chambers Brothers also manufactured the dump cars used to haul the clay and sand. For those of you who possess an original edition of Beck's
Forgotten Towns (1936), you will find a photograph of Beck and his compatriots standing in front of a narrow gauge locomotive, a diminutive steam engine with possible Baldwin or H.K. Porter origins. Beck describes finding two such locomotives near Woodmansie in his text. Chances are these two engines belonged to the Adams Clay Mining Company clay operations at Old Half Way and not to the Brooksbrae Brick Company. It is currently unclear whether Brooksbrae ever actually owned or operated a narrow-gauge locomotive at their plant.
Best regards,
Jerseyman