I’ve been waiting for a chance to get back to these notes from Alan Chapman and I finally have a couple of moments. As I mentioned before, every single line on this page is meaningful:
Today I want to talk about Walworth, English and Flett, which is happily something I recognized right away from many hours of digging around in early construction records for no special purpose. As a matter of fact, I last ran across this company quite recently when I was investigating the oil tank buried by the power plant. Here’s a change order relating to the gauges for that tank:
In 1911 Rice brought them in to install pretty much everything in the way of mechanical systems. Here’s the front page of the original contract, which gives you a pretty good idea of the broad scope of the work:
In some early photographs of the interior of the powerhouse you can find their name on equipment:
The man who ran this enterprise, Arthur Walworth, was quite an interesting fellow. A graduate of Yale, he also attended two early engineering schools, the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and the Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chausees in Paris. He designed and installed the steam heating plant at Yale before he was hired by Lovett to do the same at Rice. Here’s his obituary, pulled out of the Obituary Record of Yale Graduates for 1919 to 1920:
Bonus: Rice’s Veteran’s Day celebration was held in the chapel this year because of dicey weather.
