. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. A HISTORIAN'S COAST Dogwood Neck. The company still owned much of the local housing, a company store and its own police force, but the black workers also gained a fierce independence by owning land and having regular wages. By the 1920s Navassa was, in Willis' words, "a booming, wide-open ; It had six social clubs, numerous cook shops where the guano workers could buy a meal and trains that stopped four times a day on their way in and out of Wilmington. Other fertilizer companies also locate
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. A HISTORIAN'S COAST Dogwood Neck. The company still owned much of the local housing, a company store and its own police force, but the black workers also gained a fierce independence by owning land and having regular wages. By the 1920s Navassa was, in Willis' words, "a booming, wide-open ; It had six social clubs, numerous cook shops where the guano workers could buy a meal and trains that stopped four times a day on their way in and out of Wilmington. Other fertilizer companies also located in Navassa, employing as many as 2,000 workers in their heyday. I haven't found a good description of the inner workings of the guano factories in Navassa, but in 1897 a reporter from the Wilmington Messenger toured the nearby Almont Fertilizer Co. and described the factory in some detail. Founded in 1882 by Powers, Gibbs and Co., a British firm that had a monopoly over the sale of Peruvian guano in Europe and North America, Almont occupied a bluff on the Northeast Cape Fear River a couple of miles above Wilmington. As described by the Messengers reporter, the factory workers first used mills to grind into powder phosphate rock mined in Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. Then they separated the phosphate from the silica in great vats of sulfuric acid. The dissolved rock phosphate could be mixed with different combinations of potash, salts, blood, dissolved bone and other ingredients to make a variety of fertilizer brands. Finally, the mixture was dried, lumps were broken up and it was put into bags. The Almont Fertilizer Co., like most of the local companies, also produced its own sulfuric acid. Working in the "acid factory" was always fraught with danger due to the lethal acid and its fumes, and it must have resembled a scene out of Dante's Inferno. The black laborers burned pyrite ores mined in Spain and Newfoundland in two dozen furnaces. "The heat from
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
