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These are the two Hewitt era water
wheel houses. Originally, each wheel had a wood frame house
that also included the air pumping mechanism and stoves to
heat them in winter time. These are the last two wheels
built here. These overshot
wheels were built in the 1880s, they were 25 feet in
diameter and 8 feet wide. This is the most efficient type of
water wheel and these two were capable of producing over 200
horsepower. In the 1880s you no longer had the wheels
operating a simple bellows
to blow air, this was the age of industrial machinery! These
wheels ran two giant horizontal blowing engines that worked
much like a bicycle pump. The wheel axle has a crank arm
that revolves with the axle, moving a push rod back and
forth in the pump chamber and creating air pressure in both
directions. This air was now piped into a giant radiator
system that preheated the air before it entered the furnace
as a hot air blast. The northern wheel was rebuilt in
1995.
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