In 1970, the days were numbered for Acworth’s old train depot. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad had sold it for $50 on the condition that it be moved off the tracks.
Some local teens thought it wrong to lose the old station and have nothing to remember it by. They snuck into the building late one night and made off with one of the biggest, heaviest mechanical contraptions still in there – the freight house scale.
Six feet long, six feet tall, 3½ feet wide, built into the floor and made of oak, brass and hollow steel columns, it easily weighed hundreds of pounds. The youths took it apart and hustled it over to the house of the parents of Leman “Moose” Cray.
Now if this were a Hallmark holiday special, there’d be a dissolve from black-and-white to color and the year 2018. The recently formed “Save Acworth History Foundation” asks if anyone has anything of historical value for a new city museum.
A senior raises his hand. It’s Moose McCray.
And in the next scene, dignitaries at Acworth City Hall on Thursday, July 19, gratefully accept the donation of the restored scale.
“Moose’s Dad worked for the city as justice of the peace and as a maintenance worker,” Clemens Bak said. “When they were getting ready to tear down the depot, Moose and several others snuck over there in the middle of the night, removed the scale, took it to his father’s place and put it in a shed, and it hadn’t been moved since.”
Bak is proprietor of the Red Onion Press, a commercial print shop in Kennesaw. Being mechanically gifted – Bak seeks to preserve the art of letterpress printing, and he’s rebuilt several vintage presses – Save Acworth History thought him the ideal person to commission to get the scale working again.
Before Bak started, researcher Francine McEntyre scoured the Internet and corresponded with the University of Vermont for information about the device and its manufacturer, the Howe Scale Co. of Rutland, Vt.
The Acworth depot was built in 1893 – the railroad at the time was the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis, successor to the Western & Atlantic – but Bak thinks the scale predated the building by several decades; it likely came out of an even older, W&A depot.
Most of the scale parts including the counterweights were on hand, so it was largely a matter of cleaning, painting, puzzling things back together and looking on eBay for – or fabricating, if necessary – missing pieces such as a steel hook, a beam and a rod that connected the beam to the platform.
Calibration was by trial and error, using items of known weight to adjust the balance. Fortunately, Bak said, “this is a little scale. (Howe) made their money weighing canal boats and railroad cars.”
Bak said the railroad likely used the Howe scale to weigh goods for shipping up to 1,000 pounds; it has a capacity of 2,500 pounds. It was flush with the floor so items to be weighed could be rolled onto it with a hand truck.
Operable again, the Acworth scale will have pride of place in a history museum in a replica depot to be built by the city on the site of the old one. Until then, it’s on display at City Hall.
Not only was the Howe Scale the standard of the railroads – freight houses all over the country had them – but its historical importance can’t be understated, Bak said.
“For commerce, a scale is critically important,” he said. “That’s why these scale companies are significant to U.S. history. If you didn’t know how much something weighed, you couldn’t tell what the value was.”
