The Roeblings tried a little farther down stream. But down stream didn't mean down price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles down the river was a little old station called Kinkora, where the real estate infection had not appeared. There was land well up above high water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very cheap down there, as compared with Trenton city water rates, to a concern that used as much water as all the rest of the city put together.
[Sidenote: A LIKELY PLACE FOR A WIRE MILL]
It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a dozen strangers had struck Kinkora on the same evening the town would have had trouble to find beds for them all. It meant twenty miles rail travel a day for the workmen to live in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. Charles G. Roebling was then alive. The new site and the planning and building of the town were his charge. But, again, they didn't go looking for any welfare engineers. The whole job of planning plant and town alike was done in the long engineering room of the Roebling offices. At first they called the plant the Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the mills were a little below the station, and when the new venture was well under way, and the machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and perhaps a hundred brick houses of various types had been erected, the place had to have a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad said it was Roebling, and stamped the tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing off. It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. Between it and Roebling there are a mile or so of distance and a whole century of time.
The name "Kinkora" harks back to the year 1000, when King "Brian Boru" of Ireland lost his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace was named "Kinkora." In 1836 an ambitious Irishman named Rockefeller (not John D.) conceived the idea of an air line railroad from this spot where Roebling now stands to Atlantic City. In fond remembrance of Erin's Isle he named the terminus on the Delaware "Kinkora."
The enterprise itself died an early death.
The Roebling Company has more than 200 acres of land in the new settlement, enough, in all conscience, to accommodate as big a business as almost anyone would want to do, and houses to shelter all its workmen. If the company should ever find it good business to shake the dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether it certainly has a place to go.