From Marble Dust to Soda Water

by Henry Levin

According to Rich Steeves, a local resident and frequent contributor to the Historical Society, the Hastings marble quarry located along the Old Croton Aqueduct had more uses than previously assumed. Hastings may seem unconnected to soda, being a somewhat health-occupied village, but in the 1800s carbonated beverages were produced using dust from our very own marble quarry. 

Rich recently sent the Historical Society an image of a document from 1874, which provides an analysis of the mineral content of the dust from the “Hudson River Marble Mills,” a “Quarry at Hastings-on-the-Hudson, N.Y.” The marble dust was sold by Russel Bros. & Goodwin, who were likely intermediaries in the 19^th-century soda fountain business in the New York area. Interestingly, the document is dated 1874, which is three years after the quarry in Hastings was shut down. Presumably, Russel Bros. & Goodwin purchased the marble dust sometime prior to 1871.

The Background on Soda

The restorative power of mineral water, for bathing and for drinking, was well known going back to antiquity. Most inconveniently, back then people had to travel to the spring or spa to enjoy those benefits. From the 1500s to 1700s, various figures attempted to create soda but did not achieve much success. Things started to come together when the hand-cranked carbonator was invented in 1780 by Jacob Schweppes, followed by the first U.S. patent for a Mineral Water Apparatus, which was issued to Samuel Fahnestock in 1819.

However, harvesting large amounts of gaseous carbon dioxide (CO₂) still proved challenging. In 1832, the English-born New Yorker John Matthews indelibly transformed the new world of carbonation by patenting a process to produce soda more efficiently. His innovation entailed mixing sulfuric acid and pulverized marble dust, which generated carbonic acid gas (an aqueous solution of CO₂). Suddenly, the dust from quarries such as the one in Hastings became a key component in making soda.

In the early days, Matthew’s method was arduous and required workers to toil away in basements under each soda fountain. Here’s how it worked: He built a cast-iron box lined with lead, and filled it with sulfuric acid and crushed marble. The CO₂ generated by this mix would be filtered through a water chamber, then piped into a tank filled with cool water. A worker would have to rock the tank for half an hour, until the gas would disperse into the liquid. Then the carbonated water would be transported upwards, by pipes, to tap rooms at ground level.

Matthews seemingly wished to rival the popularity of alcoholic beverages with soda. He set up his first plant at 55 Gold Street in New York City, close to today’s South Street Seaport. There, he manufactured carbonated beverage equipment and sold it to the many soda fountain locations that sprang up in New York and other nearby locations. In 1838, Eugene Roussel, a Frenchmen operating in Pennsylvania, added flavors to his own soda water, a practice that Matthews picked up and that has now obviously caught on worldwide. 

Matthews quickly became known as “The Soda Fountain King.” By 1870, his manufacturing plant, which he had moved further uptown to First Avenue between 26^th and 27^th Streets, supplied more than 500 establishments in New York City alone.

To create all this soda, the company required a lot of marble dust. When it was being built beginning in 1858, Matthews got ahold of the spare rubble taken from the construction of St. Patricks’ Cathedral in Manhattan. Some zealous church members found the use of these stone pieces to be a unseemly way to exploit religion for cash, but Matthews was able to assuage their concerns. The marble dust from this source is said to have produced 25 million gallons of soda.

The Human Pressure Gauge

Pressure serves as a dangerous obstacle when it comes to creating gas and many of the companies dedicated to carbonation were plagued by explosions. Matthews used an unorthodox method that mitigated the risk of explosive incidents, one that became famous within the industry.

He hired a freed former slave named Ben Austen, who used his strength to safely measure the carbonation. During the carbonation process, Ben would put one of his thumbs on the pressure cock. If the pressure was near the optimal 150 PSI mark, his thumb would be pushed off by the mounting force. “Ben’s Thumb” (signifying optimal pressure) was a catchphrase for many people in the carbonation business for some time to come.

Austen’s life was threatened when infuriated Irish mobs stormed the streets, looking for Black people to lynch. This heinously violent reaction came about due to the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863, which quickly became race riots. Matthews hid Austen in a packing case and stealthily transported him out of New York. 

Some Questions Remain

The fact that marble dust was central to the development of the soda fountain industry was a revelation to the Historical Society. How much pulverized marble from Hastings was actually used for this purpose? Was dust a big revenue generator for the quarrying operation here? How much marble dust from our village was still in circulation after the Hastings quarry went out of business? We’ll probably never know the answers to these questions, although our quarry was in operation from 1828 until 1871, a significant overlap with when Matthews was ramping up his business. It could have been a lot of soda.

Henry Levin is a Hastings resident and soda enthusiast, who wrote this post using new information from Rich Steeves, material from the Hastings Historical Society archives, and research shared by Jeff Richman, the historian at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

For more info on John Matthews and Ben Austen, see Mr. Richman’s blog post at https://www.green-wood.com/2016/pressure-gauge-bens-thumb/.