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When Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, commander of the Lake Erie flotilla, fought and smote the British on September 10, 1813, and sent his famous message "We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs and one schooner and one sloop," to General William Henry Harrison, his fleet was partly equipped by a Beaver Valley Manufacturing plant known at that time as "Quinn's Rope Walk".
Wm. Quinn, came from Ireland to this country in its early days and set up a rope and cordage factory of "rope walk" as it was known in what is now Monaca - on the site of where the United States Sanitary Company was located. Monaca was then known as Phillipsburg and it was there along the Ohio river that Quinn established his rope factory.
As a factory it was not much, according to the best information obtainable, but that was early days of manufacturing here, however it was of sufficient proportion to make the cordage and rigging for the nine ships which Perry commanded and defeated the British in the memorable battle of Lake Erie. Ropes made in the Quinn Rope Walk were made from flax grown in the county and prepared almost wholly with plenty of labor and the use of an implement, now obsolete and almost extinct, known as the heckel. Some of these can be found today in old homesteads, antique shops, collectors collections o rdecaying in an old barn.
The heckel was of a simple design, consisting of boards through which long heavy spikes were driven, their job was to separate the flax into stand like sections as the flax was drawn through the implement. Then twisting, braiding and slicing and the ropes were completed.
When Captain Perry was given command of the Lake Erie fleet he had to equip almost entirely the nine vessels on that body of water. New cordage and rigging was obtained from the Quinn Rope-Walk, and with fifty-four guns procured from here and there the six British sixty-three guns were engaged with success to Perry and the Beaver County rigged Flotilla.
Mrs. Shumaker of Beaver, Pa. was a direct descendant of Mr. Quinn's and in 1913 her parents attended the 100th anniversary of the battle and they were presented with souvenirs of the occasion.
Submitted by Vivian McLaughlin, Research
Center,
Beaver Falls Carnegie Free Library