In the handsome, high-windowed directors’ room on the second floor of the Watts, Campbell Company in Newark, New Jersey, Chad Watts has set up a little museum. There, on neat display, are working drawings pasted to boards and varnished so they wouldn’t get spoiled in the shop, dim old photographs of steam engines, tools, billheads and ledgers, and all the other memorabilia that a busy machine shop could be expected to generate over the decades.

Chad Watts points to a letter from the Niles Tool Works in Hamilton, Ohio, dated June 28, 1884, announcing delivery to Watts, Campbell of a sixfoot boring and turning mill. There is nothing especially remarkable about the document, save for the fact that the hiill whose arrival it heralds is downstairs, still earning its keep along with dozens of other machines, some newer, some not.

“I’m sure we’re one of the oldest machine shops in Newark in the same family,” says Watts, and it seems like a pretty safe bet. His great-great-grandfather set up here in 1851 and began making the stationary steam engines that were then powering the world. The history of the early days is cloudy—a man named Belcher was in the picture for a year or two—but there has been a Watts in charge ever since. Chad himself came in following his stint of flying B-25s in China during World War II. “I’d been to Rutgers, and this seemed easier than looking for a job.”

Things are not so easy there now. “We’re still suffering tremendously from all the industry moving South in the early eighties. We’re not a production shop. We’re a job shop. We do anything in the repairing line. And the less industry around here, the less there is to repair. We’ve had to coast before, but never quite like this.”

Watts has twelve machinists on the payroll full-time. “You can’t just hire when the jobs come in. We need machinists, not operators. When you have equipment as old as ours, you have to build the quality into the people .”

Repairs have been the main business of Watts, Campbell for a long time. The company built the last of its steam engines sometime in the 1920s and then spent decades servicing them. “If you had one,” says Watts, “it worked. You just put some steam in it, and it went. It was like free energy. They might get inefficient, but they never wore out.”

But finally, of course, they were all gone. The last working Watts steam engine may be in Cuba; a refugee from the revolution told Chad he’d seen a “ máquina horizontal Watts-Campbell” busy on a sugar plantation there in 1961.

The equipment that tended them, however, is doing fine. Watts walks down the narrow stairs onto the shop floor, where the big machines are marshaled, gloomy and magnificent under the milky skylights. “This is a planer,” says Watts, gesturing to something the size of a country church. “I’m told we got it in a trade from Hewes and Phillips. They were our rivals down the street. We needed a planer, they needed a boring mill, so we each made two and swapped ‘em. One of the old guys here said Hewes stopped making planers after 1865.” He shrugs. “Works fine.”

Near it is a wooden jib crane made of yellow pine. “We’ve had ten ton up on it.” How old? “Nobody knows.” Nor does anyone know the age of the horizontal wooden bridge crane that rolls back and forth overhead along a castiron gear rack.

In the rear of the shop is a 115-ton vertical boring mill that can turn a wheel up to twenty-two feet in diameter. It was built right there sometime before 1883, back when Watts, Campbell had 330 employees—foundrymen, patternmakers, stableboys. It’s working now, shaving bright steel spirals off a ten-foot ring that revolves beneath the cutting blade. The potent tang of sheared metal is in the air like a coming thunderstorm.

“Well,” says Watts, “we’ve still got some good customers—Magruder Color, Linde Griffith pile drivers—and we’ve got the machines to do about anything. Some of them work only two or three times a year, but they’re there when you need them. I don’t know how many we’ve got—probably a hundred before you’re done.”

If he is worried by what lies ahead, Watts also clearly is prepared for it. “We’ve outlasted an awful lot of businesses here. And we have some advantages we wouldn’t if we were newcomers. We don’t have to keep every machine busy all the time to justify its cost.” Chad Watts looks down the tall brick room where William Watts was boss when Lincoln was still practicing law. “You see, our machinery is paid for.”