Edward Balch: Builder and Visionary in Early 20th C. Maplewood

Edward C. Balch, who lived in Maplewood from 1890 until his death in 1934, was one of the most prominent builders of the time. In 2010, Durand-Hedden volunteers pored through town and county archives to identify the 175 houses he built, mostly on the western side of town, and to put together an exhibit at the Durand-Hedden House.

The personality of Maplewood was apparent even in those times. Emerging from a collection of family farms and homes of local merchants, this was not going to be the site of random, rapacious development, but a carefully planned town where lots of various sizes would provide housing for people of a range of income levels but common goals – to live in an attractive, pleasant and safe town with a good school system.

A City of Homes

In a 1936 article for a local magazine, Meador Wright wrote, “Maplewood is a city of homes. In this sentence is encompassed its whole economy and culture, its past and present and future.” He added, “Maplewood zoning ordinances are as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians.”

It was to this nascent community that Edward Balch moved with his wife and three children in 1890, after their initial venture across the Hudson to East Orange. Balch discovered Maplewood when he visited as part of a local amateur baseball team.

Balch’s first entrepreneurial venture, begun soon after he moved to Maplewood, was as a manufacturer of women’s waterproof raincoats, cloaks and suits in New York. That evolved into a retail business making finely tailored women’s costumes for a clientele all over the Eastern seaboard, from Maine to Georgia and west to Pittsburgh.

The Balches first rented a small house on Mountain Avenue near Ridgewood Road, and then built a larger one on the corner. In 1899, with a family that had grown to include five children, Balch built a large and gracious house on the southeast corner of Ridgewood and Mountain, where he lived until his death. This new home was his masterpiece, a blend of Shingle, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival. The foundation, piers and porte cochere were of Indiana limestone carved by stone masons right on the property. Mahogany beams crowned the living room and hand-carved mahogany and marble fireplaces graced almost every room.

This experience in home building piqued his interest, as in 1900 there were large tracts of land in the town that were ripe for development – many of them visible from his front porch. He saw the potential of Maplewood as a residential suburb populated by like-minded people – young families with a commitment to the community. Little by little, over the next 20 years, he went on to build about 175 houses on the slopes of South Mountain, including Clinton Avenue, Curtiss Place, Durand Road, Euclid Avenue, Mountain Avenue, Ridgewood Terrace and Winthrop Place.

Balch built virtually all the houses on Ridgewood Terrace, most between 1908 and 1910. Setting a precedent that remains to this day, each house looked different, each contributing to the character of the neighborhood with its broad front porch and welcoming façade. Four or five basic floor plans were used for the interiors.

Many of the houses could be called “four-squares,” but Balch also built gambrel-roofed clapboard houses, center-hall Colonial Revivals, and some that evoked the Bungalow or Arts and Crafts styles. Building permits list no architect for these lovely homes and the names of those who drafted the plans may never be discovered. Builders like Balch could select plans from illustrated catalogs or even purchase “kit houses.” Balch was not a trained designer or architect, but probably had a hand in some way in the houses’ design.

Balch was a religious man and active in Morrow Methodist Church, helping in its growth from a small one-room building on Claremont Avenue (then Bear Lane) to its present imposing stone edifice on Ridgewood Road.

In a biography in The Story of New Jersey, published in about 1944, it was said that “he made it unusually easy for young couples” to buy his houses if he thought they would be good citizens for Maplewood – and especially if he thought they would become members of the Morrow Church.

In turn, these young families held him in high regard, thinking of him as “a personal friend and not just a builder from whom they had bought a home.” He built houses for his children in the neighborhood as well, to ensure that they remained part of the community. Balch was a major patriarchal figure in the civic development of the town he loved so well, playing an important role in the establishment of Maplewood’s bank, country club and centrally located park, the building of schools and libraries, and the running of Maplewood’s “Safe and Sane” Fourth of July celebration.

Perhaps as an outgrowth of Balch’s homebuilding business (and certainly as further evidence of his entrepreneurial spirit), he started the Orange Screen Company in 1911. It was located in West Orange initially, but within a few years he built a new building for it on Valley Street, where the company grew and prospered for many years. The building was later taken over by the Hammond Map Company.

The Orange Screen Company was later headed by Balch’s son Everett Purdy Balch, and broadened its product line from wood screens to aluminum screen and storm windows and enclosures. During World War II, the company operated 24 hours a day, making radio and radar equipment and a variety of aluminum and bronze window sashes for fighter and bomber planes, hospital trains and transport ships and earning the Army’s award for excellence three times.

The Durand-Hedden House is indebted to the numerous people who contributed reminiscences about Edward C. Balch and his houses, including Balch family members Peter Sickley, Robert Sickley, Susan Sickley, Jean Ward, and Miriam Weiland, and Balch house residents Claire and Charles Burkelman, Jacqueline Faupel, Lydia Lacey, Louise Noll, and Susan Weisner. Thanks also to Thelma Hadley, who urged Durand-Hedden to explore this builder’s history, and to Marley White, who took many photographs of the houses.

Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride

Until 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Kopchovsky changed all that.

In honor of Women’s History Month in March 2009, Peter Zheutlin came to the Durand-Hedden House to talk about the extraordinary adventures of his great-grand-aunt, who overturned notions of Victorian propriety by bicycling around the world, raising money as she went along.

As Zheutlin writes in his entertaining book, Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride, Annie Kopchovsky was a Jewish immigrant and working mother of three living with her peddler husband in a Boston tenement.

Two wealthy merchants made a high-stakes bet that a woman could not ride around the world on a bicycle, as a man named Thomas Stevens had done a few years earlier. Annie rose to the challenge.

When the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire offered to become the first of her many sponsors, she became Annie Londonderry. She left Boston in June 1894 for Chicago in a riding skirt, on a 42-pound woman’s bicycle, with a revolver and a change of underwear. So began one of the great escapades and publicity stunts of the Victorian Age.

Exchanging a Skirt for Bloomers

In Chicago, Sterling Cycle Works gave her a 21-pound men’s bicycle. As wearing a skirt on the new bike was virtually impossible, she changed to a man’s riding costume with bloomers.

“I firmly believe that if I had worn skirts I would not have been able to make the trip,” Annie wrote later. But mindful of Victorian mores, she was quick to add, “It must not be thought that I lost the attention which is supposed to be associated with feminine apparel. I was everywhere treated with courtesy and ….received no less than 200 proposals of marriage.”

Her journey was to include a frigid ride through France (where money she had earned on the Atlantic crossing was stolen) to Suez to Shanghai, and an encounter with an outlaw in El Paso, Texas. She made more than $5,000 along the way by lecturing, carrying advertising, and showing photographs she had taken during her trip.

Washday Blues

The bottles, bars and boxes of soft and hard soaps and detergents that line supermarket and drugstore shelves today give little hint of the smelly and laborious processes that were once required to keep people and their belongings clean and fresh.

Jane Chrysostom, who teaches pioneering skills in New Jersey and runs a summertime bed and breakfast in New Brunswick, Canada, brought the history of soap-making alive at an engaging Durand-Hedden program in November 2008.

The Sacrificial Lamb

The earliest discovery of soap probably occurred simultaneously in various places among primitive societies. Chrysostom explained that mountaintop sacrificial altars and even cooking pits presented the perfect opportunity for an unintended combination of ingredients that created the first soaps: fats from sacrificed or cooked animals, ashes from the fires that burned them, and rainwater to make it foam.

The chemical interaction of the fat from the meat with the alkali from the ash causes the fats or oils to split into fatty acids and glycerin. The sodium or potassium part of the alkali (which means “ash” in Greek) joins with the fatty acid and creates soap.

In Babylonia in 2800 BC and Phoenicia around 600 BC, soap was used in the cleaning of textile fibers such as wool and cotton in preparation for weaving them into cloth.

The Roman Connection

Saponification, the making of soap, got its name — according to legend — from an area of ancient Rome called Sapo Hill. At the top of the hill was a temple at which animals were sacrificed, and at the bottom of the hill was the Tiber River, where women washed clothes.

Presumably the women noticed that clothes washed at the spots in the river below the temple, where rainwater caused the fat-and-ash combinations to stream downhill, were cleaner or were cleaned more easily.

Soap in Early America

The earliest settlers relied on soaps brought or sent from England, but the colonists soon found it more practical to make their own rather than spend money on English goods.

The process was long and odiferous, and for that reason was done only a few times a year.

Potash solution, commonly called lye, was made by leaching lye from wood ashes stored in a barrel. Separately, fats were rendered, or cleaned, to remove impurities (such as meat).

The fat and a certain amount of lye were placed in a large kettle over a fire outdoors and boiled until the soap was formed. This boiling process could take six to eight hours. Soap-making was always considered one of the most difficult and laborious jobs on the farm or homestead, although soap factories were established in towns and cities as early as 1630.