Jacob
Nephi Rock
written
by Lenore McFarlane Ruesch (Grand Daughter)
Jacob Nephi Rock, pioneer of 1860, who came to Utah with his
parents in the Captain J.D. Ross Company at the age of six, was a railroad
veteran with a wide variety of experiences in "railroading". He helped build the tracks; he operated a
locomotive for many years; and he conceived the idea for a safety brake which
now is standard equipment on all railroad engines and cars.
A Salt Lake news paper carried this story about him January
12, 1934:
ENGINES
STILL APPEAL
Veteran
Railroader recalls Early Day History
"No sir, I just can't pass a locomotive without
stopping to look'er over."
In that manner Jacob N. Rock, 80, of 376 East Twenty-first
South Street, sums up his boyish enthusiasm about railroads and all their
appurtenances.
Rock has probably helped build more miles of railroad in
Utah and operated locomotive over the same roads than any single living
resident of the state.
He started railroading at the age of 18 years. His first job was with a surveying party in
American Fork Canyon, hired to lay out a railroad for the Miller Mining
company.
The first stake for the Bingham Canyon and Camp Floyd
railroad, which started at Midvale and ran via Bingham into Cedar Valley, was
driven by Rock on September 1872. The
road was later sold to the Rio Grande Company, now the Denver and Rio Grande
Western.
Rock also helped construct the old Utah Southern railroad,
which later became a part of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake road, and the Pleasant
Valley railroad, subsequently added to the Denver and Rio Grande Western
properties.
The Pleasant Valley road was started in 1877 by farmers
intending to use it to get coal from mines in and near Carbon county. The Utah Eastern railroad, on which Rock
worked as a builder and trainman, was likewise taken over by the Denver and Rio
Grande Western after its completion by John W. Young between Salt Lake and Park
City.
In 1893 Rock went with the original Salt Lake and Ogden railroad,
now the Bamberger Electric railway. It
has been completed between Salt Lake and Beck's Hot Springs by John Beck when
the veteran railroader went to work as a fireman and engineer. Beck and the late Simon Bamberger were motivating
forces which completed the road to Ogden.
For 18 years Rock piloted a locomotive on the line, even hauling the
final load of materials used to electrify it.
The unable to bring himself to the point of giving up a
steam engine, Rock quit and started operating a stationary steam engine in an
ice plant."
Gertrude Rock McFarlane, his daughter wrote of him:
"When father was sixteen he left the farm and went to
railroading. His mother gave him her
last two dollars and he set out for the American Fork Railroad Camp. These camp were made up of very rough men who
gambled with cards. Every evening he
played with these men whose stakes were drinks, and he won for a about a week, but one evening he was the loser; and it took
the two dollars, his mother's last cent, to pay for the drinks. He felt so sorry about it he made a
resolution that he was through with that kind of business for life; AND HE
WAS. The railroad was the American Fork,
from there he went to the Bingham railroad and then to the Pleasant
Valley. After the Rio Grande acquired
all these railroads, he was then sent to Montana where he worked for some time.
He bought a small farm at Bingham Junction, now Midvale, for
his Mother and the family. He paid for
this and gave his mother the deed before he was married.
The day Jacob returned from Montana, he married my mother
Louesa Eve Free, on December 24, 1881. ...Their first home was in Provo where
Father was Yard Master Mechanic for the Rio Grande, while the road was under
construction. The tracks were laid north
from Provo, and south from Salt Lake.
When the tracks met, Father was the first engineer to drive a train from
Provo to Salt Lake City. The train was
composed of flat cars for hauling railroad ties, so Father took one of the
kitchen chairs and with the help of a few planks and nails, he fastened it to
the floor of the first car, and Mother rode on it, thus being the first women
to ever ride on a train from Provo to Salt Lake.
From 1883 to 1887 Father and Uncle Al worked in Colorado for
a Mining Co. and built a saw mill for themselves . At the time Mother joined him there I was six
months old. This saw mill was seventy five miles south of Grand Junction on an
Indian Reservation. When this creek was
surveyed by the United States Government it was named "Rock Creek"
after the two Mormon boys who had a saw mill on it.
After returning to Utah, father began railroading again
working on the Utah central and Union Pacific.
About this time Father, together with John Hurst and George Goss,
invented a wonderful airbrake. This
locomotive air brake is required by the Interstate Commerce Commission on all
engines and cars. It was tested over the
summit in Parley's Canyon August 19, 1891 and proved very successful. Father and his partners put the brake on
exhibition in the Rio Grande Shops.
Westinghouse heard about it and sent his experts to examine it. These experts duplicated it but concealed the
double valve action in a single casing and appropriated it to their owe use and
would never give Father even a hearing.
For thirty years Father was a locomotive engineer; the last
railroad he worked on was the Bamberger.
He rain the "Dummy" (small engineer) for 18 years.
When he retired from the railroad
on the account of his age he was employed at Hygeia Ice Co. and then the Holy
Cross Hospital Heating Plant."
In this later years, Jacob Nephi Rock was a bailiff in Judge
Oscar McConkie's Court. At his funeral,
Albert E. Bowen of the Council of the Twelve said:
"He was, as Judge McConkie has said, an inventor, and
not just merely an inventor of trivial things, but an inventor of deep
penetration. I learned from my
associations with him that this great railroading industry, to which we trust
our lives when we travel over the rails, owes to him one of the greatest
inventions contributing to its safety.
He invented the basic idea that underlies the air brake, and I am
convinced that it was but the appropriation of his device that the brake is now
evolved that is used upon the stream liners that travel with such lightening
speed over this country... The Westinghouse Airbrake, which as I have been told
by him and I have no reason to doubt, has been established upon all the trains.
He carried some of his invention's patents, but
unfortunately the claims covered by his patents weren't quite broad enough to
protect him against copying and a little circumventing which made it possible
to appropriate his brain-child by others.
A most complicate thing, far beyond my capacity to
understand, Brother Rock used to come in every once in a while, painstakinly
going over it with me trying to explain the principals involved, and I told him
a good many times that it was all over my head, I couldn't understand it; but
he enjoyed coming and repeating again, trying to instruct me and I enjoyed
having him come. It was always pleasant
when unannounced and unexpected, he would put his head inside the door and say,
'Here I am again', and come in with some new idea for the prosecution of what
he had in his mind, and it was then I learned to know the granite qualities of
his character....
"I remember suggesting to
him that he go to a competent patenter and arranged a trip for him to go to New York to confer
with someone. They believed, as I have
said, that because his claims were not sufficiently broad, his patent rights
had been successfully circumvented.. And while he didn't realize in financial reward,
the gains to which his inventions entitled him, he would leave behind him a
contribution to the safety of everybody who rides upon the railroads of
America, and that is worth more than any money he could have gotten out of
it. When you, his friends, journey across
this land, you will know, if you stop to think about it, that you rest in
mental comfort, freedom from anxiety about the safety of your journey largly
because of the ideas developed and worked out to practical application by our
brother whose remains lie here today. I
speak of a beneficiary of mankind, and he has lived a long life."
Jacob Nephi Rock was born at Waynesboro, Franklin County, Pennsylvania,
October 8, 1854, son of Valentine Rock and Harriet Smith. He died in Salt Lake City, Utah April 10,
1941
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