Powerhouse Park

Powerhouse Park still serves as a staging area for ice fishing shanties during the winter, and remains of the old Port Henry Powerhouse form its boundary along Mill Creek. The building was constructed in 1907 using a mixture of six parts mine tailings to one part concrete. It was one of four interconnected generating plants built to meet the growing demands of mines and mills in Moriah. Its 175-foot stack had an inside diameter of eight feet, and its two coal-fired steam turbines, one 800 kilowatt and one 1500 kilowatt, generated 500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per month. Both were 6600-volt, three-phase, 25-cycle, 1500-r.p.m. vertical shaft turbines. Current traveled on bare copper wires to the iron ore mining and processing operations of Witherbee, Sherman and Co. at Mineville and to the Cheever Iron Ore Co. mines at Cheever. The monolithic plant produced power for fifteen years and was eventually sold to New York State.

Port Henry, New York · United States