How DeGolyer saved the Baldwin material is only part of the story, actually.
According to Matt Gray, a now-deceased BLW employee, Witbeck was restoring a Baldwin-built Louisana plantation locomotive and inquired with the company about obtaining a set of drawings for his loco. BLW officials said that would be permissible, and if he was interested, he could peruse the rest of the Baldwin engineering drawings for whatever he wanted, since the company was in the process of purging their drawing file. He made the visit to Eddystone in 1951-52, filled two boxcars with material (randomly selected, loaded nearby on an lcl siding). Whatever was left (mostly the larger A- and B-size engineering drawings) were thrown down a shute and disposed of by BLW employees in a refuse bin below. The C- and D-sized drawings were retained by the company for diesel parts replacement and reference purposes and eventually went to Wilmington and finally Malvern where Baldwin-Hamilton maintained their offices until closure in 1991. These drawings (mostly post 1941 in coverage but not exclusively) are now at the PA State Archives in Harrisburg. If only the entire Baldwin library and engineering depart records were saved, what a marvelous archive of locomotive engineering history would have survived! Much of their material, I was told, dated back to the founding of the company in the early 1830s and went forward to almost the end of production.
Getting back to the Witbeck materials, he kept what was of utmost interest and the rest of the material was sold to Owen Davies Bookseller in Chicago. Everett DeGolyer learned of the material and purchased it lock, stock and barrel in the 1960s and it ended up going to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, his alma mater. The SMU material is almost exclusively from the pre-1940 era and is heavy on steam technology but the drawings are largely incomplete in terms of total chronological coverage of Baldwin's output (they have several catalogues available that index the Erecting Card and Engineering Drawings). If you are seeking a complete set of drawings for your 1920s Baldwin-built loco (or a specific loco from another era) it is either hit or miss--you may be surprised or totally disappointed. The colelction is very much like swiss cheese--lots of gaps and holes with missing material relative to Baldwin's total output.
Some of Witbeck's Baldwin materials can be found at Louisiana State University. Another small collection of earlier Baldwin paint and mechanical data is housed at Stanford University and arrived there in the early 1960s; its provenance is unknown to me. Whitcomb records went to California State RR Museum in 1991, and other Baldwin subsidiary records were placed by B-H at various archives at the same time.
The 18,200-item Baldwin negative collection was saved by Herbert L. Broadbelt, a mechanical engineer from Baldwin's engineering department in the mid- to late-1950s. Again, it now exists because of the random action taken by a well-intentioned individual to save history from total distruction. Some older negatives were damaged by mold in Mr. Broadbelt's basement over the years and were thrown out while others were sold off to collectors for the right price under his ownership, so it has gaps. For instance, we know that Baldwin starting taking photos of finsihed locos on Broad Street as early as 1859 (some stereocards still exist) and Baldwin copy prints from the 1860s abound in our general photo file under individual railroad companies. But the oldest image in the Baldwin negative file dates back to 1871, so the question remains: what happened to all of the earlier Baldwin negatives, say from 1859-1871? They may have resided with a contract photographer in Philadelphia and never made it into the company's files or they were in the firm's collection and were disposed of earlier; I cannot say with absolute certainty since do not know. I now manage this collection at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania Archives in Strasburg.
K.R. Bell
> Luckily most of the Baldwin records have
> been saved by Everette L. DeGolyer, Sr at
> the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist
> University in Dallas. (snip).
> I believe much of the DeGolyer Baldwin
> material was first saved by the Hammond, LA
> photographer, C. W. Witbeck. He shipped two
> (or three?) boxcars of material from the
> Baldwin plant as the archives were being
> dumped. My third hand recollection is that
> some glass negatives were included but did
> not survive the trip to Hammond.
> Alex Huff, who attended a CNW surplus
> auction in Boone, Iowa a number of years ago
> when over twenty file cabinets, were sold
> .... with contents, including property
> leases and trackage rights agreements.
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