The town slowly continued to grow throughout the decades. For many years, New Holland had restrained its growth and maintained its status as a self-contained community. Industrial development, tending away from that of a simple farming community, followed the general trend throughout America. By the early to mid-1900s there were many thriving businesses in New Holland. It can be said that New Holland became a "Boom Town". Many of New Holland's older residents can remember back when they were children to how the town flourished economically. As a resident, you never had to leave; everything you needed was right here in New Holland.
It can be said that New Holland became a "Boom Town".
Started in 1919, New Holland Concrete Products, Inc., is now a conglomerate of New Holland Concrete, Burkholder Paving, and Martin Limestone. The company is one of the largest single-site producers of concrete products on the East Coast.
The New Holland Machine Company was never a "Mennonite" company. But the founder, many early stockholders, and inventors of critically-important machines, seem to have shared Mennonite confessional values.
This freeze-proof engine was a good example of Abe Zimmerman's ingenuity. The water jacket was tapered so the water would lift up as it turned to ice in cold weather. When the engine was started, the ice melted.
Abram Zimmerman established his own shop in a horse barn on North Railroad Avenue on the edge of the village in 1895. A billion-dollar corporation would evolve from this humble beginning. A farm boy, Zimmerman served a machinist's apprenticeship in a Lancaster firm and trained in the Shirk Blue Ball Machine Shop just east of the village of New Holland.
The horse barn was purchased from a local Mennonite Meeting House and moved to the New Holland site. There Zimmerman installed a few machine tools, hired his brother to help, and proceeded to build, repair and sell machines.
Glick believes Zimmerman seems to have severed his own Mennonite connection about this time. This apparently came about as the result of an overzealous earlier involvement. The incident may have been indicative of his manner. Much later, it led to the near demise of his company.
"The commitments to traditions of an earlier time are not easily understood in the late 20th Century," Glick says. "Now it merely seems bizarre, but the incident was intensely important to those involved: Should the Meeting House have a pulpit?
"In the late 1800s, Pennsylvania Mennonite Meeting Houses, like those of their Quaker neighbors, were simple to the point of austerity. A pulpit, like a church steeple, was thought to be a 'worldly' innovation appropriate only for mainstream denominations such as the Lutheran or Reformed or Catholic fellowships. From the Mennonite viewpoint, a pulpit would elevate the minister and somehow diminish the ethic of equality.
"The more liberal Mennonites thought a pulpit would be useful. It would offer a convenient place for the minister's Bible, for example. But from the conservative viewpoint, that was precisely the problem. In their tradition, the minister spoke extempore, without notes, quoting the Scripture from memory. A pulpit could tempt the minister to follow the 'worldly' prepared and polished sermon methods of the 'popular' churches, not a good idea at all."
"This was the 1889 issue in the Mennonite congregation of which the Zimmerman family were members. The trustees were building a new Meeting House; and to the distress of the conservatives, they installed a pulpit. It was a special problem for Abe Zimmerman's father. A conservative, he felt particularly responsible. He is said to have remarked that the offending pulpit should be removed, 'even if at night.'
"Not to surprisingly, it happened that way. The pulpit disappeared one night, removed, it was said, by Abe Zimmerman, with the help of his sister. Now it was the liberals' turn for distress. In the ensuing controversy, Abe was estranged and dropped out of the fellowship."
Direct action for problem sacred or mundane was a Zimmerman characteristic. He recognized the power problem on farms of the period. Except for animal or human muscle power, the alternatives were water, wind or stream. Wind power was not reliable in the hilly eastern states. Water power was limited to stream sites, and steam engines were both cumbersome and expensive. Zimmerman had a better idea and took action.
The German Otto four-cycle engine was already being manufactured in Philadelphia. Fueled by gas from city gas mains, it was not useful to farms. But Zimmerman obtained a franchise to sell the Otto engines and designed his own vaporizing carburetor to convert them to gasoline and kerosene fuels. He sold them to local farmers.
The Otto was a substantial improvement over steam in the lower horsepower range. While hard to start in cold weather, it did not require time-consuming firing up to obtain a head of steam. The power was adequate for the small threshers and feed grinders of the period.
Farther west in the plains and prairies, grain threshers were larger and were usually powered by straw-burning steamers. For Pennsylvania farmers, this was not an option. They needed all the straw for bedding livestock. Instead, they used smaller sweep-arm "horsepower" to drive threshers. Four or eight horses hitched to the "horsepower" gearset walked in a circle to thresh the grain. A six-man, eight-horse crew threshed only a few hundred bushels in a 10- or 12-hour day. With the Otto engine, output increased.
After selling the Otto for a short while, Zimmerman obtained a franchise to sell the Columbus engine which was factory-equipped for liquid fuel. Like the Otto, it was a large single-cylinder, dual-flywheel machine. But Zimmerman already had an idea for a better solution to the Pennsylvania farm power problem.
He would build a lighter-wight engine appropriate for the year-round farm tasks that would be easy to serve and simple to operate. His engines were built in several sizes up to five horsepower. A pair of engines could be belted together for 10 HP loads. The engine was unlike any other: it was water-cooled, did not require anti-freeze, but was freeze-proof!
Zimmerman accomplished the freeze-proof feat by shaping the water jacket in the tapered wedge in the form of horse watering troughs. In freezing weather, the water in the engine would lift up harmlessly as it turned to ice. When the engine was started again, the ice would melt as the undamaged water jacket was warmed by engine heat. His was the only freeze-proof engine on the market. The design merited a patent and became an important marketing feature when manufacture began after the incorporation of the New Holland Machine Company.
—Information from "The Innovators: The New Holland Story" by Homer K. Luttinger pages 13 to 15