Milestone Marks Fiegs' Date With Fate

Dictated by Greg Fieg

The year 2012 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Corbett and Stewart acid factory which played a key part in the establishment of the Lothar Fieg family and subsequent generations.

As a boy, Lothar Fieg (1886-1958) emigrated from Germany with his parents, Carl and Emilie Fieg.  He left the family farm in Milford, PA in the early part of the twentieth century to find work at the factory in southern Delaware County near the hamlet of Corbett, NY - then called Campbell's Creek.  Lothar was remembered by the late Beulah Stewart, an heir of the factory's founder, as being affable, intelligent and capable, and he rapidly advanced through the corporate hierarchy and was named superintendent before his thirtieth birthday.  This was no small feat as the plant, which produced acid, charcoal, wood alcohol and other collateral products was described as the largest such operation in the world at its inception. 

Corbett and Stewart was a major contributor to munitions manufacturing and thus, upon the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, the war department mandated that Lothar be fired as he was a German citizen and technically an "enemy alien."  (Though domestic sabotage was almost unheard of during America's participation in World War I and presumably most spies were too clever to be caught, the War Department knew exactly what to do: fire that guy working in the acid plant in upstate New York!)

Without this intervention of fate, Lothar never would have taken his fledgling family in 1918 to find work at the burgeoning rail yards in Oneonta, Lothar's children would never have found their future mates and none of the next generation of that branch of the family would have been conceived!  Coincidentally, without the hundreds of jobs provided by Corbett and Stewart that drew job seekers from hundreds of miles around, Lothar and Florence's union would never have been consummated in the first instance. 

Florence's father, William, a stone cutter, had contracted pneumoconiosis, (also known as "Potter's rot" or silicosis), a severe lung disorder caused by the inhalation of stone dust.  He and his family left their home in Colchester for Corbett where his wife, Celestia, operated the Merry Mason Boarding House. The five Shields daughters, Jane, Jessie, Nettie, Florence and Grace, pitched in with the chores. 

When Florence met dashing young Lothar Fieg she was teaching school.  After their courtship, the wedding date was set but on that day Florence, who had contracted scarlet fever, was quarantined to her room.  Lothar was forced to climb to the roof of the boarding house and hold hands with his fiancee through the open window while the preacher performed the ceremony from the ground. 

In 1920 Lothar finally took his oath of allegiance to the United States at the Delaware County courthouse in Delhi and became a U.S. citizen. He never returned to work at Corbett and Stewart as he had already established himself in Oneonta where he is credited with the construction of numerous buildings, some of historical significance, many of which still stand today.

Ironically, though once a going concern that made millions of dollars for its investors, the Corbett and Stewart operation was predicated on the harvesting of thousands of acres of timber throughout the Catskills which, being a finite amount, foretold at the company's inception, of a time in generations hence when the timber would be gone and Corbett and Stewart would be finished.

By 1970 all that was left of the once mighty factory were the barely recognizable ruins of its rail yard and the sidings of the Delaware and Northern Railway, also now defunct. The village of Corbett, once wholly owned by the company, remains.