Arboretums have much in common with botanical gardens, but are defined by their emphasis on woody plants, including trees, shrubs, and vines. Both botanic gardens and arboretums, however, are distinguished by an educational or scientific purpose along with aesthetic and recreational functions.

A complex network of Quaker botanists and dendrologists (those who study wooded plants) were at the heart of early arboretums in the Philadelphia area. In 1773, Humphry Marshall (1722-1801) established the first arboretum in the United States on his Marshallton, Pennsylvania, estate. A Quaker stonemason by trade, he was cousin to fellow Quaker John Bartram (1699-1777), founder of the first botanical garden in America. While Marshall’s arboretum showcased both native and European plants, his focus was on North American flora. In 1785, Marshall published Arbustrum  Americanum, the first treatise on woody plants published in the United States. Some scholarship suggests this early and persistent Quaker affinity for native flora over transplanted exotics can be traced to religious beliefs about stewardship over God’s creation.

Quaker Arboretums, a Family Affair

A surprising number of these early Quaker arboretums were family affairs. In 1798, Quaker twins Joshua and Samuel Pierce began an arboretum known as Pierce Park. This arboretum was notable for how it epitomized early arboretums as scientific collections; the trees were laid out in straight rows by taxonomy. Humphry Marshall advised the brothers in their collecting. Some Pierce trees survived into the twentieth century at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, through the intervention of Pierre S. du Pont, who purchased the property in 1906 to save it from timber companies. In 1825, two more Quaker brothers founded what would become the Tyler Arboretum: Jacob (b. 1814) and Minshall Painter (b. 1801). The two brothers, networking with Marshall, Bartram, and other Quaker dendrophiles, quickly gathered more than a thousand tree types. By the early twenty-first century the arboretum, the oldest extant arboretum on the East Coast, still held twenty original “Painter” trees, including the largest giant sequoia in Pennsylvania. In 1944, descendant Laura Tyler bequeathed Painter Arboretum to a board of directors and the property became the nonprofit Tyler Aboretum.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States suffered anxiety over its cultural relationship with Europe, English garden designers became viewed as necessary to validate the aesthetic and scientific worth of an arboretum. No wonder, then, that the English gardener William Carvill was hired to design the (Quaker) Haverford College Arboretum in 1834. He incorporated sweeping vistas, while also expressing Quaker values of community and individuality within his English-style designs. The arboretum boasts a descendant of the American elm under which, by tradition, William Penn signed a treaty with the Native Americans. Likewise, the English-trained William Saunders (1822-1900) consulted on the master plans of Awbury Arboretum in the 1870s, before going on to design Gettysburg Cemetery and the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C. Awbury also shared Quaker roots with Haverford’s arboretum; Quaker businessman Henry Cope, inspired by visiting the Woodlands estate in West Philadelphia, founded Awbury in 1852 in Germantown. After housing eight generations of Copes, Awbury became a formal public arboretum in 1916 and turned nonprofit in 1984.

Distinct from the Philadelphian lineage of Quaker botanists, another slightly later thread of arboriculture focused on international collections and global diversity. Closely following Humphry Marshall’s seminal publication on local fauna, William Hamilton (1749-1813) began planting trees at the Woodlands in 1786. Hamilton was an aristocratic Anglophile in his tastes and arboricultural practices. He introduced the Norway maple to North America, gave John Bartram a ginkgo sapling that became the oldest ginkgo on the continent, and voraciously collected globally diverse trees. He also shared a Quaker passion for North American plants, successfully petitioning for seeds from the Lewis and Clark expedition, although he displayed them in English naturalistic-style landscapes, with sweeping vistas punctuated by clusters of trees. In 1840, the Woodlands became a public cemetery to preserve his arboricultural legacy.

This non-Quaker strain of international dendrology was revived and brought to prominence in the 1876 Centennial Arboretum, still standing in Fairmount Park in the early twenty-first century. The Centennial Arboretum picked up where the international collector William Hamilton left off, showcasing trees from all over the globe, to much acclaim and imitation. Shofosu, the Japanese teahouse and garden at the Centennial Arboretum, influenced Western arboretum design and collections, arguably up to the addition of two Japanese gardens to Haverford College Arboretum in 1990 and 2004.

Barnes Foundation Arboretum

International collecting also became the focus of the Barnes Foundation Arboretum, initially developed by Captain Joseph Lapsley Wilson (1844-1928) beginning in 1880. Purchased by the Barnes Foundation in 1922, the arboretum boasts over 3,000 varieties of woody plants, including katsura trees, European beeches, Japanese raisin trees, and ginkgos. Also influenced by the Centennial Arboretum, in 1887 Quaker siblings John and Lydia Morris broke with the dominant Quaker precedent and began planting exotic trees. Their Compton estate grew in 1912 with the addition of “English Park,” made up almost exclusively of Chinese specimens, and a “Japanese Overlook” rock garden installed following the “Japanese Hill and Water Garden” addition of 1905. Known as Morris Arboretum since the University of Pennsylvania purchased it in 1932, the siblings’ estate became the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

More recent arboretums, informed by restoration ecology, have renewed emphases on native plants. The Jenkins Arboretum, founded in 1976 in Devon, took the southeastern Pennsylvania hardwood forest as its starting palette and specializes in eastern North American trees together with thousands of azaleas and rhododendrons. Similarly, the Lewis W. Barton Arboretum and Nature Preserve at Medford Leas, founded in 1981 in Medford, New Jersey, features New Jersey flood plain natives as well as global specimens. Tellingly, Medford Leas is a Quaker senior living community and receives guidance from the Quaker-founded Morris Arboretum. The Quaker strain of native gardening never died; even at the height of the exoticism craze in 1929, the Scott Arboretum of the Quaker Swarthmore College was designed to emphasize Eastern Pennsylvanian climate and ecology.

The roots of Greater Philadelphia’s arboretums run deep. In the region, arboretums display the influence of Quaker reverence toward nature, late nineteenth-century Anglophilia, Centennial celebrations of international collections, and an ever-growing focus on public education.

Anastasia Day is a Ph.D.-track fellow in the Hagley Program in the History of Industrialization at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include gender, consumption, technology, and environmental history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Originally part of a thousand-acre tract of land in Kingsessing Township first settled by the Swedish in the mid-seventeenth century, Bartram’s Garden began in 1728 when John Bartram purchased a 102-acre tract for his family farm. Bartram was a self-taught naturalist who sought out the company of other like-minded individuals, both at home and abroad. Bartram’s friendships with Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and James Logan (1674–1751) led to his introduction to London and Royal Society Fellow Peter Collinson (1694–1768), with whom he began a correspondence in 1731. Bartram and Collinson soon began to exchange plants along with botanical notes on experiments and other discoveries. By 1750, Bartram was sending regular shipments of North American seeds to a wide variety of European collectors, including Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), and advertising his seeds for sale in London periodicals. Bartram expanded his garden to keep up with his growing plant trade business and performed experiments on the lychnis dioica that corroborated Logan’s experiments on Indian corn. As Bartram’s fame grew, so did his garden. He traveled farther and farther afield to collect new plants and seeds, and he recreated their environments at home by constructing ponds and swamps for aquatic plants, areas of forest and grassland, as well as sections for nursery seeds and greenhouses for more tropical specimens. By the turn of the century, Bartram’s Garden boasted the most varied collection of North American plants in the world.

When John Bartram died in 1777, his sons, John Bartram Jr. (1743–1812) and William Bartram (1739–1823), continued the business. They expanded the grounds as well as the garden’s reputation in national and international circles through their commercial and educational activities. William Bartram’s growing renown as a botanical illustrator and plant collector attracted botanical enthusiasts from near and far who came to exchange both plants and knowledge. French botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) visited Bartram’s Garden during his North American sojourn, as did botanists from closer to home, such as Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), Thomas Say (1787–1834), Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), and Frederick Pursh (1774–1820).

Both George Washington (1732–99) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) visited and purchased plants from Bartram’s Garden for their own estates in Virginia, and near neighbor William Hamilton (1745–1813) exchanged many plants with the Bartrams, even sending William Bartram one of the three ginkgo trees he introduced to America from England in 1785. Bartram’s Garden’s reputation as a destination grew, especially among the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In 1784, the congress ended a session early to allow several delegates to indulge their curiosity about Bartram’s Garden and venture across the Schuylkill River for an afternoon visit with the family in their garden.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Bartram’s Garden expanded again under the third generation of Bartrams. Ann Bartram Carr (1779–1858) and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr (1778–1866), took over the business from Ann’s father, John Bartram Jr., and expanded both the commercial business and the garden itself. At its largest, Bartram’s Garden comprised twelve acres of gardens and ten greenhouses filled with over fourteen hundred native plant species and as many as one thousand varieties of more far-flung exotics. In 1844 and 1845, the Carrs added another dimension to Bartram’s Garden when they opened the grounds as a summer pleasure garden, selling ice cream and other refreshments to visitors and offering steamboat trips three days a week from the Delaware River wharves.

By midcentury, however, increasing financial difficulties forced the Carrs to sell Bartram’s Garden. Railroad magnate and industrialist Andrew Eastwick (1811–79) purchased the house and grounds in 1850. Eastwick planned to construct a villa near the original Bartram house. Recognizing the historic significance and aesthetic appeal of the site, he preserved the original house and grounds as part of his private estate and even lived in the Bartram house during construction of his villa, “Bartram Hall.”

After Eastwick’s death, Bartram’s Garden fell into neglect until Eastwick’s former gardener, Thomas Meehan (1826–1901), aided by Boston botanist and head of the Arnold Arboretum Charles S. Sargent (1841–1927), conceived a plan to purchase the acres of Bartram’s Garden for the city as part of Meehan’s campaign to create parks in Philadelphia. After a prolonged campaign by Meehan, who was a member of Philadelphia’s Common Council, and others, in 1888 the city added a portion of the original Bartram’s Garden to the city plan and marked it for preservation. Bartram’s Garden finally came under the control of the City of Philadelphia in 1891.

Two years later, in 1893, descendants of John Bartram organized the John Bartram Association and reasserted their influence over the direction of the garden. With the aid of University of Pennsylvania botany professor and director of the university’s botanic garden John Muirhead Macfarlane (1855–1943), the association established a library and archives relating to the Bartram family and their botanic activities at Bartram’s Garden. In 1923, the Fairmount Park Commission assumed control of the property and worked to preserve and restore the gardens and buildings while continuing to operate the garden as a city park.

In October 1960, the secretary of the Interior designated Bartram’s Garden a National Historic Landmark in acknowledgement of the importance of the garden to John Bartram’s career as a botanist and to the history of American botany. Through restoration and interpretation of the site, The John Bartram Association continued to preserve the historical and contemporary gardens for visitors into the twenty-first century, including the original ginkgo tree (1785), a yellowwood tree sent by Michaux (1784), the Franklinia alatamaha from which all current examples descend, and the Bartram oak. Since the third decade of the eighteenth century, Bartram’s Garden served as a repository of North American plants of national and international importance, bringing together the commercial, public, and educational aspects of Philadelphia’s botanical legacy.

Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia, exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at The Woodlands Estate, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–1850, edited by Richard F. Veit and David G. Orr (University of Tennessee Press, 2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Philadelphia region’s history as a botanical paradise and center of discovery began in the eighteenth century with the work of individual collectors and enthusiasts such as John Bartram (1699–1777), who used his home at Bartram’s Garden to cultivate and sell native plants to an international group of botanists and collectors, including Peter Collinson (1694–1768), Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), and Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). Linnaeus even named a variety of moss after Bartram in recognition of his botanical efforts. Bartram introduced as many as two hundred North American plant species into Europe, including the magnolia, mountain laurel, azalea, and rhododendron, and by the nineteenth century the botanic collection at Bartram’s Garden was the most extensive and varied collection of North American plants in the world.

Another eighteenth-century botanist operating in Philadelphia was Bartram’s neighbor, William Hamilton (1745–1813), who turned his country estate on the west bank of the Schuylkill River, The Woodlands, into a botanical paradise with a collection of native and exotic plants said to number ten thousand. The Woodlands and Bartram’s Garden drew plant enthusiasts of all kinds to Philadelphia, from medical students studying botany and materia medica at the University of Pennsylvania to such international luminaries as André Michaux (1746–1802), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and Peter Kalm (1716–79).

Hamilton, John Bartram’s son William (1739–1823), and other area botanists ensured that later generations of botanists would continue to make their mark in the science by establishing Philadelphia as a training ground: Hamilton employed several gardeners who went on to international careers, such as nurseryman John Lyon (1765–1814) and botanist Frederick Pursh (1774–1820). Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), professor of botany and materia medica at the University of Pennsylvania, sent his student and protégé Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859) to both The Woodlands and Bartram’s Garden for training.

Philadelphia continued to dominate the botanical scene in the nineteenth century. When, as president, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) sought to expand the sciences on a national level, he sent Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) to study with Barton, Hamilton, and William Bartram before he headed west to explore the recently acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. As there was yet no national botanic garden or arboretum, both Jefferson and John Adams (1735–1826) saw Bartram’s Garden as the appropriate substitute.

Botanical practice underwent a number of changes in the nineteenth century, both in Philadelphia and farther afield. As the century wore on, reliance on individual botanists gave way to various new institutions focused around the promotion and propagation of scientific discovery. The American Philosophical Society begun by Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) had long been a promoter of enterprising individuals working to advance understanding of science, medicine, and literature, as had other, more narrowly focused Philadelphia institutions. The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, the oldest agricultural society in the United States, had been sponsoring scientific farming experiments and developments since 1785 and included among its early members Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (1732–99), and George Logan (1753–1821), a politician and gentleman farmer whom Thomas Jefferson considered the best farmer in Pennsylvania. However, it was not until 1812, when the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded, that Philadelphia—and the entire Western Hemisphere—had an institution specifically and explicitly devoted to the study of the “natural sciences.”

The Academy of Natural Sciences promoted botanists and other scientists through the publication and dissemination of their work. It provided an alternative for young researchers who had plenty of ambition but lacked a wealthy elite patron or an independent income that would allow them to pursue botany as more than a hobby. The academy, which sponsored public lectures on botany for women beginning in 1814, popularized the discipline and made it accessible. It also funded increasingly ambitious collecting expeditions to the Arctic, Central America, Africa, and Asia. Other institutions soon followed, including the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, founded in 1827, which brought together botanical and horticultural enthusiasts; the Wagner Free Institute of Science, formally established in 1855, with the goal of bringing free science education to the wider public; and the Philadelphia Botanical Club (1891), which counted among its members several prominent naturalists such as Thomas Meehan (1826–1901) and John Harshberger (1869–1929). Institutional support of botanical and other scientific activities in Philadelphia contributed to the founding of the first college of pharmacy in North America in 1821, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, which drew broadly on Philadelphia’s reputation as a center for botanical and medical science.

The later nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw even more expansion in botanical activities in Philadelphia and beyond as interest in new areas of study including conservation, evolutionary biology, and ecology grew along with a devotion to a more general public audience. In 1907 Pierre S. DuPont (1870–1954) established Longwood Gardens in Chester County as a botanical conservation and horticultural sanctuary outside the city, which grew into an extensive landscape devoted to public education in horticulture and ecological conservation. Other institutions furthered interest in botanical activities by capitalizing on the public’s interest in horticultural displays revived by the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and the construction of Horticultural Hall. A century later, the modern Horticultural Center in Fairmount Park replaced Horticultural Hall and brought visitors to the display and demonstration gardens all year round. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society built on this interest with its annual Philadelphia Flower Show (first established in 1829), which drew an estimated 250,000 visitors annually by the early twenty-first century, and its locally targeted efforts coordinated through the Philly Green program (established in 1974).

In the later twentieth century, institutional support for botanical activities expanded through consolidation as Philadelphia-area universities formed partnerships with other local institutions including the Morris Arboretum (University of Pennsylvania) and the Academy of Natural Sciences (Drexel University) to further ecological, horticultural, and biological research across multiple platforms. Botanical activities, consolidated under the larger umbrella of biology and life science departments and medical research programs, continued to expand our understanding of the natural world.

The story of botany in the Philadelphia region is a story of individuals and institutions that, from the eighteenth century forward, established Philadelphia as a city of botanical discovery and abundance as well as a destination for botanical enthusiasts from around the world.

Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at The Woodlands Estate, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–1850, edited by Richard F. Veit and David G. Orr (University of Tennessee Press, 2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Archaeological sites throughout the northeastern United States reveal that Native Americans used dogs in sacrifices, as partners in the hunt, and as spiritual guardians. Early inhabitants of the Delaware Valley, the Lenni Lenape, believed that dogs guarded passage through the heavens and only permitted virtuous souls to join the creator in the afterlife. Burial sites throughout eastern Pennsylvania containing artifacts carved with dog motifs attest to the close link believed to exist between dogs and the spirit world.

European immigrants to the Philadelphia region valued dogs for their utility and labor. Colonists employed greyhounds, bloodhounds, and nondescript mixed breeds to track game. Often these excursions supplied food for the table, but in other instances an emerging gentry utilized packs of hounds to pursue foxes for sport. Other dogs kept vigil over livestock and property. Occasionally, some advocated for the use of mastiffs and other large breeds as weapons of war against native peoples. In 1755, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) called for Pennsylvania to acquire fifty mastiffs to harass Native Americans allied with the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). (No evidence suggests that Pennsylvania acted upon Franklin’s suggestion.) Dogs also served as beasts of burden, especially among the working class who lacked the resources to invest in horses. Occasionally, entrepreneurs envisioned dogs as engines of industry powering turnspits, churns, or other mechanical devices. At an agricultural exhibition on the Bush Hill estate in Philadelphia in 1822, one enterprising man demonstrated a system in which four dogs on a treadmill generated the requisite energy to power a grist mill.

Growing Affection

In spite of the fact that relationships were often grounded in specific acts of labor and utility, tender feelings and strong connections still flourished between master and dog. The Philadelphia family of Elizabeth Drinker (1735-1807), for example, possessed many dogs through the years, and her diary revealed genuine attachment to the animals. When her “good old Dog, Watch” died in April 1781, she recalled that he had “served us faithfully for upwards of seven years.” Poems and odes praising the steadfast loyalty of watchdogs appeared frequently in journals and illustrated the attachment that people fostered toward their companions. In addition, newspaper advertisements throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries announced rewards for lost dogs of all kinds.

Although dogs proved to be valuable assets for their owners on many levels, their increasing numbers created problems in the city. As early as 1702, a grand jury in Philadelphia complained of “the great damage the Inhabitants of the Citty Do Dayly sustaine by the great loss of their sheepe and Dammage by Reason of the Unnecessary Multitude of Doggs that are needlessly kept in the Cityy.” Even as the United States remained overwhelmingly rural well into the nineteenth century, dogs became an enormous nuisance in cities. Since many owners permitted their pets and livestock to range freely, dogs charged after carriages and knocked down pedestrians. Snarling curs infested markets and their waste blanketed doorsteps and sidewalks. After the sun went down, a chorus of howls often prevented citizens from getting much-needed rest. Perhaps most importantly, the press raised the specter of “mad dogs”—aggressive and unpredictable canines that were ostensibly afflicted with rabies. While rabies (or hydrophobia as it was known at the time) was an extremely rare disease, newspapers amplified its presence by printing graphic accounts of the excruciating deaths of its victims. The threats posed by dogs convinced one correspondent to a Philadelphia newspaper to remark in 1811, “To walk through the city after the close of day has become truly dangerous … it will soon become necessary, for those who would ensure safety, that they go armed.”

As a result, Philadelphia, like many major cities in the nineteenth century, embarked on a program to regulate the numbers of dogs that roamed the streets. Residents called for heavy taxes on dogs as well as legislation that required roving canines to be equipped with collars and muzzles. Municipal governments implemented ordinances and enlisted dogcatchers to capture strays and destroy the surplus population. Beginning in the 1850s this less-than-desirable job fell to a group of African Americans who became known in the press as the Dog Detectives. Between June and September each year, the Dog Detectives, led by Captain Jim Francis (?-1864), corralled dogs found without muzzles and delivered them to a pound, located for a time on Buttonwood Street between Broad and Thirteenth Streets. There, Francis and his associates clubbed the dogs to death if owners failed to claim their pets and pay the requisite fine within a day or two. Generally, Philadelphians found the work of the dogcatchers barbaric, but newspapers frequently praised their efforts in the name of public health and safety.

Humane Treatment Movement

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a growing impulse emerged to view animals as sentient beings worthy of protection from abuse and neglect. Americans cultivated what became known as a domestic ethic of kindness and lobbied for the humane treatment of creatures unable to fend for themselves. In 1867, the Pennsylvania Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PSPCA) became the second anti-cruelty organization in the nation. Chapters followed in New Jersey in 1868 and Delaware in 1873. The Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (WPSPCA), founded in 1869, made the treatment of dogs one of its top priorities. Under the guidance of Philadelphia humanitarian Caroline Earle White (1833-1916), the WPSPCA worked to provide shelter and placement in new homes for lost and unwanted strays. For those too sick or old to be adopted, the WSPCA instituted a new method of putting animals to death with the use of carbonic acid gas. The compassion of the women earned the respect of many for removing the cruelty and violence that had been embedded in the process of capturing strays for decades.

At the same time, changing attitudes toward animals led to increased pet ownership among the middle class. Philadelphia held what was billed as the first extensive dog show in the country at the Centennial Exhibition in September 1876. Fanciers exhibited nearly six hundred canines from diminutive toy black-and-tan terriers to lean Italian greyhounds and massive Newfoundlanders. The emergence of exotic breeds and the dog shows that publicized them increased the popularity of many novel types of dogs and transformed them into commercial objects and status symbols. Throughout the late nineteenth century, once exotic and rare breeds like the spitz, pug, Boston terrier, Scotch collie, and Saint Bernard fell in and out of fashion. With people’s attachment to their dogs reaching new levels, consumers sought out a wide array of products designed for their pets including food, leashes, blankets, and beds.

In the twentieth century dogs became ubiquitous in the role of faithful companions. The animals’ gregarious nature enabled them to insinuate themselves into new niches in a modern, industrialized society. Dogs accompanied their owners into new leisure spaces like the beaches and boardwalks of resort towns. In 1909, for instance, the Philadelphia Inquirer observed the growing numbers of dogs in Atlantic City that had a “playful habit of rushing pell-mell into the water.” Canines also served as mascots to fighting units in wars including one named Philly, a stray mutt that travelled to Europe with Philadelphia soldiers serving in World War I. They also became associated with advertising and mass entertainment as consumer culture made celebrities of dogs like Nipper, the trademarked fox terrier of RCA Victor in Camden, New Jersey, as well as Rin Tin Tin, and Lassie.

Ascent of Guide Dogs

In the twentieth century, dogs assumed two other important duties as they worked with law enforcement and assisted the visually impaired. Prominent Philadelphia native Dorothy Harrison Eustis (1886-1946) played a significant role in training dogs in both tasks. Following World War I, Eustis relocated to the Swiss Alps where she trained German Shepherds as police dogs. However, in 1927, after she published an article in the Saturday Evening Post on a school in Germany that taught dogs to guide blind veterans, readers inundated Eustis with mail asking how they might acquire such useful companions. This intense interest persuaded Eustis to found the Seeing Eye, the nation’s first trainer of guide dogs, in 1929. Within three years, the institute had established its headquarters in Whippany, New Jersey, and it moved to Morristown in 1966. By 2014, the Seeing Eye had placed more than sixteen thousand guide dogs across the United States.

The reliance on canines’ acute senses and sociability accelerated their use as service animals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Canine Partners for Life, founded in 1989 in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, pioneered the use of dogs in alerting their human partners to a variety of medical conditions including diabetes, seizures, and cardiac arrest. In addition, dogs assumed therapeutic roles for some individuals, relieving anxiety and helping their owners to cope with the stresses of everyday life. Yet these new uses for dogs blurred the line between pet and worker as when Canine Partners for Life had to sue to recover one of its service dogs from a deceased owner’s family in 2016.

With an estimated 350,000 dogs in the city in 2015, Philadelphians have continued the longstanding trend of keeping dogs for companionship and pleasure rather than for their practical utility. The shared emotional bond has encouraged humans to see dogs as friends and family, and consequently owners have insisted upon amenities and access for their pets unheard of in the past. Within the city and its surrounding region dog parks have sprouted up where canines can frolic and socialize off leash. In New Jersey, resort towns such as Wildwood have reserved stretches of beaches for dogs and their owners to enjoy the ocean.

At the same time dogs have come to occupy a cherished place in the home, they have also become emblematic of the rampant consumerism of the twenty-first century. In 2016 alone, Americans spent more than $66 billion dollars on their pets. New businesses such as bakeries, dog-walking services, and pet-friendly vacation planners have catered to the inseparable bonds between some humans and their canine companions. With its origins dating back to 1879, the popularity of the Kennel Club of Philadelphia’s dog show attained new heights as its television broadcast became a Thanksgiving tradition in 2002, annually showcasing some of the most fashionable breeds for viewers. More troubling, though, has been the proliferation of puppy mills breeding dogs in crowded and unsanitary conditions to fulfill intense demand. State legislation, including New Jersey’s Pet Purchase Protection Act enacted in 2015, has cracked down on problematic breeders, requiring pet stores to deal only with reputable operations and disclose breeder information to consumers.

The relationship between dogs and people has evolved over millennia. While many of the former roles that dogs assumed in human lives have long since become obsolete, new ones have emerged to illustrate the connection between the species remains alive and well.

Jonathan Hall is an environmental historian, specializing in the history of animals in the nineteenth century. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montana. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Flaxseed agriculture and flaxseed exporting began in the 1730s, a relatively late but very important colonial export. It was a key supplement to flour as farmers could diversify their crops and use the residual useful elements such as linseed oil, flaxseed cake, and the remaining plant fiber to make rough linen for home use. Colonists sent flaxseed to the north of Ireland, where farmers then grew the fibrous plant essential in weaving linen, which was then was traded back to Philadelphia. In Ireland, when farmers cultivated flax, they pulled the entire two-to-three-foot high, green, slim plants from the ground by the roots before seeds developed. This created the softest, highest quality fibers as well as a need to import seed for the next crop.

The flaxseed trade dominated the port of Philadelphia’s exports to Ireland from November to February. Flaxseed shipments were in the hands of many small traders and farmers who sold other grains, such as clover, timothy seed, and wheat. Linen importers were general dry goods traders, not specialists in linen. Direct linen exports from Ireland to North America were small in the early years, but by the 1740s textiles were half of all imports from England into Pennsylvania.

Raw Materials in Short Supply

From the earliest years of colonization, Philadelphia imported linen from Europe because local production could never fill the Delaware Valley’s needs. Raw materials were always in short supply, and less than ten percent of the population had weaving equipment. Spun linen thread and textiles produced in the region were always rough, and workers did not improve the quality over time. Despite rhetoric promoting domestic manufacturing, most factory plans failed because they lacked funding and labor was too expensive. The Philadelphia region was artisanal, with small batch production well into the late-nineteenth century. Philadelphians manufactured coarse linen mostly in private homes from a patch of hemp or flax. The majority of people in the Delaware Valley wore this common, rough linen (also known as tow) created in the region. Domestically made linen was also versatile for durable household and sail use. Retail shops had a mix of domestically made everyday linen and imported textiles.

The beginning of a shift in trade from linen to cotton occurred after the American Revolution. As speed and volume of production increased with industrialization in the early nineteenth century, cotton became much less expensive. Philadelphians still used Irish linen for shirting, table linen, sailcloth and grain bags, but cotton rivaled the stylings and functionality of linen for dresses, handkerchiefs, and shirts and signaled a new era for textile manufacturing.

Michelle Mormul received her Ph.D. in history at the University of Delaware in 2010. Her research focuses on trade and commerce in the eighteenth century and textile history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As early as the 1650s, industrious farmers produced enough wheat not only to sustain themselves but also to send a surplus to market. For farmers in the city’s hinterland, the center of any rural community was the “custom” grist mill.  More than just a place where farmers took their product for grinding, the mill was where they learned news, met with friends, and transacted  business. These custom mills serviced a geographic radius of five to ten miles—the distance a farmer could travel with a wagon in one day. Custom mills were small, typically one or two stories, and the miller extracted payment by taking a “toll,” or a portion of the product. This he could keep for his own use or sell. Unlike the grist mills of New England and the South, most Delaware Valley mills were powered by indoor water wheels, an innovation unique to this area.  Moving the wheel inside helped prevent it from icing in the winter, and the miller could work nearly year-round.

As demand for Pennsylvania flour increased, larger merchant mills appeared. Merchant mills differed from custom mills in that they purchased unprocessed wheat seeds from the farmers and sold the rendered flour at market themselves or through agents. The most famous of these merchant milling centers developed on the banks of the Brandywine River, where shallops (ships slightly smaller than sloops) were loaded directly at the mill with up to two hundred barrels of flour at a time for shipping to Philadelphia. By the 1770s the Brandywine mills featured prominently in travel accounts as “must-see” destinations.  Their round-the-clock operation contributed to the growth of a symbiotic industrial town,  Brandywine Village, which provided a ready supply of skilled workers such as coopers, millwrights, and ship captains. The difficulty and expense of transporting wheat from western farms to eastern markets, often over roads plagued with potholes and muddy quagmires, led to the incorporation of the first paved turnpikes and turned the simple business of transportation into a potentially lucrative venture.

Flour Inspection Act

The importance of flour to Philadelphia was further demonstrated by the city’s preoccupation with protecting its dominance in the market. After decades of competing with New York and Baltimore, during which time Philadelphia flour developed the reputation of being lower quality than that of its neighbors, the city passed the first comprehensive flour inspection act in 1722. This act stipulated that flour intended for export meet a set standard for quality and be packed in barrels branded with the registered mark of the miller. Millers who improperly classified the quality of their flour or who were caught tampering with weights paid  severe penalties. These laws, among the first of their kind in the British colonies, enabled Philadelphia’s flour exports to increase sevenfold from the 1730s to the early 1770s.

This commitment to quality, paired with a series of poor harvests in Europe, soon made the Delaware Valley the breadbasket of the world.  A further boon was the work of inventor Oliver Evans (1755-1819). Evans was born in Newport, near Wilmington, Delaware, already  famous for its Brandywine River mills. Prior to his inventions, a grist mill required four or five workmen to keep the machines running smoothly and the wheat and flour flowing. The system often bogged down when it came time to sift the flour, which was warm and moist from the friction of the stones. Moist flour clogged the sifters, and warm flour packed before it cooled could turn rancid before it reached its consumers.  Evans invented a system by which bucket elevators did the work of men to carry wheat and flour between the different floors of a mill, and a mechanized rake called a “hopper boy” cooled the flour and delivered it to the sifting machines. These innovations made flour milling perhaps the first automated industry in America, and on December 18, 1790, Evans received the third patent ever awarded by the United States government.

Area Reigned Until 1815

The Delaware Valley continued to reign as the world’s foremost milling center until 1815. The steady decline after that time period can be attributed to a number of factors.  First, Philadelphia’s flour merchants depended heavily on the trade of high-quality “superfine” flour to European markets.  Improved harvests in Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century diminished demand for American wheat and flour, while at the same time the catastrophic invasion of the Hessian Fly, which first appeared on Long Island in 1777, destroyed wheat harvests in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.  After consecutive years of loss, many farmers stopped planting wheat altogether and focused on corn, rye, and oats, which were fine for domestic use but had no market overseas.

By 1860 railroads made possible the free flow of farmers and commerce to the open, fertile plains of the Midwest. Hard Midwestern wheat, higher in gluten content than softer Eastern wheat, could not be processed on millstones because of its tough hull. When “roller mill” technology emerged to process this desirable product, the giant new commercial mills on the Mississippi River won those sought-after contracts. Millers in the Delaware Valley were slow to refit their machines, and most saw no point in competing with Minneapolis, which after 1880 was simply known as “Mill City,” home to corporations like Pillsbury and Gold Medal Flour.

For a century, Greater Philadelphia served as the powerhouse of the world’s flour economy. Even though the flour bubble burst after 1815, there existed enough of an industrial foundation that many of these mills and commercial centers successfully shifted to more marketable products.  The Brandywine Valley’s world-famous grist mills converted to textiles, paper and gunpowder. Emerging industries took advantage of existing pools of skilled laborers and shippers, as well as one of the best transportation infrastructures in the country. All of these were built in large part on the back of the flour industry.

Jennifer L. Green spent four years as the education and interpretation director at a historic grist mill in Chester County, Pa., and continues her work in the industrial history of the Greater Philadelphia area as Program Manager at the National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum in Coatesville, Pa. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The indigenous and early colonial residents of the Delaware Valley were largely self-sufficient. The minimal processing needed to make bread or to preserve meat was done mostly at home or on the farm. Yet the inklings of the future food industry were visible in the trades marching in the Philadelphia Grand Federal Procession in 1788 celebrating the new Constitution: bakers, butchers, sugar refiners, and brewers joined their fellow predecessors of the coming Industrial Revolution in the line of march.  And even in this early period, food processing brought the region into the global economy. Hogs driven to Philadelphia for slaughter and grain transported to the city for milling ended up not only in market stalls on High Street (later Market Street) but also as provisions traded for Caribbean sugar destined for the city’s refiners.

Philadelphia’s propitious location in the midst of the rich agricultural lands of southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey made it the natural location for the artisans and merchants who would establish a wide array of food-processing businesses. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century only flour milling, brewing, and sugar refining had established enterprises beyond the size of small artisanal shops.  Philadelphia, in fact, became the center of the new country’s largest food industry, dominating flour milling in the late eighteenth century  through the first third of the following century and exporting some 400,000 barrels of flour (and a smaller quantity of corn meal) per year. The city also housed many sugar refineries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century.

Although  leadership in flour milling fell first to Baltimore and then the Midwest, Philadelphia, Camden, and nearby towns soon saw phenomenal growth in an amazing range of food-related industries: canning, the baking of bread, biscuits, and soft pretzels, candy-making, meat processing, the production of ice cream, mustard, and vinegar, and much more. Most new companies were of the type Philadelphia was best known for: small- to medium-sized and family-owned, often operating in the production of specialty items. But some of them grew to become national or world leaders in the mass production of food products and obtained financing from sources of capital beyond the wealth of their founding families.

Food Processing Outpaces Manufacturing

Spurred by the demands of war and growing urban populations, food industry expansion nationally outpaced manufacturing as a whole in the late nineteenth century, and, in Philadelphia, food processing become the city’s second largest industry (after textiles) by 1910. Canning, invented to feed Napoleon’s armies, became essential in the Civil War and remained so in America’s twentieth-century conflicts and in ordinary consumption.

Urbanization separated more and more people from the farms that produced their food, and the new advertising industry, as well as the promise of lightened housework, helped convince Philadelphia housewives (and others) that they needed factory-made canned soup and mass-produced sliced bread. Fears of contamination that led to governmental regulation also provided advertisers with arguments for why consumers should buy brand-name (and government-inspected) ice cream and cellophane-wrapped chocolates. Philadelphia’s many ethnic groups expanded the range of food processing methods and markets even further. Meat processing, for example, took the form of a first-floor Kosher butcher shop in West Philadelphia, an Italian basement butchery in South Philadelphia, and a Polish smokehouse in Port Richmond.

Canning, more than any other food-processing sector, brought the industrial revolution to the cities, towns, and hamlets of the Delaware Valley in the second half of the nineteenth century. In virtually every town in the lush agricultural region surrounding Philadelphia, tinsmiths built canneries, partnered with farmers and merchants, and sold their products not only in the city, but along the trade routes stretching west along the railways. When the steamboat Bertrand sank in the Missouri River in 1865, it carried to the bottom peaches and cranberry sauce from canneries in Philadelphia and southern New Jersey (as well as rival Baltimore). Canning also spurred development of allied industries.  Southern New Jersey’s glass manufacturers provided the first containers for the industry, and several can makers followed (like the Continental Can Company located next door to Campbell Soup in Camden), while Bridgeton’s Ferracute Machine Company built canning machinery used throughout the region. This growth of related industries and synergies among producers of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and final consumer goods was seen most clearly in the case of canning, but it was a phenomenon that characterized all branches of the food industry in the Delaware Valley.

Most canneries remained fairly small, but several grew into sizable establishments, employing hundreds or even thousands of workers, typically doubling in size during harvest season.  Philip J. Ritter first tried his hand at confectionery, but had more success when he began selling his wife’s preserves in 1854. When operations outgrew the family’s Kensington home twenty years later, he opened a factory on Dauphin Street. By 1894 his cannery employed 150 workers year-round and 300 at peak season. To get even closer to its raw materials, especially tomatoes for its award-winning Ritter Catsup, the company opened a plant across the river in Bridgeton, New Jersey.  An even more famous product, Campbell’s Soup, rolled off the lines of that company’s mammoth plant in Camden.

New Eating Habits

Eating new items like canned soup was something Philadelphians were learning to do, but bread and other baked goods had been part of their diet from colonial days.  Yet even with the onset of the industrial revolution, most people in the city and surrounding towns continued baking bread at home or purchasing it from the hundreds of small neighborhood bakeries. The first attempt at building a large mechanized bread bakery at Broad and Vine Streets in 1857 ended in failure three years later. But by the end of the nineteenth century a number of local bakeries and branches of national bread makers had implemented modern production and distribution methods, and brands like Freihofer‘s and Stroehmann’s became household names.

One of the main obstacles to commercial production of bread was overcome by Charles Fleishmann’s (1835-1897) invention of consistent packaged yeast in 1868 in Cincinnati.  His “Vienna Model Bakery” became one of the highlights of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. The Model Bakery moved to 253 North Broad Street after the Exposition (managed by Fleischmann’s brother-in-law) and the company expanded from there to Manhattan and elsewhere. Other bakers quickly adopted the use of commercial yeast, and store-bought brand-name bread spread rapidly.  Philadelphia baker Charles Freihofer (1860-1942) continued the Vienna theme when he teamed with his brother to open the Freihofer Vienna Baking Company in Camden in 1899 and a similarly named company at 24th and Master Streets in North Philadelphia a year later. Rapid growth in the business led to a move to 20th and Indiana Streets in 1913 and expansion to several other cities. Freihofer’s and competitors’ home-delivery vans, originally horse-drawn, became a fixture in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods as many smaller bakeries closed their doors.

Entrepreneurs Philip Bauer and Herbert Morris conceived the idea of mass-producing and marketing small “sanitary-wrapped” cakes and opened a plant on Sedgley Avenue in 1914. Their Tasty Baking Company was so successful that “Tasty Kakes” became a Philadelphia icon. By 1922 they moved to a much larger facility on Hunting Park Avenue.   Other Philadelphia traditions remained the province of smaller establishments.  Small soft pretzel bakeries were found in almost every neighborhood, though some, such as Federal Pretzel Baking Company in South Philadelphia, introduced limited mass-production techniques to increase their output. Similarly, the rolls used for Philadelphia’s cheesesteak sandwiches and hoagies came from a variety of bakers.  But the Amoroso family enterprise, originally just another small bakery in Camden in 1904, repeatedly outgrew its facilities until it was able to produce enough rolls to meet region-wide demand in a large plant on South 55th Street in Southwest Philadelphia.

Although large-scale production of breads and cakes got off to a slow start in Philadelphia, the manufacture of biscuits and crackers was well established by the Civil War, when “hard-tack,” a hard, usually saltless biscuit, was widely used for military rations. Godfrey Keebler (1822-93) had worked in a number of bakeries by the onset of the war, and in 1862 opened a bakery in South Philadelphia. His success from supplying the Union Army as well as the Philadelphia market led to expansion to a mechanized facility at 258-264 N. Twenty-Second Street and later, after a merger that formed the Keebler-Weyl Baking Company, to a large plant at G Street and East Hunting Park Avenue. The National Biscuit Company conglomerate (formed in 1898) also opened operations in Philadelphia at Broad Street and Glenwood Avenue, and later near the Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast section of the city.

Confectionary Leader

Philadelphia has also long been a leader in the confectionery industry. Stephen F. Whitman (1823-88) opened a confectionery shop on the waterfront in 1842 and introduced prepackaged candy in 1854. His company pioneered the use of cellophane in its famous Whitman’s Sampler (1912) and moved several times, eventually to Fourth and Race Streets.  It relocated once again, in 1960, to a new industrial park in the Far Northeast, where it employed 1,650 workers.  (Another Philadelphia candy shop, opened in 1873 by the young Milton Hershey [1857-1945], failed after a few years; he moved about a hundred miles west where he founded the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894.)  Among other well-known Philadelphia candy makers were Richardson’s Mints (1893), C. A. Asher (1892, moved to Germantown in 1899), and David Goldenberg (who started his candy store on Kensington Avenue in 1890 and created Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews as a World War I ration in 1917).

A related industry, the manufacture of ice cream, was also important in Philadelphia. Among other ice-cream makers in the city, William A. Breyer (1828-82) began making ice cream in 1866 and opened a retail store on Frankford Avenue in 1882. The business was continued by his wife and sons after his death.  The company trumpeted the pure ingredients of its ice cream, and growing sales led to several moves, eventually to a large plant at Forty-Third Street and Woodland Avenue that employed 500 workers by 1931.

Meat, poultry, and seafood processing have been small but continual parts of Philadelphia’s food industry from the beginning from the beginning.  Excellent transportation to the West enabled meat processors to supply the needs of the large regional market. A few small-to-medium-sized slaughterhouses were found in the area, such as Cross Brothers in Kensington and Triolo’s in Burlington County, New Jersey. Dietz and Watson started making delicatessen meats in 1939 and expanded to other cities while maintaining a large plant in the Tacony section of the city. The nineteenth-century shad fisheries and markets of Shackamaxon even resulted in the change of that neighborhood’s name to Fishtown.

Local Consumers Were Producers, Too

Philadelphians were not only consumers of the products of the companies founded by the area’s food industry entrepreneurs; residents of working-class neighborhoods throughout the region were also the ones who did the work that turned agricultural raw or semi-processed materials into finished products. And that work was often long, hard, and low-paying, especially before employees joined together in unions to press for better pay and working conditions. Among the first recorded activities of united Philadelphia food workers was a strike for higher wages by the Journeymen Bakers in 1835. Journeymen Biscuit Makers were mentioned in the press a year later.  Some crafts in the industry were unionized over the next century, but it was only after the organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s that most of the areas food workers became union members–even the 1,500 confectionary workers who organized Candy Workers Local 350. Union contracts improved the lives of food workers but often only after strikes and other industrial actions. One example among many was the strike of 1,900 bakers in 1946 against eight major bakery firms including Freihofer and Fleischmann in Philadelphia and Stroehmann Brothers in Norristown. Working-class support for unions and picket lines was impressive.  A sense of the strong traditions against crossing picket lines can be garnered from an arbitrator’s report about what happened at Cross Brothers Meat Packing Company when employees who had struck a different unit of the company crossed the street to an unrelated division of the firm:

On July 1, 1971, [Cross Brothers] expected approximately 65 slaughterhouse and 18 boning employees to report for work. None reported, since they refused to cross the Local 195 picket line. The office and clerical employees and the delivery employees, represented by Teamsters’ locals 161 and 500 respectively, similarly did not report for work. . . . Employees of an independent contractor building an addition to Packers’ building, as well as those of a garbage removal contractor, also refused to cross the picket line in order to perform their job duties.

Several of the most intense clashes between workers and management in the food-processing industry occurred in South Jersey, especially at Campbell Soup in Camden and Seabrook Farms in Cumberland County.  The workers at Seabrook, mostly African Americans and Italian immigrants, who were paid 12-15 cents per hour, initially won a big increase in their  wages when they struck in 1934, but their union was destroyed a few months later after concerted attacks by company, police, and vigilantes.

By the early twenty-first century much of Philadelphia’s food processing industry had disappeared or been absorbed into global food mega-corporations, though, just as in earlier centuries, small establishments continued to compete in various niches. There were many reasons for the decline. The rich agricultural hinterlands of the city that had supplied canneries and other food processors were no longer the source of raw materials. Although local farms still produced a smaller amount of food for the fresh market, food processors preferred cheaper mass-produced intermediate inputs like tomato paste from California and China. Beyond reasons specific to the food industry, Philadelphia’s food workers suffered along with others from the increasingly aggressive cost-cutting strategies of global capitalism that ramped up in the 1970s. The lure of highly automated factories with fewer workers, remaining workers who would accept lower pay and not join unions, states and countries offering corporate tax breaks and little regulation, and repeated bouts of merger-and-acquisition mania all took their toll on Philadelphia’s industries, including its food processors.

Recent Consolidation

Freihofer’s and Stroehmann’s breads (along with Arnold’s, Entenmann’s, and others) had been absorbed into the largest bakery corporation in the United States, Bimbo Bakeries, a unit of Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo. Area residents might have taken some comfort from the fact that Bimbo’s American headquarters located in Horsham in Montgomery County. Tasty Baking Company closed its Nicetown plant and moved to a new taxpayer-subsidized facility at the former Navy Yard in 2010. Because the new plant was highly automated, hundreds of employees were laid off.  Yet the company avoided bankruptcy only by becoming part of Georgia-based Flowers Foods (a Bimbo competitor). After Whitman’s Chocolates’ much-heralded move to the new Philadelphia Industrial Park in 1960, it was sold to Pet, Inc. When Pet later sold the brand to Russell Stover Candies in 1993, it closed the Philadelphia plant.  Breyer’s Ice Cream went through several corporate owners; it became part of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever in 1993 where it made mostly “frozen dairy desserts” rather than ice cream.  It laid off the 240 workers at its Philadelphia plant in the mid-1990s and demolished the building. One of the city’s oldest industries–sugar refining–ended with the closing of the National Sugar refinery (Jack Frost sugar) in Fishtown in 1981 and the Amstar (formerly Franklin) refinery (Domino sugar) in South Philadelphia a year later.

Still, food processing companies large and small remained in the area in the twenty-first century. Cross Brothers was gone, but 400 workers at Dietz and Watson continued curing meat in Tacony, and the Czerw family still smoked kielbasa in its Port Richmond smokehouse. Keebler’s factory in Juniata was closed long ago (and the company itself had been absorbed into Kellogg’s), but 700 workers still made cookies and crackers at the Nabisco plant in Northeast Philadelphia, though it had changed ownership by then to Kraft Foods. Federal Soft Pretzel Bakery was sold to snack food giant J&J Snack Foods Corporation across the river in Pennsauken in 2000, but Philadelphia Soft Pretzels continued hand-twisting pretzels at its Feltonville bakery, though by then it was competing with dozens of new franchised pretzel makers.

The Philadelphia food-processing industry had fallen far from its important position of the early twentieth century.  Most large mass-production facilities had taken the same route as the region’s other large manufacturers and moved to newer and cheaper locations in the globalized food economy. Some foods that had short shelf life or were difficult to transport were still made in plants in or near large cities, including Philadelphia. For example, while Bimbo managed all of its U.S. holdings from Horsham, it still relied on local bakeries (such as Stroehmann’s) for most of its bread production (and it continued using old local brand names). A few independent companies with strong local ties (like Dietz and Watson) still employed hundreds in the area, and the growing ranks of “foodies” and newer immigrant groups provided opportunities for numerous niche producers of specialty and ethnic foods. These, along with a handful of national and global corporate headquarters of food companies like Campbell and Bimbo, marked the latest stage in the history of food processing in Philadelphia.

Daniel Sidorick has taught history at Temple and Rutgers Universities and the College of New Jersey.  His book Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press) was awarded the Richard P. McCormick Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Since its founding, Philadelphia has acted as a commercial hub for the surrounding region, its hinterlands. Although New Jersey and Delaware had European settlers before Philadelphia’s establishment in 1682, Pennsylvania and its founding city quickly became the focus of economic activity in the region extending both east and west of the Delaware River. With an advantageous location, Philadelphia acted as the region’s principal port, allowing goods from Great Britain, the West Indies, and elsewhere to flow in and serving as a gathering point for produce to be exported. From the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s hinterlands grew in size and diversification of products, but as the region developed, other commercial hubs developed to support and rival Philadelphia.

The Delaware River Valley was originally populated by the Lenape, or Delaware, people, who shaped the region’s initial economic activity. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Lenapes retained a strong presence in the river valley, and the various native and European groups generally worked with each other through trade and negotiated rights and privileges. Native American trails became the earliest paths for the colonists, aiding travel, communication, and commerce into the densely forested hinterland. During this early period, Europeans tapped into the preexisting fur trade before developing their own settlements inland. The territory that later became the state of Delaware was first colonized in 1638 by the Swedish, who adopted a plantation pattern in an attempt to emulate Virginia’s success with tobacco. However, these settlements were underpopulated, of limited profitability, and experienced conflicts with the local Lenape groups. From 1676 through 1702, New Jersey was divided by a line running from the northwest to the southeast, creating the distinct provinces of East and West New Jersey. West New Jersey was administered by a group of wealthy Quakers, including William Penn (1644–1718), but it was sparsely populated and had no major cities of its own.

After the founding of Philadelphia in 1682, the region’s producers saw the new city as a natural commercial center for the Delaware River. William Penn (1644-1718), founder and first proprietor of Pennsylvania, selected a site near the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers to better facilitate shipping. Pennsylvania grew quickly during the five decades before the American Revolution, adding eight inland counties to the original counties huddled by the river (Bucks, Philadelphia, Chester, and the lower counties that later became Delaware). Immigrants—free, indentured, or enslaved—strengthened the hinterlands’ connection to the burgeoning urban center as they spread through the countryside. In addition to Quakers and other English colonists, Pennsylvania attracted Scots-Irish, Germans (including the “Pennsylvania Dutch”), and dissenting religious groups.

Population Boomed

At first, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Philadelphia primarily exported raw farm products and timber from these homesteads of the fertile Delaware River valley lands, and the numerous creeks and rivers served as transportation routes for the goods. In the eighteenth century, the European colonists developed their own settlements in the hinterland areas. Timber resources allowed for a vigorous shipbuilding enterprise. The plantations of Delaware Bay moved away from tobacco to more diversified farm products such as meat, grain, and timber. The population boomed from migration from the Chesapeake Bay region and immigration abroad, though the towns and cities that grew remained satellites of Philadelphia.

By 1750, increasing grain production made Philadelphia’s hinterland the breadbasket of the British Empire. The new emphasis led to an increase in flour mills for processing the grain. Mills of various kinds operated throughout the hinterland but had the highest concentration and outputs in Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, where fertile lands combined with strong streams for waterpower to facilitate the milling of grain. Likewise, iron production and its attendant forges and foundries grew during the same period, primarily in Berks and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania and in western New Jersey.

Supplies of timber, flour, iron, and similar stores made Philadelphia an important provider of war materials during the colonial wars. However, the Seven Years’ War (1754-63), which erupted from conflicts in far western Pennsylvania, interfered with trade. In Pennsylvania specifically, it created conflicts over the extent of protection the colonial assembly would provide for the hinterlands as the area suffered from destructive raids. During the War for Independence, Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania hinterlands experienced disruption but not for extended periods of time, allowing economic activity to largely continue and cement its role as a producer. By the end of the eighteenth century, it led the new nation in production of textiles and leather goods, as well as metalworking and carpentry.

Road Improvements

In the late eighteenth century, the creation and improvement of roads from Philadelphia deep into the hinterlands eased travel, improving freight transportation but also pushing the frontiers beyond its reach. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) advocated for improving road networks, emphasizing the communication benefits as postmaster general. Improving communication and mail helped information from centrally located Philadelphia reach its hinterland and other colonies (later states) faster than ever, further increasing Philadelphia’s economic and political influence. In 1794, Pennsylvania completed a paved turnpike connecting Philadelphia with Lancaster, which lowered transportation costs by as much as two-thirds and was the first of its kind in the nation. This simultaneously drew Lancaster more into Philadelphia’s orbit, and made it a commercial center in its own right, as a gathering point for central Pennsylvania’s goods.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s hinterland reached as far west as Lancaster and Reading on the Schuylkill River, and the city’s influence extended to the edge of the Appalachian Mountains and the Susquehanna River watershed. The city commanded the Delaware River Valley as far north as Trenton at the falls of the Delaware. Ships going in and out of Delaware Bay called on Delaware’s smaller ports, such as Wilmington and New Castle, creating a connection for Philadelphia at those locations as well. During the same period, however, New York City to the north and Baltimore to the south increasingly grew and rivaled Philadelphia as leading international ports for the mid-Atlantic states, especially from north of Trenton and the Susquehanna Valley, respectively.

From the time of its founding, Philadelphia’s location and natural resources made it a commercial hub for the surrounding region. As the eighteenth century progressed, manufacturing capabilities increased and Philadelphia’s exports became more diversified while the city increasingly grew as a commercial and political center through the periods of the American Revolution and early Republic.

Jordan AP Fansler grew up in Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and has worked at multiple museums in Greater Philadelphia.  His doctoral thesis and scholarly work focus on the relationship of citizens to their state, national, and imperial governments in the early-modern Atlantic World. (Author information current at time of publication)

As elite animals, expensive to maintain, horses did not work in agriculture until the invention of the reaper and other mechanical devices in the nineteenth century. They were present but not plentiful in the colonial period. In Philadelphia, a compact preindustrial “walking city,” the wealthy used horses for riding, carriage travel, and sport. Most other people walked where they needed to go and hauled goods in handcarts and oxcarts. In the region, wagons drawn by horses and oxen brought agricultural products to Philadelphia’s port over rudimentary wagon roads. Completion of the Philadelphia-Lancaster turnpike (1795), the first paved long-distance road, dramatically increased traffic of Conestoga wagons drawn by “Conestoga horses” (a regional type of draft horse) and stagecoaches.

Industrialization intensified the use of horses for power. The period from the American Revolution to World War I might be called the golden age of horse power, in which horses became singularly important in moving goods and people. Commercial development, westward expansion, market access, and national security all drove the construction of transportation infrastructure in the form of roads, canals, and railroads. Each created the conditions for using more horses. A wave of turnpike building across the Northeast increased wagon and stagecoach traffic to Philadelphia, while local stagecoaches, called omnibuses, with regular routes and schedules, provided the first public transit system. This stimulated the wagon industry to produce stronger, lighter, more affordable vehicles that still further expanded horse use. A canal network connected Philadelphia to the anthracite coal region in northeast Pennsylvania, fueling its industrial growth as “the Workshop of the World” and strengthening its connection to the agricultural hinterland. Horses and mules (half-horses) pulled canal boats until late in the nineteenth century. On farms, horses pulled mechanical reapers, which helped to double agricultural production in the United States between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century and meet the food demands of growing urban populations of both humans and animals.

Rail Lines Linked by Horses

The expanding railroad network also caused a dramatic increase in the use of horses starting in the 1850s. Railroads increased the amount of freight, which then had to be transported to and from the depots. The fragmented railroad network also required transporting of people and goods from one railroad depot to the other. In addition, with steam engines initially banned from central Philadelphia due to danger from fire and explosions, horses pulled railroad cars from the city limits into downtown depots.

Railroads stimulated urban growth, but horses made the cities work, providing the circulation of people and goods within the city, and from the hinterlands to the city. Horse-drawn streetcars expanded Philadelphia’s residential area and suburbs, carrying 222 million passengers on 429 miles of track by the 1880s. Streetcar companies owned more than five thousand horses, which lived in large multistory stables akin to modern parking garages. Horse-drawn traffic—single-horse drays, huge multihorse wagons, carriages and cabs—filled the streets. Horses worked in construction, shipping, manufacturing, and shipping by hauling, excavating, and powering cranes, equipment, and capstans. The consolidation of Philadelphia city and county in 1854 created municipal departments for fire, streets, health, and sanitation, all using horses. By 1900, Philadelphia had four hundred horses per square mile, or nearly fifty thousand horses overall, including a small number of donkeys and mules. An 1872 epidemic of horse influenza, called “the Great Epizootic,” demonstrated the importance of horses by bringing Philadelphia to a complete halt for several days—a nineteenth-century version of a blackout.

Horses were urban residents and consumers as well as prime movers. They lived in small stables scattered around the city and suburbs as well as in the large stables of department stores, police and fire departments, and streetcar, railroad, and express companies. As consumers, they needed food, equipment, and services. Many businesses served horses’ needs, and the University of Pennsylvania founded its School of Veterinary Medicine in 1883 because of the presence of so many potential patients. Horses affected the urban environment by adding four to ten tons of manure and hundreds of gallons of urine to the streets each day, creating an issue for the growing public health movement. During the cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866, officials focused on cleaning stables. In addition, city dwellers had the problem of removing several thousand horse carcasses a year, many left on the streets for days after horses died on the job.

After the Civil War, horses gained a new role as equine recreation became an important pastime for members of a new, wealthy upper class who modeled themselves on British gentry. They rode, drove coaches and carriages in Fairmount Park, and went fox hunting and played polo, establishing such institutions as the Rose Tree Hunt Club in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1859 and the Devon Horse Show in 1896.  Although Pennsylvania banned horse racing for much of the nineteenth century and until 1959, prominent Philadelphians such John C. Craig, George D. Widener Jr. (1889-1971), George Elkins (1858-1919), and Samuel Riddle (1861-1951) (who owned Man O’War and War Admiral) bred racehorses and became prominent in the world of racing in New York and elsewhere. The upper classes supported the growing humane movement, closely linked to other reform movements of the era such as temperance, public health, and urban reform. The humane movement focused primarily on horses and founded such organizations as the Philadelphia Society for the Protection of Animals (1869) and its offshoot, the Philadelphia Fountain Society (1870). As expanding horse use made abuse more conspicuous, these reformers built water fountains for horses, monitored the treatment of work horses, and lobbied for limiting streetcar capacity and improving street pavements.

The Decline of Horse Use

Horse use began to decline in the early twentieth century. By 1900, streetcar electrification had eliminated most streetcar horses, which had made up a large part of the urban horse herd. The growing use of electric and internal combustion trucks and motorized equipment began to eliminate roles for urban horses. While automobiles were less important in replacing urban horses than trucks—few urban residents had owned private horses—automobiles changed the mindset of urban residents about the use of streets. City streets had traditionally been social spaces, but automobile drivers viewed them more as transportation routes and argued that horses should be banned as dangerous nuisances. Between 1910 and 1930 the horse population of the United States leveled off, but in cities it dropped by 50 percent.

Horses did not entirely disappear from Philadelphia in the twentieth century, but they came to occupy specialized niches. Milk delivery used horses for a long time because the horse memorized the route and moved the wagon from house to house as the milkman walked back and forth making deliveries. As late as the 1950s, individual vendors sold meat, produce, and other goods from horse-drawn wagons. The City of Philadelphia employed horses at the city dumps until the 1950s and continued to employ police horses in the twenty-first century. Horses also continued to work pulling carriages in the historic district around Independence Hall.

Outside the city, the Amish and some organic farmers continued to farm with horses.  The primary use of horses, however, remained recreational, for riding and driving. The counties of Pennsylvania and New Jersey surrounding Philadelphia, especially Chester County in Pennsylvania, became well known as horse country. The Devon Horse Show continued to be a premier event on the horse show circuit. Several horse stables remained within the city limits, including Chamounix Equestrian Center in Fairmount Park, where the “Work to Ride” program involved disadvantaged urban youth with horses and fielded a championship polo team.

In 2010, an automobile crashed into a horse carriage near Independence Hall, injuring two carriage drivers. Even though the driver of the car was at fault, the accident set off a debate about whether horses belonged in cities. Horses have been domesticated since about 3,500 BCE; since that time they have lived in and around humans, often in cities and towns. Whatever the future of horses in cities, their past is urban.

Ann Norton Greene is a historian of environmental and technological history in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, with expertise in animal history and energy history.  Her book, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, analyzes the use of horses in creating modern industrial society in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Derived from the Latin hortus, “garden,” and colere, “to cultivate,” horticulture is the study and cultivation of plants for both beauty and utility. Horticulture encompasses activities like garden design, botanical study, and small-scale cultivation of crops (as opposed to the large-scale farming techniques of agriculture). Professional and amateur horticulturalists alike take care of forests, orchards, and arboretums, tend to vegetable and flower gardens, and cultivate species for sale or for study. While preserving and enhancing the beauty of a specific environment, horticulture also is key to maintaining a sustainable and safe food supply.

New Discoveries and Foreign Imports

In pre-contact North America, the Delaware Valley provided ample resources for the semi-agricultural communities of the Eastern Woodlands. In contrast to the hunter-gatherers of the Plains, the Lenni Lenape grew maize, beans, and squash and collected fruits and leaves from around 200 species of trees, vines, and shrubs. They fertilized their gardens with fish scraps. Although there seems to be no evidence of crop rotations, the Lenapes’ gardens changed as they moved from one village to the next, which they did frequently.

When European colonists arrived in the seventeenth century, they quickly established their own gardens to grow fruits, vegetables, medicinal herbs, and ornamental flowers. Many of the species grown in colonial gardens were transplanted from Europe. Local species were, however, foraged from the surrounding oak, hickory, and chestnut forests around the region’s small settlements. In addition to serving as a major staple of the colonists’ diet, these plants were also exported as Europeans developed an insatiable taste for colonial plants such as phlox, asters, and sunflowers.

Some colonists created extensive gardens with a greater diversity of species than most typical colonial gardens. These early versions of botanical gardens were meant for study and, in the case of Quakers like John Bartram (1699-1777), for representing the diversity of God’s creation. Bartram developed the most famous North American garden of this period on the banks of the Schuylkill River in 1728. There he grew and arranged local species as well as others he collected on expeditions along the eastern seaboard, accompanied by his son William (1739-1823), who illustrated the specimens they found. The Bartrams and other enthusiasts exchanged seeds, plants, and botanical information with scientists in Europe such as Peter Collinson (1694-1768), beginning an important transatlantic dialogue about horticulture. William’s drawings became a crucial means of disseminating horticultural information in particular. In his rendering of Franklinia alatamaha, a typical example of botanical illustration from this period, William depicted only a small portion of this rare North American tree to emphasize the intricacies of its blossom and leaves so that the plant might be easily identified by others.

Bartram was not the only Philadelphian to create large-scale (and usually private) gardens in this period. Henry Pratt (1761-1838) designed his Lemon Hill estate to be a “showplace” with almost three thousand plants of seven hundred varieties. Other early botanic gardens included Tyler Arboretum, originally the farm of Jacob (b. 1814) and Minshall (b. 1801) Painter. The Painter brothers, interested in the study of natural history, collected dried plant specimens throughout their lives and in 1825 began planting more than 1,000 varieties of trees and shrubs on their property for study. In 1800 the DuPont family of Delaware started their first garden on two acres of land that later became part of the grounds for the Hagley Museum and Library.

Early in the nineteenth century, local horticulture enthusiasts began to organize. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) formed in 1827 as a means of sharing information about plants and garden design. Members exchanged seeds and grafts from each other and abroad, tested new technologies and pesticides, and tasted new varieties and uses of fruits and vegetables.

In the early days, members frequently brought new or particularly large species of plants to show off at meetings. In 1829, the society founded the long-running Philadelphia Flower Show when it hosted an exhibition at the Masonic Hall on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to provide local growers the opportunity to display such specimens to the general public. Considered the first public flower show held in the United States, the event featured species ranging from Sickle pears to amaryllis to geraniums.

Many of these varieties, both local and imported, held great importance for horticulturalists in this period. Philadelphia painter Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), for instance, documented the local interest in horticulture by depicting his botanist brother, Rubens (1784-1865), holding a potted geranium in a portrait from 1801. With both Rubens and the geranium rendered in exacting detail, the work functioned as a portrait not just of Rubens but also of the flower, a variety of Pelargonium inquinans. Imported from South Africa by way of Britain, this was the first tropical geranium cultivated in the New World and therefore a major challenge for a Philadelphian to grow.

Popularizing Horticulture for the Home Grower

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the New York-based landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52) described Philadelphia as “the first city in point of horticulture in the United States.” The early establishment of a horticultural community in and around the city as well as the incorporation of large estates into public parks, Downing argued, caused Philadelphia to develop more rapidly into a center for horticulture than other major North American cities. In addition, by the middle of the century Philadelphia became known for its horticultural publications, such as the influential Gardener’s Monthly, published in the city from 1859 to 1888 and edited by the Philadelphia botanist and nurseryman Thomas Meehan (1826-1901).

At the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a 75,000-square-foot Horticultural Hall—the largest conservatory in the world—further marked Philadelphia as the nation’s center of horticultural activity. Inside, amateur and professional gardeners from the United States and eleven other countries displayed tropical plants, fruits, vegetables, and gardening tools and equipment. Tropical plants and fruits testified to advancements in transporting plants. Ferneries and aquatic flowers (not to mention waxwork flowers) created a spectacle amidst other varieties. The popularity of Horticultural Hall, with more than 1,800 species on view, spurred development of arboretums and botanical gardens around the country.

The promotion of horticulture, particularly floriculture, at the fair also spurred the development of nurseries and seed houses in the second half of the nineteenth century. Philadelphia had long been a major center of commercial horticulture activity. It was home to the first seed house in the country, founded by David Landreth (1752-1828) in 1784, and Bartram’s garden operated as a modern nursery by 1783. Later, Robert Buist (1805-80) of Philadelphia opened Rosedale nurseries, known for its roses and indoor plants, and Meehan began the successful Germantown Nurseries in the 1850s. By the 1890s, commercial horticulture in the greater Philadelphia area reached new heights as it became internationally known as home to the largest seed house in the world, the W. Atlee Burpee Company.

Begun by W. Atlee Burpee (1858-1915) as a mail-order poultry business, Burpee later switched to seeds as it proved to be a more profitable venture. Vegetable seeds became Burpee’s most popular product for home gardeners living in rural areas and emerging suburbs in the Northeast, Great Lakes, and Plains states. To promote his business, each year Burpee published a catalog filled with colorful illustrations and descriptions of vegetables and flowers. An illustration of the “Rocky Ford melon” and the “Emerald Gem,” for instance, with an up-close depiction of one whole and another partially dissected large green melon resting in a melon patch emphasized the successful growing outcomes of Burpee’s varieties (as did distinctive names). A large part of Burpee’s success lay in his experimental farms, the first of their kind in the United States. In 1888, he established Fordhook in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where, taking advantage of the exceptional growing conditions, he developed and cultivated new varieties of plants, for example, the “stringless green pod bush bean” and “iceberg lettuce.” In 1909 he began two other experimental farms, one in California and the other, Sunnybrook, in Swedesboro, New Jersey.

Seed houses like Burpee succeeded because of the gardening movement taking place in the United States at the turn of the century. As urbanites moved to the suburbs to escape the pollution and overcrowding of the cities, middle- and upper-class homeowners, especially women, became more and more interested in gardening the landscape around their homes. Groups of amateurs formed garden clubs like the Philadelphia Botanical Club (founded in 1891), the Garden Club of Philadelphia (founded in 1904), and the Garden Club of Wilmington (founded in 1918). The Garden Club of America began in Germantown in 1913. Amateur and professional degree programs also began to proliferate at this time. Women played an important role in establishing horticultural education with Jane Bowne Haines (1869-1937) opening the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women in 1910 and Laura Barnes (1875-1966) opening the Barnes School of Horticulture in the 1940s. The region’s state universities later instituted Master Gardener training programs in Pennsylvania (Penn State, 1982), New Jersey (Rutgers, 1984), and Delaware (University of Delaware, 1986).

The Preservation Impulse

While the commercialization of horticulture maintained a steady pace into the twentieth century, attention also turned toward preservation. Beginning in the second half of the century, municipal, state, federal, and private organizations acted to preserve the gardens and parks in Philadelphia and the surrounding region of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. In addition to ongoing preservation of areas such as Fairmount Park and Bartram’s Garden, these conservation efforts and a revived interest in native species spurred the development and preservation of nature reserves and native or wildflower gardens. The Brandywine Conservancy, founded in 1967, created a garden around the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to pay tribute to native species. Mt. Cuba Center, a woodland wildflower refuge in Hockessin, Delaware, became a public garden in 2001.

Other preservation efforts have been organized at the local level. The Philadelphia Green program, started by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in 1974, has created community gardens and small parks in neighborhoods across the city. Vacant lots have been turned into vegetable and flower gardens, and trees have been planted in a number of low-income neighborhoods, renewing interest in horticulture in these communities. The Philadelphia Orchard Project, founded in 2007, focused on planting and preserving community orchards. In southern New Jersey, the Camden City Garden Club began in 1985 to assist Camden residents with community gardening projects. It later turned its attention to educating younger generations about horticulture with its Grow Lab program and the Camden Children’s Garden, a four-acre “horticultural playground.” In the twenty-first century, professional and amateur horticulturists in the greater Philadelphia area continued, as they had for centuries, to use gardening as a means of beautifying urban spaces, encouraging the exploration of nature, and building communities.

Eliza Butler is a Core Lecturer in Art History at Columbia University. Her research centers on the intersection of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. (Author information current at time of publication.)