Beginning in the eighteenth century, early explorations in flight primarily followed two distinct avenues: hot-air balloons developed by brothers Joseph-Michel (1740-1810) and Jacques-Étienne (1745-99) Montgolfier in Paris and hydrogen-inflated balloons tested by the Montgolfiers’ contemporary and fellow Frenchman Jacques Alexander Caesar Charles (1746-1823). Serving as ambassador to France from 1778 to 1785, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) witnessed and reported on such experiments to associates and friends in Philadelphia, stoking American interest in aeronautical flight.

As Philadelphia, then serving as the national capital, emerged as a focal point for ballooning in the new republic, early aeronautical endeavors in the city had mixed success. On May 10, 1784, Dr. John Foulke (1757-96) successfully recorded the first balloon flight in America, a small, unmanned paper test balloon released from the courtyard of the Dutch minister’s residence. Following Foulke’s demonstration, Maryland innkeeper and lawyer Peter Carnes’ (1749-94) ascension in a tethered hot-air balloon at the city prison yard on July 17, 1784, failed spectacularly when a gust of wind knocked Carnes from the balloon before it caught fire and fell to earth. A decade later, the exploits of European balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809) renewed Philadelphians’ interest in aeronautics; on January 9, 1793, citizens paid $2 to $5 per ticket to witness Blanchard’s ascent from the Walnut Street Prison yard at Sixth and Walnut Streets, a spectacle sponsored and attended by President George Washington (1732-99).

Ballooning Set the Stage

While public enthusiasm for ballooning waxed and waned throughout the nineteenth century, early aeronautics nonetheless fostered a public receptiveness to flying that increased as inventors turned their attentions to the problem of heavier-than-air flight. At the dawn of the twentieth century, interest in fixed-wing aircraft and other flying machines drew together a mix of scientists, engineers, part-time researchers, and enthusiasts to form a growing aeronautical community in the Philadelphia region. Notable among these individuals was George A. Spratt (1870-1934), a medical student from Coatesville, Chester County, Pennsylvania, who channeled his scientific training into the study of aerodynamics and participated in the Wright brothers’ gliding experiments at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the summer of 1901. Following the Wright brothers’ success in 1903, airplanes, like balloons a century earlier, gripped the public imagination and developed initially as a form of entertainment. Between 1908 and 1915, the Point Breeze racetrack and the Philadelphia Naval Yard at League Island became popular destinations for exhibition flights and air meets sponsored by the Aero Club of Pennsylvania, which formed in December 1909 from the merger of the Aero Club of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Aviation Society. In addition to exhibition flights, races between airplanes were also a popular attraction; locally, department store chain Gimbel Bros. (Gimbels) sponsored a 1911 contest from New York to Philadelphia that concluded at Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park.

While the Aero Club of Pennsylvania, as well as aero clubs at local colleges and universities including the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford, and Swarthmore, brought a degree of organization to amateur aviation, American involvement in World War I served as a catalyst for the emergence of a true aeronautical industry in Philadelphia and the nation. As the War Department increasingly recognized the airplane’s potential for scouting, observation, and tactical support of ground troops, ambitious goals of producing 22,625 airplanes and 4,500 aircraft engines led to the construction of government-owned and operated facilities like the Naval Air Station Lakehurst (New Jersey) and the Naval Aircraft Factory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Established in 1917, the Naval Aircraft Factory quickly became a critical hub for the manufacture of flying boats, seaplanes, motors, and other accessories; by war’s end, the facility boasted over one million square feet of floor space and employed more than 3,600 workers. The region’s contributions to the war effort also included the manufacture of component parts by Philadelphia-based firms like G.E.M. Manufacturing, which specialized in aerial cameras, and the J.G. Brill Company, which produced rough cylinder motor liners at its trolley and rail car plant at Sixty-Second Street and Woodland Avenue, as well as the training of aviators and support personnel at the Essington Aviation Station located on the former site of the Lazaretto quarantine station.

Military Influence Persists

Following the war, the symbiotic relationship between government and the nascent aviation industry remained critical, as military needs continued to influence industrial production and priorities, particularly in Philadelphia. Most significantly, the Naval Aircraft Factory scaled back its workforce to approximately twelve hundred workers and, throughout the 1920s, shifted focus from the production of aircraft to research and development of experimental designs. Initially, private industry followed suit and increasingly focused on the engineering and testing of materials and component parts until federal legislation expanding airmail service contracts for private carriers spurred demand for new and more efficient aircraft. Among others, aviation enthusiast Harold F. Pitcairn (1897-1960) capitalized on the 1925 Kelly Air Mail Act to establish a manufacturing facility for light utility aircraft at his Bryn Athyn airfield under the auspices of Pitcairn Aviation, the passenger service and flying school based in Willow Grove. Renewed demand for military and civil aircraft similarly spurred companies like the Huff-Daland Aero Corporation of Ogdensburg, New York, to establish a new headquarters and production plant along the Delaware River in Bristol, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Notably, the arrival of Huff-Daland in 1926 coincided with the opening of Philadelphia’s first municipal airport, a 111-acre facility located in the Eastwick section of the city, while public interest in the 1927 transatlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh (1902-74) and his subsequent tour, which included stops in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, likewise spurred a boom in commercial airport construction, including the William Penn Airport on Roosevelt Boulevard and the Philadelphia Aircraft Company’s airfield on Easton Pike near Doylestown.

Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s strategic location along primary east-west and north-south arteries significantly spurred the development and growth of aeronautical infrastructure and industry in the city and surrounding region. Nonetheless, aircraft manufacturing and airfield construction contracted sharply during the Great Depression, as companies once again redirected their focus from aircraft manufacturing to component parts. Amidst this shift, the Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia distinguished itself for its innovative use of stainless-steel and a pioneering shot-welding fabrication process used to produce aircraft materials that were stronger and more resistant to corrosion. Similarly, the production of engines, rotary wings, and propellers by companies like Fleetwings Inc. of Bristol and Jacobs Aircraft Engine Company of Pottstown helped to sustain the local aviation industry until demand for new aircraft rebounded in the lead-up to World War II. As the nation mobilized for war, the Naval Aircraft Factory once again stepped up production to meet rising demand and expanded into a wealth of experimental, highly classified projects on pilotless aircraft and guided weapons systems that underscored an ever-growing emphasis on research and development. This shift solidified further in 1943, when the Naval Aircraft Factory was renamed the Naval Air Material Center and the facility’s primary duties divided into two units: the Naval Aircraft Modification Unit, which focused on the conversion of service aircraft and special weapons work, and the Naval Air Experimental Station, which conducted laboratory and materials testing. Technological research and innovation similarly dominated wartime work at the Philadelphia-based Steam Division of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which engineered and produced the first operational American turbojet for the U.S. Navy in March 1943.

Cold War and Beyond

Across the state of Pennsylvania, employment in the aircraft, engines, and parts industries peaked at approximately 45,000 workers in July 1944; from there, employment and production statistics steadily declined into the postwar period, as industries struggled with the effects of demobilization and a market over-saturated with readily available used aircraft. In response, the Naval Air Material Center doubled-down on the research and development of specialty parts and materials, including advanced catapult systems, rocket-powered ejection seats, and improved arresting gear. Similarly, in 1947, the navy’s aircraft plant in Johnsville (Warminster), Bucks County, was converted into the Naval Air Development Station and embarked upon research in aviation electronics, medicine, and unmanned aircraft. Over the next decade, the two facilities evolved further, increasingly focusing on missile and spacecraft technologies and effectively positioning themselves at the forefront of Philadelphia’s burgeoning aerospace industry.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a number of private corporations across the region  joined in these endeavors, including the Boeing Vertol facility in Ridley Park, which specialized in helicopter and rotary wing aircraft; the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) facility in Camden, New Jersey, which developed guided missile and checkout equipment; and General Electric’s Missile and Space Vehicle Department based in Philadelphia, which in 1957 received the company’s first Air Force contract to develop a reentry vehicle for intermediate-range ballistic missiles. In April 1960, General Electric broke ground on a new Space Technology Center in Valley Forge, which became the hub for the company’s Space Division and its work on a range of missile and satellite projects for the remainder of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Despite the growth of private industry in the postwar period, the aerospace industry in Philadelphia arguably reached its apex in Johnsville, which in 1959 became headquarters of the Naval Air Research and Development Activities Command. In this capacity, the facility oversaw the Naval Air Engineering Center’s work on pressure suits used by Project Mercury astronauts, as well as jet and rocket engine research and centrifuge testing to measure the effects of G-force on humans. Several Gemini and Apollo program personnel and astronauts, including John Glenn (1921-2016) and Neil Armstrong (1930-2012), trained at the facility, as well as a number of X-15 space plane pilots.

True to the aerospace industry’s increasing dependence on government contracts and projects, cuts in military spending and the consolidation of facilities toward the end of the Cold War hastened the industry’s decline in the Philadelphia region in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, General Electric acquired the RCA Corporation and subsequently sold its entire aerospace division, including the Camden facility, to the Maryland-based Martin Marietta Corporation (later renamed Lockheed Martin) in April 1993. Similarly, the Naval Air Research and Development Activities Command in Johnsville closed in 1996 and many of its buildings were subsequently demolished in 2001, a symbolic end to the long history of the aeronautical and aerospace industry in the Philadelphia region.

Hillary S. Kativa is the Chief Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. In addition to an MLIS from Rutgers University, she holds an M.A. in history from Villanova University and received her B.A. in history and English from Dickinson College. Her research interests include American political history and presidential campaigns, public history, and material culture. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Commercial aviation grew dramatically in the United States in the twentieth century, and a number of airports in the Philadelphia area grew to become regional centers of the industry. There was nothing assured or inevitable about this growth, however. It depended on the efforts of local political leaders, investments by the aviation companies, and state and federal aid.

Parks and racetracks served as the first landing areas for airplanes in Philadelphia, but by the late 1920s designated airfields dotted the city and surrounding region. While most were privately owned, the federal government established a flying field at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and a seaplane base on the Delaware River in Essington, Pennsylvania.  Just upstream from Essington in the Eastwick section of southwest Philadelphia, the city built its first municipal airport in 1926 to serve as a site of operations for a Pennsylvania National Guard squadron, a commercial flying service called the Ludington Exhibition Company, and the U.S. Post Office’s new airmail flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

While the Eastwick field was soon deemed inadequate for Philadelphia’s needs, constructing a larger city-owned and -operated airport proved difficult.  Work began in 1931 on an expanded tract, which included the Eastwick property and land on adjacent Hog Island purchased from the federal government, but this project ground to a halt the next year, a victim of the Depression and a fiscally conservative mayor, J. Hampton Moore (1864-1950), who cut the city’s public works budget. Most flying activity, including the airmail service, had already shifted across the Delaware River to the less flood-prone Central Airport on Crescent Boulevard in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and  construction languished until 1936 when a new mayor, S. Davis Wilson (1881-1939), restarted the work with funds made available under the New Deal.  Although a laborer strike and a dispute between the city and the federal government over the location of a runway delayed completion, the new Philadelphia Municipal Airport officially opened in 1940.

When the United States entered World War II, military operations at area airports increased.  Philadelphia Municipal Airport and the Greater Wilmington Airport in New Castle County, Delaware, served as Army Air Corps bases, and Mercer Airport near Trenton functioned as a test site for Navy planes built at a nearby plant. The government also purchased a few privately owned airfields during the war. One in Northeast Philadelphia was improved and donated to the city in 1944, while another in Montgomery County, Willow Grove Naval Air Station, would remain an active military facility for decades after the war.

Postwar Aviation Boom

With the war’s end, commercial aviation in the United States boomed, and the City of Philadelphia worked to make its municipal airport a part of the growing industry.  It renamed the facility Philadelphia International and turned to the federal government for money to help build longer runways and a larger terminal. Before 1946, the U.S. government funded municipal airport development on an ad hoc basis, via New Deal work relief programs and wartime national defense projects.  In 1946, though, Congress established a grant program to subsidize construction and renovation and thereby promote a national network of airports. Federal grants became a continuous source of funding for airport construction from the late 1940s into the twenty-first  century and helped fund a new international airport on Hog Island that opened in December 1953.

In the 1950s, Philadelphia International gained more flights to other cities in the United States and abroad.  City leaders also campaigned to terminate the leases of the National Guard and air force reserve squadrons based at the international airport, believing they impeded commercial flying operations. Military leaders offered to pay for an expansion of the Northeast Philadelphia Airport if their units could operate there, but the city rejected the idea and the units eventually relocated to Willow Grove Naval Air Station in the early 1960s. The Mercer County and New Castle County fields served less controversially as homes to National Guard squadrons in the decades after World War II  and, along with the Northeast Philadelphia Airport, supported business aviation, charter and recreational flying, and light manufacturing.

By the mid-1960s, traffic at Philadelphia International had reached record levels, and officials decided it would have to be expanded to accommodate future growth.  With financial support from the state and federal governments, the city began construction of new runways, terminals, parking lots, and a SEPTA regional rail line connecting the airport to Center City.  While the investments were welcome, their management drew heavy criticism in the 1970s because of delays, cost overruns, and revelations that city and political party officials had accepted bribes from construction firms bidding on contracts.  Some critics called on Philadelphia to cede its control of the airport to an independent authority that they said would manage it impartially and in the best interests of the whole metropolitan region, but city leaders successfully resisted the idea.

When Congress voted in 1978 to deregulate the airline industry by abolishing the Civil Aeronautics Board, the airline business and the business of airport management both changed.  For forty years, the CAB had dictated who could start an airline, what cities it could serve, and what fares it could charge. After 1978, market competition answered these questions and cities assumed more direct responsibility for attracting airlines to their airports.  Greater competition encouraged airlines to establish hubs—specific airports where they concentrated their operations— and cities competed for hub status to gain more flights, jobs, and revenues.  Deregulation also allowed low-cost carriers to proliferate. These airlines usually provided fewer amenities and routes but offered travelers lower fares and helped offset the inflationary effect a larger carrier operating a hub at the same airport tended to have on ticket prices.

Hub for US Airways and UPS

While the 1980s and 1990s were a volatile time for the industry as airlines grappled with the realities of deregulation and many new and long-established carriers went out of business, traffic at Philadelphia International generally increased. The airport became a hub for US Airways and United Parcel Service, attracted service from a number of low-cost carriers, and saw new facilities develop to handle growing airplane, passenger, and automobile traffic.  This expansion sparked conflicts with neighboring communities like Delaware County’s Tinicum Township, in which much of the airport lay, over property tax payments and plane noise.

In the early twenty-first century, discount airlines began flying from some of Greater Philadelphia’s smaller regional airports.  With reduced operating costs and less tenant demand, the fields charged airlines lower rents and landing fees, making them compatible with the budget airline business model, and the airports’ locations along limited-access freeways made them accessible to area travelers.  The Atlantic City, Mercer County (now Trenton-Mercer), and New Castle County (now Wilmington-Philadelphia) airports all gained new service from discount airlines in this period.

Global demand for private jets and civilian helicopters grew after 1980, and a number of aircraft companies established assembly and maintenance facilities at area airports during that time.  AgustaWestland, an Italian-British helicopter builder, opened a shop at Northeast Philadelphia Airport in 1982 that later expanded into a manufacturing facility; Dassault Aviation of France established a maintenance, repair, and overhaul station for its business jets at Wilmington-Philadelphia Airport in 2000; and in 2007, American firm Sikorsky began assembling helicopters in a plant at the Chester County Airport in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

State and local governments helped entice these companies with tax breaks and construction financing. The fields also offered manufacturers less air traffic and lower rents than large commercial airports; proximity to deep-water ports, interstate highways, and railroads; and an established supply chain and skilled labor pool, thanks to Boeing’s long-time presence as a helicopter builder in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania.

By the early twenty-first century, many of Greater Philadelphia’s airports were regional centers of the world’s commercial aviation industries. While globalization led to the loss of traditional industrial jobs in the area, it fostered new employment, including manufacturing and mechanical jobs, at the airports. The growth of the local aviation economy was not an inevitable consequence of globalization, however.  Intentional policies of development and investment, both public and private, made it possible.

Demian Larry is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Temple University.  His dissertation is about the politics and economics of airport development in Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Schuylkill Arsenal, established by Act of Congress on April 2, 1794, occupied an eight-acre site between the east bank of the Schuylkill River and Gray’s Ferry Road. Constructed between 1802 and 1806, in its early years the arsenal operated as a storage depot for gunpowder, arms, and other supplies. (In 1803, the arsenal issued clothing, blankets, tents and equipment to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.) The functions of the arsenal changed after the War of 1812 and the opening of a new arsenal in Frankford in 1816. While Frankford superseded the Schuylkill Arsenal as an ordnance depot, the older site evolved into a clothing arsenal because of its proximity to textile mills. It ceased storing arms in the 1830s, and in 1842, after the Quartermaster Department acquired the site from a defunct supply agency, the Schuylkill Arsenal became a center for manufacturing, procuring, and distributing clothing, footwear, and camp equipage.

The Schuylkill Arsenal provided the Army with supplies either by contracting out requisitions to private firms or, when the contract system proved deficient, by manufacturing goods onsite. The arsenal’s bootee- (an ankle-length boot) and tent-making establishments, in particular, produced items superior to those acquired by contract. The arsenal also employed a large female workforce, which varied from 400 to 10,000 depending on military demand. While the men worked as packers, cutters, tailors, and laborers, women found jobs as seamstresses. Working from home, the seamstresses who obtained work directly from the arsenal sewed cut textiles provided to them, returned with finished uniforms, and received wages on a per-piece basis. Seamstresses hired by contractors, on the other hand, often worked in crowded sweatshops and received a fraction of what the public employees earned.

The low wages of seamstresses in Philadelphia and other cities drew criticism in 1833 from Philadelphia economist and publisher Mathew Carey (1760-1839), who argued in a series of essays that the women made too little to support themselves or their children. Seamstresses also began forming trade unions, organizing strikes, and writing petitions to improve their lot. In 1835, seamstresses and women employed in other trades organized the Female Improvement Society to protest inadequate wages. During the Civil War, arsenal seamstresses petitioned the War Department to set a minimum wage for both public and private sector workers and called for an end to the Army’s use of contractors. Although the petitioners met with President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and government workers received a pay raise, the practice of subcontracting continued.

By the time of the First World War, the Schuylkill Arsenal’s site had become too small to meet the demands of outfitting the American Expeditionary Forces. The arsenal, renamed the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, moved in 1918 to a new location on Twenty-First Street and Oregon Avenue. From 1921 to 1941, the depot housed a quartermaster training school for commissioned officers, officer candidates, and enlisted personnel. It lost this function, however, when rapidly increasing enrollment during World War II resulted in the school’s removal to Fort Lee, Virginia. The arsenal served as a storage site until its closing in 1958.

Philadelphia’s second arsenal, in Frankford, served different purposes. Established by the Ordnance Department on May 27, 1816, the arsenal occupied twenty-two acres on the north bank of the Frankford Creek, near its confluence with the Delaware River. Equipped with a wharf, the site provided waterborne access to the Worrell gunpowder mills. Initially, the arsenal included four stone buildings arranged around a parade ground, and open land in the surrounding area offered the possibility of future expansion.

During the antebellum era, the Frankford Arsenal functioned as a depot for storing, repairing, and cleaning military equipment and weapons. On a small scale, the arsenal also manufactured ordnance, including paper cartridges, percussion caps, and musket balls. Arsenal commanders also awarded contracts to private firms such as the DuPont Company, whose gunpowder they inspected before shipping it to other posts.

In the 1830s, the site began to develop from a small post used mainly for storage and procurement into a bustling industrial and scientific complex. In 1835, the Secretary of War made the arsenal the Ordnance Department’s only proving ground for gunpowder, and the site nearly doubled in size with the purchase of adjacent land in 1836 and 1850. Previously manned by about twenty-five soldiers plus a temporary civilian workforce, the arsenal expanded to employ hundreds of civilian workers.

During the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844, the Frankford Arsenal faced the only threat to its security in its 161-year history. On May 8 in neighboring Kensington, mobs destroyed the Roman Catholic churches of St. Augustine and St. Michael’s and several homes belonging to Irish immigrants. The arsenal’s  commander sent arms and ammunition to Philadelphia County Sheriff Morton McMichael (1807-79). Rumors of an impending attack on the arsenal and a nearby church prompted the War Department to deploy reinforcements from a unit based in Fort Columbus, New York. Nothing came of the rumors, however.

In the ensuing years, commanders expanded the arsenal with a rolling mill, a laboratory for conducting experiments in ballistics and explosives, and a factory that produced more than one million percussion caps a month by 1853. Steam-powered machinery, introduced in 1852, hastened the transition from hand craftsmanship to industrial production. By 1864, the arsenal had become a manufacturing center that employed 1,226 civilian laborers and artisans, many of them from the neighboring community of Bridesburg.

Given the Frankford Arsenal’s role as a scientific testing ground, fires and explosions were common. In 1861, an explosion at one of the laboratories resulted in two fatalities and, in 1862, another destroyed part of the percussion cap factory. Arsenal commander Major Theodore T. S. Laidley (1822-86) responded to events such as these by constructing new buildings with wrought-iron frames, an innovation that allowed the beams and columns to withstand explosions even if the roofs collapsed and the walls blew out.

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Ordnance Department purchased more land and added an array of new buildings, including an optical shop for developing instruments and munitions. Engineers and scientists contributed to the arsenal’s already substantial catalogue of innovations by developing the Gatling gun, smokeless powder, 75mm and 105mm recoilless rifles, the rocket-powered pilot ejection seat, and laser rangefinder, to name a few. Production of munitions increased dramatically during the Spanish-American War, the two world wars, and the Korean War. At its peak, in 1942, the arsenal employed 22,000 workers and produced nearly all of the nation’s wartime supply of small-arms ammunition for that year.

In November 1974, the Department of Defense announced that the Frankford Arsenal would be closed. The move, part of a nationwide base reduction and consolidation process that began under Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009), drew criticism from residents and local politicians and became a bone of contention during the 1976 presidential election campaign. On Election Day eve, vice-presidential candidate Walter Mondale (b. 1928) visited the arsenal and promised to keep it open if the voters elected Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) president. The site had grown to more than 200 buildings on 110 acres of land and maintained a workforce of 2,000 people. The arsenal closed in the fall of 1977, but it later reopened as a business park.

The Schuylkill Arsenal and Frankford Arsenal played critical roles in U.S. military supply system during times of war and peace. They also contributed to Philadelphia’s status as one of the nation’s principal manufacturing and commercial cities.

Jean-Pierre Beugoms is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Temple University. He is working on a dissertation about the logistics of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. (Author information current at time of publication.)

During the early colonial period, up until the mid-1760s, the town economy of Philadelphia built on the contributions of artisans and entrepreneurs. Artisan shops produced shoes, soap, wagons, clothes and food for the town, while also laying bricks and constructing buildings. By 1745, master artisans made up 48 percent of the total population of Philadelphia, highlighting their significance to the burgeoning town. For artisans of this period, the home and workshop were very often in the same building or at the least in close proximity. In some cases, master artisans labored alone to complete specific orders for their customers, but in many cases they relied on the work of indentured servants, slaves, and a few skilled journeymen to assist in the completion of their tasks. Master artisans were respected throughout the city, due in large part to the vital goods they provided the community, but also for the independence of their craft.

By the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) the labor market had changed dramatically to favor free laborers over indentured servants, whose availability had declined. Typically, then, master artisans owned the shop, ordered supplies, supervised the workers, and continued to work alongside his employees, including apprentices and journeymen. Apprentices were traditionally teenagers who spent three to seven years learning their craft under their masters, from whom they could expect room, board, and education. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one they would be promoted to journeymen status, given a set of tools, a suit, and a wage. Journeymen were skilled workers who performed their work with little interference from the master and received pay by the day or by piece. Tradesmen viewed this system of labor as a type of fluid hierarchy in which apprentices would someday climb the artisanal ladder, from journeymen to master and proprietor of their own shops.

Masters, Journeymen, Apprentices

The relationship between master artisans, journeyman, and apprentices was initially built on mutual respect, and master artisans took a paternal role over their laborers. Work was performed at a casual pace and on a per customer basis. Workers wore leather aprons, shared workbenches, and worked with hand tools to construct their goods. The workday was long, traditionally twelve to fourteen hours, but consisted of morning breaks for coffee and beer, a lunch break in the early afternoon, and a late afternoon break for a snack. Overall, artisans within Philadelphia strove for “competence,” the ability to provide enough money to support their families and save a little for the future, but few master artisans were actually able to reach this level of economic comfort.

The end of the Seven Years’ War also brought implementation of imperial acts by Britain on the colonies. These acts served as a blessing for many struggling Philadelphia artisans because many of them did not tax home-produced goods. As Philadelphians used the policies of nonimportation, or the boycotting of British goods, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the purchase of home-produced goods brought increased business to Philadelphia artisans. Nonimportation pitted artisans against merchants who benefited from Atlantic trade with Britain, but these differences were largely cast aside once war broke out. During the War for Independence, Philadelphia artisans enjoyed a period of production with little competition. This did not last long, for when the war ended and Atlantic trading resumed, artisans found themselves once again competing against foreign goods. During the postrevolutionary years, they joined merchants in seeking a stronger central government that would protect the nation’s domestic industries.

Dramatic Shifts After the Revolution

The postrevolutionary years also brought dramatic shifts to the relationship between master artisans, journeymen, and apprentices. By the 1780s masters no longer signed contracts with apprentices promising tools, clothes, or an education, but instead replaced these items with monetary compensation. Masters refrained from teaching apprentices the art of the craft and instead tended to rely on them as simple wage laborers. The increased presence of under-trained workers within their craft angered many journeymen, as did other changes within their labor environment. As work customs changed to meet new market obligations, such as fewer breaks, more oversight, less autonomy at work, and decreased wages, journeymen perceived their interests diverging from that of their masters, and they began to doubt their ability to climb the artisanal ladder. Such changes strained the relationship between masters and journeymen. Perceiving master artisans as no longer producing for a community, fulfilling their paternal obligations, or striving to reach “competence,” journeymen came to view their master’s intentions as a threat to the social and economic order of society and at odds with the true and moral intentions of labor.

The first sign of dissension emerged in 1786 during one of the nation’s first strikes—the first recorded strike in Philadelphia’s history—as journeymen printers went on strike against employers refusing to pay a weekly rate of six dollars. Further divisions became apparent during the 1788 Federal Procession, which honored the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, when at least two trades marched in separate companies, one of master artisans and one of journeymen. By the 1790s early labor disputes between these two groups sprung up in a number of crafts, including carpenters in 1791 and cabinetmakers in 1795. Tensions between these two groups continued after the turn of the century as revolutions in transportation, communication, and industrialization greatly expanded the market economy well beyond Philadelphia, giving priority, in the eyes of journeymen, to the market over the moral intentions of craft labor.

While artisans played a significant role in crafting Philadelphia’s colonial and pre-Revolutionary economic and social history, divisiveness within artisanal ranks also played a large role in shaping Philadelphia’s post-Revolutionary history. As markets continued to expand throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the divide between master artisans and journeymen grew. Many master artisans left the workshop and became simply business owners, merchants, and entrepreneurs. Journeymen continued to toil in the workplace, but it was as wage laborers, and work was most likely performed at a machine and no longer at a workbench. As friction between these two developed into the 1820s journeymen laborers responded with the formation of trades unions and political parties to fight their cause, which set up a nearly thirty-year period of labor and class unrest within Philadelphia.

Patrick Grubbs is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who is writing his dissertation entitled “The Duty of the State: Policing the State of Pennsylvania from the Coal and Iron Police to the Establishment of the Pennsylvania State Police Force, 1866 – 1905.” He has been employed at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2009 and has taught Pennsylvania history there since 2011. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The automobile, or “horseless carriage,” originated in Europe, where in the late 1800s companies such as Daimler-Benz, Peugeot, and Bentley produced limited quantities for niche customers. The first car in Philadelphia, a French import owned by merchant Jules Junker (c.1858-?), was registered in 1899. In the early 1900s, brewer Louis J. Bergdoll Jr., a racing enthusiast, purchased franchises for Philadelphia’s first Fiat, Packard, and Benz dealers. Bergdoll and other retailers formed the Automobile Dealers Association of Greater Philadelphia in 1904, the oldest group of its kind in the nation.

By the end of World War I, Philadelphia’s “automobile row,” anchored by the Albert Kahn (1869-1942)-designed Packard Building at Spring Garden Street and stretching along North Broad Street roughly to Girard Avenue, included car makers Ford, Cadillac, Studebaker, Hupmobile, and Oldsmobile. Cars also caught on in Wilmington, Delaware, where by 1916, the city’s 110,000 residents had fourteen car dealers to choose from. With varied selection and especially following the introduction of Ford’s Model T, regional car ownership grew rapidly, prompting journalist Christopher Morley (1890-1957) in 1919 to note that Philadelphia’s Market Street was “dimmed by the summer haze that is part atmospheric and part gasoline vapor.”

For those unable or unwilling to purchase an automobile, auto shows and races allowed people to view cars in terms of style and performance. Philadelphia held its first annual auto show in 1902, the nation’s third city (after New York and Chicago) to do so. Wilmington’s first show followed in 1916, with more than 100,000 viewing cars at the Hotel du Pont. Starting in the early 1900s, auto racing competitions were held throughout the metropolitan area. The Trenton Speedway at Hamilton, one of New Jersey’s first, began hosting races in 1900 on its half-mile dirt course. Following enlargement and paving in 1957, the track held NASCAR events until 1972. On an eight-mile, oiled gravel track in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, the Quaker City Motor Club (whose members included prominent businessmen) ran races from 1908 through 1911. Though popular and drawing spectators from Canada to Paris, the races angered Philadelphia patricians who felt speeding cars disturbed the park’s tranquility. Delaware’s Wawaset Park hosted New Castle County’s first auto races in 1915. Through the 1920s, Wildwood, Cape May Court House, and Longport, New Jersey, held races on the beach during summer months. Other venues included Delaware’s Dover Downs (opened 1969) and Long Pond, Pennsylvania’s Pocono Raceway (opened 1971), both of which hosted NASCAR races into the twenty-first century.

Broad Street Paved, 1894

The advent of the automobile required creative responses from cities formed long before its arrival, including street paving, road building, and traffic control measures. Paving in Philadelphia commenced in 1894 (Broad Street was the first), yet automobile congestion on the city’s narrow blocks led over time to the designation of one-way streets and the installation of kerosene-lit traffic signals (requiring human operation) in the 1910s. Although landscape architect Jacques Gréber’s (1882-1962) 1917 proposal to alleviate gridlock through an ambitious series of diagonal boulevards across Philadelphia’s rectilinear grid never materialized, other built arterials served the purpose, including Northeast (later Roosevelt) Boulevard and Fairmount (later Benjamin Franklin) Parkway. While they may not have alleviated traffic, they increased outlying property values and spurred suburban growth. The 1926 opening of the Delaware River (later Benjamin Franklin) Bridge allowed drivers easy connections between Center City and South Jersey. In Delaware, Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954), impatient with poor road quality on his daily commute from Longwood, personally financed improvements of the Kennett Pike (SR 52) to connect central Wilmington with suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Increased car ownership prompted safety concerns. In 1904, due to steam-powered cars’ emissions and possible explosion, Philadelphia initiated the Bureau of Boiler Inspection, a forerunner of vehicle inspection. With rising car fatalities in the 1920s, safety campaigns in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey led to mandatory vehicle inspection. Penalties for speeding and other violations were addressed in traffic courts. Though Philadelphia in the mid-1920s created one of the country’s first municipal traffic courts, smaller towns devoted specific days of the week for violations. During Prohibition, Philadelphia’s director of public safety Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) set up military checkpoints to curtail bootlegging and introduced armored squad cars for the city’s police force. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the Farmers Anti-Automobile Association, angered by speeding cars, formed in 1910 to set strict rules for drivers using their rural roads.

Greater Philadelphia’s motorists required auto-related businesses such as gas stations, repair shops, and parts suppliers. Due to environmental hazards, gas stations were located in urban industrial areas prior to 1920. Yet with roads delivering cars and trucks beyond cities, stations followed. The Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first interstate road exclusively for cars, opened in 1925 and passing through Greater Philadelphia, prompted local oil companies such as Sun and Atlantic to open stations along the route. In 1907, Max Paul, an Old City bicycle repairman, opened one of Philadelphia’s first car repair shops at 7018 Woodland Avenue; in 1968 Paul’s two sons, who inherited the business, opened the city’s first Toyota dealership. And in 1921, Pep Auto Supplies opened its first store in Philadelphia. Renamed “Pep Boys” two years later, the company operated 40 stores in the region by the mid-1930s.

World War II directly impacted Greater Philadelphians’ automobility. Following Japan’s invasion of the Dutch East Indies (where the U.S. procured ninety per cent of its rubber supply), local junkyards were scoured for used tires. Additionally, the Office of Price Administration (OPA) stipulated that all “nonessential drivers” own no more than five car tires. In 1942, the federal government halted all new car manufacturing, established speed limits of thirty-five miles per hour to reduce tire wear, and instituted gasoline rationing. During the war, Philadelphia became notorious for bootlegged fuel. Other measures, such as carpooling and using mass transit, helped conserve valuable resources. Car companies also contributed to the war effort, with Ford’s Chester, Pennsylvania, facility assembling tanks and military vehicles and General Motors’ West Trenton plant building torpedo bombers.

Car Manufacturing Arrives

Greater Philadelphia experienced dramatic automobile-related change after 1945. As suburbanization increased, car manufacturers followed. GM and Chrysler opened new factories in Elsmere, Delaware (1947), and Newark, Delaware (1952), respectively. The physical decay of cities such as Philadelphia and Trenton (and their narrow streets) prompted many in the region to move to car-dependent suburbs. At the same time, parking lots and garages were built throughout those cities’ downtowns for suburban commuters. Yet not all garage plans materialized. In 1947, the newly created Center City Residents’ Association (CCRA) defeated a proposed garage for beneath Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. In 1950, City Council created the Philadelphia Parking Authority to manage lots and garages, but the agency did not oversee on-street parking until 1983.

Driving also led to decreases in mass transit ridership. National City Lines, a shell company created by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil, purchased majority stakes in many U.S. trolley companies, a move intended to phase out the systems in favor of the automobile. Along with National City Lines’ acquisitions, inexpensive gas, transit strikes in the late 1940s, and bus lines that provided access to suburbs allowed the automobile to dominate the postwar landscape.

With passage of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, the area’s towns and cities were connected by high-speed expressways, including the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), the Delaware Expressway (I-95), the Atlantic City Expressway, and the New Jersey Turnpike. New suburbs accessible by highways, such as Levittown, Pennsylvania; Cherry Hill, New Jersey; and Sherwood Park, Delaware, contained slow-speed, curvilinear streets and driveways for homes. Graced further by shopping malls, drive-through restaurants, and drive-in movie theaters, Greater Philadelphia’s postwar suburbs reflected the region’s continual embrace of the car.

As Greater Philadelphia approached the digital age in the 1980s, highway agencies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania proposed electronic toll collection to reduce bottlenecks. In the early 1990s, the “E-Z Pass” system went into operation on selected highways; by 2015, all area bridges and toll plazas used the system. In the twenty-first century, automobiles, while still the region’s preferred method of travel, were challenged by car- and bike-sharing programs in central cities and suburbs, transit-village development, and increased service offered by SEPTA, PATCO, and NJ Transit. As reliance on personal digital devices increased, leading to several fatal accidents, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the 2010s began issuing penalties for “distracted driving.”

While bringing both positive and negative results, automobiles and their many related business allowed Greater Philadelphia’s residents and visitors personal freedom, faster mobility, and a romantic attachment to the open road.

Stephen Nepa received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. He teaches history and American studies at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and Rowan University. He also has appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: the Great Experiment. (Author information current at time of publication.) 

Prior to the assembly-line techniques perfected by Henry Ford (1863-1947), few automakers controlled all aspects of production. Instead, parts, from chassis to headlights, came mainly from individual companies. In 1906 the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company shipped its first electric car battery to Baker, a Cleveland-based carmaker; three years later, production moved from Tioga and Emerald Streets to a larger plant at Tioga and C Streets. Starting in 1919, the company stamped “Philco” onto each battery. Philco shifted production to car radios in 1926 and, after pioneering permeable tuning and high-fidelity sound, emerged as the world’s largest car radio maker. Camden, New Jersey’s RCA, producing less than half of Philco’s output in the 1930s, ranked second. Such prominence attracted the Ford Motor Company, with whom Philco signed an exclusive contract for audio components in 1934. The nearby Budd Company, founded in 1912 by Edward G. Budd (1870-1946), specialized in car bodies. With early bodies comprised of wood, Budd’s all-steel frames caused a sensation when, in 1916, John (1864-1920) and Horace (1868-1920) Dodge ordered 70,000 units for their touring sedans. From its Hunting Park factory complex containing nearly 7,000 workers, Budd supplied bodies to U.S., British, and German carmakers into the 1950s.

In addition to parts manufacturers, small carmakers and regional operations for larger companies opened in Greater Philadelphia. New Jersey hosted more than fifty car-making interests between 1900 and 1950, although most were located in the northern and central portions of the state. South Jersey enterprises included Trenton’s Walter Automobile, which collapsed in 1917, and the Mercer Automobile Company (also of Trenton), which, backed by the Roebling family, endured until 1929. Equally important in early 1900s transportation were trucks, which over time rendered horse-drawn vehicles obsolete. After purchasing a Brooklyn-based carriage builder and expanding operations to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1905, John Mack (1864-1924) and his brothers commenced production of their eponymous trucks. By 1938, Mack’s AC model made the company internationally famous.

Ford Opens an Office, 1906

The Ford Motor Company became the first of the “Big Three” U.S. automakers to establish a presence in the region. In 1906, two years before its Model T debuted, Ford opened a sales office in Philadelphia. When World War I began, Ford’s Model T production alone outpaced all other automakers’ efforts combined, prompting the company to open additional assembly plants. In 1914, after designing the Packard Motor Company showroom at Broad and Spring Garden Streets, architect Albert Kahn (1869-1942) designed a factory for Ford at Broad Street and Lehigh Avenue. At capacity, the Lehigh plant produced 150 Model T units per day. Following American entry into the war, the U.S. Ordnance Department took over the factory to manufacture helmets, body armor, and machine-gun trucks. In 1925, needing more space and hoping to ship vehicles more efficiently, Ford transferred operations to Chester, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River. Until the outbreak of World War II, workers at Chester assembled various Ford models with parts produced at River Rouge, Michigan. General Motors (GM), whose area operations expanded after 1945, arrived in 1938 with a components factory at West Trenton, New Jersey.

World War II and its aftermath greatly affected local automobile manufacturing. In 1942, the U.S. Ordnance Department again commandeered factories, using Ford’s Chester facility to prepare tanks and military vehicles and GM’s West Trenton plant to build torpedo bombers. After the war, carmakers increased regional operations to meet the demand created by the postwar baby boom, expansion of the American middle class, and suburbanization. While existing plants returned to peacetime production, GM and Chrysler opened new factories in Wilmington, Delaware (1947), and Newark, Delaware (1952), respectively. By the 1960s, automobile manufacturing emerged as the largest industry in Delaware, second only to the DuPont Corporation’s chemical plants. Parts manufacturers, including Budd, Mopar, and Lears Auto Parts of Newark, also thrived in the early 1950s. Yet Philco, which began the decade soundly, collapsed spectacularly by 1960 due to overexpansion and diversification into other industries. In 1961, the remnants of the company were acquired by Ford, which that year shuttered its Chester facility to consolidate operations in Mahwah, New Jersey.

Auto Factories Fade Away

By the late 1970s, due to labor issues, gas shortages, and the arrival of fuel-efficient foreign imports, U.S. auto manufacturing entered a protracted decline. Though Ford opened a new plant in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in 1989, it was among the closures in the 1990s and early 2000s that also affected West Trenton, Wilmington, and Newark. Negotiations between union leaders and executives temporarily saved the factories, but foreign competition, labor outsourcing, and consumer tastes remained obstacles. In 1998, GM closed its West Trenton factory; the building was demolished in 2000. Budd’s Hunting Park complex ceased production in 2002 after its parent company consolidated its U.S. operations in Michigan. In February 2007, Chrysler announced the closure of its Newark facility and in July 2009, GM permanently idled its Wilmington plant, the last active auto factory in the eastern United States. Together, the three closings affected more than 10,000 workers. By early 2010, Greater Philadelphia’s only remaining car or truck assembly interest was Mack, which still built trucks at its one-million-square-foot plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania.

Though many former car factories stood vacant after 2010, others were repurposed. One year after its closing, California-based Fisker Automotive, a luxury marque, acquired GM’s Wilmington plant. However, Fisker declared bankruptcy in 2013 and sold the facility to Chinese auto parts maker Wanxiang, confirming the global scope of industry competition. In 2011, Chrysler’s Newark factory was partly demolished; its remaining sections were used in the construction of the University of Delaware’s College of Health Sciences.

For decades, Greater Philadelphia’s carmaking operations, from parts factories to assembly plants, in peacetime and war, played invaluable roles for workers, lifestyles, and commerce. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, the few surviving physical remnants of the industry served as a reminder of the region’s once-critical role in automobile manufacturing.

Stephen Nepa received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University and has appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: the Great Experiment. He wrote this essay while an associate historian at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden in 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia supported several commercial bakers from the beginning. A list of businesses in the city in 1690 included seven “Master Bakers,” while a 1700 report to the Commissioners of Customs noted that the fertile farmlands of southeastern Pennsylvania allowed for the export of large quantities of bread and flour, staples of Philadelphia’s substantial trade with the West Indies. As the city grew in its early years, bakers were among the many providers of essential goods and services to the expanding population. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) recalled that one of the first things he did upon arriving in Philadelphia in 1723 was to purchase “three great puffy rolls” from a baker on Second Street.

Philadelphia’s leading trading firms sold large amounts of bread and hard crackers to Caribbean and European customers in the colonial period. The region’s bakeries sometimes had to supply other groups as well. In September 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, the city’s largest trading company, Willing and Morris, wrote to associates in Barbados that it was difficult to procure bread for export because “the Bakers are all engaged in Baking Bread for the different Fleets & Troops in America.” Commercial bakers also did the baking for poorer families that did not have the facilities to bake at home; women would make the dough themselves and pay the local baker a small fee to bake it.

One of the region’s earliest large-scale bakers was Evan Thomas (1690-1746), a Quaker miller who in 1735 bought a tract of land on the Delaware River at the northern edge of Philadelphia County, where he built a very large bake oven. The “Bake House,” as it was known, was a major operation that supplied bread and biscuit to ships that plied the river. When Thomas died, his son Evan (b. 1724) continued the business. Although there is no documentary evidence, tradition holds that the Bake House provided bread for American troops in the area during the Revolutionary War.

Bread for the Troops

Cyrus Bustill (1732–1806) also supplied bread to continental troops during the war. A mixed race African American born a slave in Burlington, New Jersey, Bustill was purchased by a Quaker baker who taught him the trade. After his owner freed him in 1769, Bustill set up a bakery in Burlington, from which he supplied troops in the area with bread. He later moved to Philadelphia, where he operated a bakery on Arch Street above Second Street and became a leader in the city’s African American community.

Germans were among the largest immigrant groups to bring baking traditions from their homeland to the Philadelphia area in the colonial period. German-born Christopher Ludwig (1720–1801) was one of the most successful such immigrant bakers. The son of a baker, he served in that capacity in various militaries in Europe and later received culinary training in London before immigrating to Philadelphia in 1754. Ludwig established a prosperous bakery and confectionary shop in Letitia Court, between Market and Chestnut and Front and Second Streets. Although a wealthy entrepreneur in his mid-fifties at the time of the Revolutionary War, Ludwig nevertheless volunteered for service and in 1777 the Continental Congress appointed him Superintendent of Bakers for the Continental army.

A few large-scale operations notwithstanding, the region’s baking industry was comprised primarily of small shops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, there were three biscuit makers and four cake bakers among Philadelphia’s self-employed free African American women in 1838. An 1857 report on Philadelphia manufacturers found that while there were many bread makers in the city, only two or three produced enough to be considered wholesalers. A new bread-making firm incorporated in 1856 as the Pennsylvania Farina Company built a large steam-powered bakery at Broad and Vine Streets, but it failed within a few years. The 1857 report noted that baking of pies had recently developed into a considerable business, but that overall, the city’s only major commercial baking activity involved making biscuits, crackers, and ship bread (the latter known as “hard tack”). Nine such establishments operated in Philadelphia in 1857, employing a total of 125 men who made 120,000 barrels of crackers annually.

Biscuits, Crackers, and Cookies

The city’s largest mid-nineteenth-century biscuit and cracker maker was T. Wattson & Sons, which occupied a four-story building on North Front Street. Thomas Wattson (1788–1874) started the business in 1846 and in 1852 sold it to his son-in-law John T. Ricketts (1805–63). One of Rickett’s chief employees was German immigrant Godfrey Keebler (1822–93), who came to America at age ten and at nineteen settled in Philadelphia to learn the baking trade. Keebler operated a small bakery in the city in the early 1840s, moved out of the area for several years, and returned in 1850 to work for Ricketts. In 1862 he went out on his own, first opening a small bakery at Twelfth and Christian Streets in South Philadelphia and then a large factory, Godfrey Keebler’s Steam Biscuit, Cracker and Cake Bakery, at Twenty-Second and Vine Streets. By 1890 Keebler had one hundred employees. He entered into a partnership that year with Augustus Weyl (1835–1926), son of a German-born baker, to form Keebler-Weyl Baking Company, which became one of the nation’s largest cookie and cracker makers.

Another mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia baking company, J.S. Ivins & Sons, rose to prominence on the strength of its cookie products. Founded in 1846 by Job S. Ivins (d. 1894), the company had various locations on North Front Street before moving in 1898 to a large factory on North Broad Street below Ridge Avenue. Ivins produced a variety of cakes and cookies, including Spiced Wafers, a cookie that became a longtime regional favorite after its introduction in 1910.

Vienna Model Bakery of 1876

At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the Fleishmann brothers, natives of Austria-Hungary who were based in Cincinnati, Ohio, exhibited their “Vienna Model Bakery,” which featured a bread-baking process using packaged compressed yeast cake they had invented. The Fleishmann’s process greatly improved the commercial production of bread, and when the Exposition closed they moved the Model Bakery to Broad Street near Vine Street. From there they expanded into a nationwide baking and restaurant company, while their packaged yeast became widely used in commercial baking, ushering in the era of mass-produced, store-bought bread.

An 1882 census of Philadelphia manufacturers noted that the city was home to 934 baking establishments, employing a total of 3,240 workers, including 2,363 men, 396 women, and 481 children. Curiously, only ten of the establishments were listed as “steam” bakeries; the rest were listed as “hand.” Steam was used to heat baking ovens as well as to power machines that kneaded, mixed, and rolled dough. At a time when most industries were powered by steam engines and many manufacturing processes were automated, baking in Philadelphia was still done primarily by hand. By 1909 Philadelphia boasted 1,208 baking establishments employing 4,598 workers and ranked third in the nation in bread and bakery products.

One of the most successful local baking firms was the Freihofer Baking Company, established by brothers Charles (1860–1942) and William (1858–1932) Freihofer in Camden, New Jersey, in 1893. The company moved to Philadelphia several years later and in 1900 merged into the larger Freihofer Vienna Baking Company. By the mid-1910s Freihofer was one of the largest bread makers in the nation, with nine hundred workers in two large plants in North Philadelphia.

In 1927 Keebler-Weyl merged with a nationwide group of bakeries to form the Union Biscuit Company, whose headquarters were in Chicago. Although part of national conglomerate, Keebler-Weyl maintained major baking operations in Philadelphia. In 1934, the company began making cookies for the Girl Scouts of Greater Philadelphia Council. Local Girl Scout troops throughout the nation had been selling cookies as a fund-raising activity since the 1910s, but Keebler-Weyl was the first commercial bakery to bake and package cookies for the Girl Scouts on a council-wide scale. Other area councils joined the arrangement and Keebler-Weyl became the official baker of what soon came to be known as “Girl Scout Cookies.”

Ethnic Bakeries

The types of baked goods available in the area expanded significantly in the early twentieth century with the influx of large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants who brought their ethnic baking traditions with them. Italian and Jewish bakeries became especially common, joining German bakeries, which had long been part of the area’s food landscape. Area residents could now purchase a wide range of baked goods in countless neighborhood ethnic bakeries throughout the region.

Local Italian bakers supplied the rolls for Philadelphia’s unique hoagie and cheesesteak sandwiches. The area’s largest roll maker, Amoroso’s Baking Company, was founded by Italian immigrant Vincenzo Amoroso (1862–1927) and his two sons in Camden, New Jersey, in 1904. In 1914 the company moved to West Philadelphia, first to Sixty-Fifth Street and Haverford Avenue and then in 1960 to South Fifty-Fifth Street, where it grew to over four hundred workers. Still family-owned in the mid-2010s, Amoroso’s moved to Bellmawr, New Jersey. In nearby Glassboro, New Jersey, Liscio’s Bakery, another large family-owned Italian bread maker, began in 1994.

German bakers introduced pretzels in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century pretzels were a signature Philadelphia snack, widely available and popular throughout the area. The Oakdale Baking Company, established in 1903 at North Tenth Street and West Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia, was a major pretzel maker in the first half of the twentieth century. Under the direction of businessman L. J. Schumaker (1878–1948), it merged with several pretzel makers nationwide to form the American Pretzel Company, which by the late 1910s controlled about 80 percent of the U.S. pretzel business.

National and Multinational Bakers

In addition to local companies, Philadelphia was home to the production facilities of large national and multinational baking firms in the twentieth century. Bond Bread, a brand name of the General Baking Company conglomerate based in Rochester, New York, established several plants in Philadelphia early in the twentieth century, including operations in Lower Northeast, South, and West Philadelphia. Cookie and cracker maker National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco) opened a plant at Broad and Glenwood Streets in North Philadelphia in the early twentieth century, then moved in the 1950s to a large plant on Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast. After going through several ownership changes, the plant closed in 2015. By this time, much of the industry had consolidated and moved out of the area, leaving just one large-scale bakery in the city, the Tasty Baking Company.

Philip Baur (1885–1951), a baker from Pittsburgh, and Herbert Morris (1882–1960), an egg salesman from Boston, founded the Tasty Baking Company in Philadelphia in 1914 with the novel idea of selling individually wrapped, fresh-baked snack cakes. Their first bakery on Sedgley Avenue in Germantown was successful, and in 1922 Baur and Morris opened a large plant on Hunting Park Avenue in Nicetown. The company’s “Tastykake” products became longtime area favorites. In 2010 the Tasty Baking Company moved to a new modern production facility at the Philadelphia Naval Business Center in South Philadelphia, where it employed eight hundred workers. In 2011 Georgia-based food conglomerate Flowers Foods acquired Tastykake and began to distribute its products nationwide.

From modest beginnings in the late seventeenth century to the growth of large-scale baking operations in the twentieth century, the Philadelphia area has a long, rich history of bakers and bakeries. The region’s signature baked goods–Italian rolls, pretzels, and snack cakes–were still made locally in the early twenty-first century, while the area continued to support a wide range of baking operations from small family-run bakeries to large industrial bakers with regional and national distribution.

Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016, and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit Risk & Reward: Entrepreneurship and the Making of Philadelphia for the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directs a project for Jazz Bridge entitled Documenting & Interpreting the Philly Jazz Legacy, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Chartered May 26, 1781, by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, the Bank of North America was the first national and truly commercial bank in the United States. Officially titled The President, Directors, and Company of the Bank of North America (BNA) until 1825, the bank was the first created by the national government to do business with and for the government. Though Pennsylvania Bank was founded in 1780, it did little business apart from subscribers who in 1782 sold their shares to BNA, which expanded its financial connections.

Robert Morris (1734-1806), congressional superintendent of finance, crafted the charter and used the bank to stabilize the national currency and save the Confederation from bankruptcy. Ninety-nine Philadelphians, along with congressmen, subscribed to bank shares and the bank opened on January 7, 1782. Morris, famous for furtive dealings, used a $450,000 French silver shipment to Congress to fund the bank, which then lent the money back to Congress. Later, when the bank feared congressional loan default, Morris sold the government’s shares to repay the bank, which then re-lent the money to Congress. Through maneuvers like this, the bank kept Congress funded through the Revolution and built itself a secure reputation.

BNA faced political controversy early on. Opponents argued it was an overreach of congressional power and a bastion for moneyed interests. Fears eased when bank directors chartered the bank in Pennsylvania giving BNA the unique distinction of holding two charters simultaneously. State politicians briefly revoked the charter in 1786. When the Confederation ceased, the national charter vanished and the bank operated under its state charter until 1864.  Out of the national spotlight, the bank increasingly became a tool of the Pennsylvania government, which protected it in exchange for favorable loan conditions. BNA was a model for the federal Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791 by Congress at the behest of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), a protégé of Morris. BNA, however, did little business with the federal government, aside from relatively small loans to the government during the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

In 1863, seeking security, BNA applied to become “national” under the National Banking Act.  Participating banks received national charters but were required to purchase government bonds with fixed interest rates as well as accept minimum reserve requirements. Banks benefited from consistent interest income and a federal guarantee that if the bank failed, bank depositors would be reimbursed by the sale of bank-held government bonds. Granted national status in 1864, BNA was the only bank exempted from the requirement to add the word “national” to its title.

BNA became part of the Federal Reserve System in 1914. It joined with Commercial Trust Company in 1923 to become The Bank of North America and Trust Company. In 1929, it merged into The Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives and Granting Annuities, eventually renamed the Pennsylvania Company for Banking and Trust. BNA’s legacy became the First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust Company in 1955 after another merger, this time with the First National Bank of Philadelphia. In 1990, Core States acquired “First Pennsy,” which then First Union in turn acquired in 1998.  In 2001, First Union merged with Wachovia, which was then purchased by Wells Fargo in 2008.

The first building BNA occupied was at 307 Chestnut Street in the home of Tench Francis (1730-1800), the first cashier. That building and its opulent nineteenth-century replacement were later demolished, however, next door at 315 Chestnut Street the original main office of First National Bank survived (later becoming home to the Chemical Heritage Foundation). BNA lived on, though its identity did not.

Robert F. Smith is Assistant Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Hamilton’s nationally-chartered bank followed a Philadelphia precedent, the Bank of North America,  established in 1781 to meet the economic challenges facing Americans during the Revolutionary War. Proposed by Philadelphia financier and superintendent of finance for Congress Robert Morris (1734-1806), the Bank of North America received a charter from Congress that provided incorporated status. Private citizens, including Philadelphia merchants and financiers, bought shares in the bank with hard money, providing the initial capital reserve for the bank to print notes and provide loans.

When Hamilton took office as Treasury secretary in 1789, economic instability and the Revolutionary War debt threatened the nation and the individual state governments. Capitalizing on those circumstances and using powers he believed the new U.S. Constitution granted, Hamilton put forth a plan that included the Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress. The bank would stabilize currency, act as a depository for and lender to the government, and raise money for the nation to pay down the war debts.  Hamilton also recommended that the federal government assume the outstanding war debts of the states. By consistently paying down this debt, the nation would reestablish good faith for future loans. As an organ of the national government, the bank would also tie private citizens financially to the well-being of the United States, and those who held a stake in the war loans would likewise want to see the nation prosper to ensure their repayment.

The First Rival Political Parties

The bank immediately ignited controversy and, together with other early disputes, fueled a developing political divide that led to the first rival political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Each side argued that failure to follow their policies was tantamount to abandoning the Revolution, to the ruin of the nation. Federalists, who supported the bank, tended to be urban merchants and lawyers. They supported the bank, deeming it necessary for strengthening the nation’s economy and the union in general. They believed that the Articles of Confederation had failed on both of those counts, and that the Constitution was adopted to enact just the types of vigorous national programs that Hamilton suggested. Their rivals, who often lived in rural areas and were often debtors rather than creditors, argued that the bank was unconstitutional.  It would be a tool to further enrich urban elites who had stockpiled wealth during the Revolution, and increase the emphasis on volatile financial markets. Furthermore, it would do little to aid destitute veterans requiring immediate debt relief. These opponents, led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in the cabinet, and James Madison (1751-1836) in the House of Representatives, also argued that by encouraging speculation and financiers, the bank would run counter to the Revolutionary principles and the virtuous agrarian ideal that best suited a republican form of government. Despite the controversy, Congress passed the legislation necessary to establish the bank, and President George Washington (1732-99) signed the bill into law, granting it a twenty-year charter to 1811.

Originally headquartered in Carpenters’ Hall, the meeting place of the First Continental Congress, after 1797 the Bank of the United States moved to its own building on Third Street (later part of Independence National Historical Park). The building, an example of neo-classical architecture emulating Greece and Rome, featured a colonnaded, marble façade alluding to the ancient republican ideals that the new nation espoused.

As with the Bank of North America, the Bank of the United States drew many of its major stockholders from the Philadelphia region. Thomas Willing (1731-1821), formerly president of the Bank of North America and business partner to Robert Morris, became the national bank’s first president. Willing, Samuel Howell (1723-1807), and David Rittenhouse (1732-96), all Philadelphians, served as the bank’s first appointed commissioners. Another of Hamilton’s initiatives, the United States Mint, also located in Philadelphia, assisted the bank with its capacity to regulate the money supply. In addition to its local presence, the Bank of the United States connected Philadelphia to the nation through its branches in Boston, Baltimore, New York, and Charleston (opened in 1792); Norfolk, Va. (1800); Washington, D.C., and Savannah, Ga. (1802); and New Orleans (1805). Despite the difficulty of coordinating the far-flung branches, they assured the bank’s opponents, especially those in the South where most of the branches were established, that it would be truly national and serve more than simply Philadelphia’s merchant class.

The national controversy surrounding the Bank of the United States abated after its creation, but the partisanship it engendered continued. Within months of its incorporation, the bank, through its initial branch in Philadelphia, played a hand in the credit bubble and restriction that set off the Panic of 1792, seemingly confirming fears about economic volatility held by the bank’s opponents. In spite of that incident, by the end of the bank’s twenty-year charter in 1811, national credit was largely established and the Democratic-Republicans controlling Congress allowed the charter to expire with the assets liquidated relatively peacefully, at least in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia branch’s shares were primarily bought out by Philadelphian Stephen Girard (1750-1831), who operated the institution as a private concern, the Girard Bank. Only five years later, in the midst of depressed trade after the War of 1812 and European Napoleonic Wars, Congress instituted a Second Bank of the United States (also headquartered in Philadelphia).

The First Bank of the United States played a pivotal role in establishing the nation’s credit. It drew from the traditions of banking already present in Philadelphia during the Revolution, was supported by Philadelphia’s merchant class, and set a precedent of national banking. It contributed to the growing partisanship of the early Federal period and helped the Philadelphia region and its wealthy elite remain at the epicenter of national finance and the economy into the nineteenth century, even after the seat of government shifted to Washington, D.C.

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.

Conflict over renewing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States triggered the 1830s Bank War, waged between President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) and bank president Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844). Operating from its Parthenon-style building on Chestnut Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets in Philadelphia, the bank served as a reliable depository for federal money and provided a sound national currency. The expiration of its federal charter in 1836 virtually ended Philadelphia’s standing as the nation’s banking center, and New York’s Wall Street supplanted Chestnut Street as the America’s financial hub.

Congress issued a twenty-year charter for the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, with the government controlling twenty percent of the bank’s stock. Modeled after the First Bank of the United States, established in Philadelphia in the 1790s, the Second Bank handled all federal deposits and expenditures. The bank had a rocky start (overextension of loans helped trigger the Panic of 1819), but it became a dependable institution, and Biddle was generally considered a highly successful and respected leader. By the end of the 1820s, the bank had twenty-nine branches and conducted $70 million in business annually. Nevertheless, President Jackson’s first annual message to Congress in 1829 alleged corruption and condemned the bank as an unconstitutional entity. He favored hard money over bank notes, but also blamed the bank for the Panic of 1819, particularly for his personal losses.

While Jackson, a Democrat, opposed the bank, National Republicans in Congress sought to renew the institution’s charter in 1832 (four years early), believing a veto would cost Jackson reelection. The House approved by 107-85 and the Senate by 28-20. Pennsylvania’s two senators and all but one of its twenty-five congressmen were among the bill’s advocates. The New Jersey and Delaware delegations were also strongly pro-bank. During congressional debates, pro-bank petitions came in from citizens of Philadelphia and Delaware County as well as from state banks, including fifteen from Pennsylvania. Despite nationwide support across various social groups, Jackson vetoed the bill.

Jackson handily won reelection in 1832, though his veto likely cost him votes. A majority of Philadelphians voted against Jackson (he did carry Pennsylvania); New Jersey voted in an anti-Jackson state legislature, but the state’s electoral votes ended up in Old Hickory’s column. He was still personally very popular. When Jackson visited Philadelphia on the first anniversary of his charter veto in June 1833, a reception in Independence Hall–just one block from the Second Bank–became so crowded with enthusiastic supporters that some had to escape the throng through open first-floor windows.

Jackson insisted that the bank was “trying to kill me,” and he vowed to destroy it at any cost. He believed his reelection a mandate and continued to portray the bank as a corrupt tool of foreign interests that worked against Americans. In 1833, President Jackson instructed his treasury secretary to withhold federal deposits, later transferring federal money to “pet banks” (state banks with Democratic ties). Jackson dismissed two secretaries before finding a willing accomplice in Roger B. Taney (1777-1864). In response, Biddle contracted the bank’s operations by calling in loans and exchanging state notes for specie to protect the institution and its investors. The bank’s board of governors unanimously concurred.

As the Second Bank limited its operations, however, an economic depression began, businesses closed, unemployment rose, and inflation reached one of its highest rates in U.S. history. Biddle did not have the capital to make payments on the national debt. The War Department forbade the bank from carrying out its responsibility of paying Revolutionary War pensions in an attempt to turn public opinion against it. Still, the bank initially lost little support and a new political party, the Whigs, emerged to challenge Jackson’s supposed tyranny. At the height of the Bank War, 1833-34, the Senate received 243 memorials calling for the return of federal deposits and only 55 petitions supporting the president’s actions. In January 1834, the Philadelphia Board of Trade issued a statement blaming the financial panic on the Jackson administration. Other Philadelphia banks also protested the president’s actions. Tensions grew to the point that wealthy, pro-administration Philadelphians found themselves excluded or expelled from social organizations. In Congress, the Whig-controlled Senate censured Jackson for his actions against the bank. Each side blamed the other for the turmoil.

Biddle ultimately relaxed the bank’s credit policies and the economic malaise lifted. The bank thus received the brunt of the blame for the previous years’ problems. The public turned against the bank, viewing its actions as vindictive. In 1834, Election Day riots occurred in Philadelphia, and the Whigs lost seats in Congress and the state legislature. Finally, in 1836, two weeks before the U.S. charter expired, the Pennsylvania legislature granted the bank a state charter. By the time Biddle retired in 1839, the bank was in poor shape. Over the following two years, when it could not pay its debts, the bank suspended and resumed specie payments twice, closing its doors permanently in 1841.

The Bank War cost Philadelphia and the nation a central bank, shifting the nation’s financial center to New York City. Thereafter, local banks lacked any regulating authority and the resulting speculation triggered panics through the rest of the century.

Andrew Tremel is an independent researcher and public historian at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. (Author information current at time of publication.)