The China trade was a complex system of commercial circuits linking economies in the Atlantic world to those of what early Americans called the East Indies—the wide zone between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, encompassing China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. The traffic centered on Canton (Guangzhou), the biggest city of the Pearl River Delta and the only Chinese-controlled port open to Western traders. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Canton became the most important market for teas and Chinese manufactured goods. Lacking commodities in demand in Asia, westerners paid for their purchases in silver—usually Spanish dollars minted from New World silver mines—and accepted stringent regulations, including limiting their trading partners to a special guild of merchants, the Cohong, setting a specific season for all business, and confining them to rented factories (buildings that combined warehouses, offices, and living quarters) beyond the city’s walls.

Colonial Philadelphians, like other British subjects, developed a taste for Asian goods. However, access was mediated by the British East India Company, which held a monopoly on East Indies trade. In 1773, Parliament’s preferential treatment of the East India Company’s tea business helped spark widespread protests—most famously in Boston, but also in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s relationship to the China trade changed with the American Revolution. While the war gained Americans political independence, it cost them the markets of the British Empire, including the West Indian ports that Philadelphians depended upon as outlets for the region’s agricultural products. Faced with a dire economic situation, Philadelphians gambled on new trades—including with China. The first American ship to reach Canton, The Empress of China, departed New York harbor on February 22, 1784. It was a joint venture of Philadelphians and New Yorkers, organized by Philadelphian financier Robert Morris (1734-1806) and captained by Philadelphian John Green (1736-96). A financial success, the Empress’s voyage inspired imitators, which helped establish Philadelphia as a major center for U.S. trade with China.

The founding generation of Americans saw their new trade with Asia as a matter of national pride as well as a source of prosperity. Philadelphia politicians used the establishment of a new federal government in 1789 to aid the trade, passing legislation that gave special protections to American merchants shipping East Indies goods. Still, bereft of cheap silver at home, and without all the monopoly protections of their European rivals, Philadelphian merchants like Stephen Girard (1750-1831) had to adapt to compete. They used smaller ships and crews to save on operating costs and more nimbly respond to markets. They also persistently sought new sources of Spanish dollars as well as new commodities that might sell well at Canton, including ginseng, sea otter pelts, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer (sea slugs).

These innovations, along with good timing and a relaxed approach to commercial legality, were crucial to the trade’s early success. The Napoleonic wars provided neutral American shippers with an advantage as suppliers of tea to Europe, but also risked British interference. Philadelphia merchant Benjamin Chew Wilcocks (1776-1845) helped inaugurate an American opium-smuggling trade in 1805, shipping the drug to China from Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey, and later from British India. Well known as a painkiller, opium had become increasingly valuable in Asia as the practice of recreational smoking spread. Seeking to curb this addictive habit, Chinese authorities had long banned opium importation, though with little effect on smugglers’ business (the drug was legal in the United States). While not every Philadelphia merchant was an opium trader—a few, like Quaker Nathan Dunn (1782-1844), refused it on religious grounds—the illicit market for the drug was robust, and by the late 1820s, opium outpaced silver as the main import exchanged for goods in China.

Opium smuggling’s profits proved to be the undoing of the old China trade. The elaborate networks that British and American merchants created to facilitate opium trafficking caused friction with Chinese officials, culminating in Britain’s invasion in 1840 (the First Opium War). Though not belligerents, Americans benefited from Britain’s 1842 victory, as the treaties the Qing Empire made in its aftermath eliminated trading restrictions and opened new ports. Conflict over opium also accelerated consolidation among American China firms, which increasingly shifted their operations to New York. Philadelphia’s participation in overseas trade decreased, as its merchants invested in manufacturing, transportation, and domestic commerce instead.

The China trade had a lasting impact on Philadelphia’s culture and society. Chinese goods were for decades markers of high status and fashion. China merchants were leaders in the commercial community, serving as bank and insurance company directors as well as members of the Philadelphia Board of Trade. Some of them, like Nathan Dunn and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739-1801), built country estates in the Chinese style, filled with chinoiserie, and occasionally staffed by Chinese servants. Their fortunes also helped fund major charitable and educational institutions, including the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and Girard College. The trade also influenced popular perceptions of China and its people among Philadelphians, long before any significant immigration from Asia. Grocers’ advertising for teas commonly featured Chinese people and landscapes, and beginning in 1839, Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Museum gave thousands of visitors an experience of “China in miniature” through dioramas of daily life in the Middle Kingdom. Through the China trade, Philadelphia came to know the world—and it, Philadelphia.

Dael A. Norwood is an Assistant Professor of History at Binghamton University. His book project, Trading in Liberty: How Commerce with China Defined Early America, examines how the lucrative commerce between the United States and China shaped the politics and political economy of the American state in its first century. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware Bay does not often get the historical acknowledgement received by its estuarine neighbor, the Delaware River, but it exerted equal weight in shaping the Philadelphia region’s cultural and economic development. Over seven hundred square miles in size and bordered by New Jersey and Delaware, the Delaware Bay is one of America’s premier maritime gateways, connecting the Philadelphia region to both international and domestic trade. While the bay’s extensive salt marshes, along with limited sheltered harbors, prevented certain economic and military uses, its natural resources duly compensated for these environmental obstacles. The bay’s waters fostered an array of navigational skills among shoreline residents, a tradition that would later pay dividends when sail and steam transport expanded in the nineteenth century. Stands of timber lining the bay’s shoreline and tributaries facilitated the growth of shipbuilding, an industry that flourished until almost the end of the twentieth century. Most notable, the use of the bay’s marine resources—from its well-known oysters to salt hay—formed the backbone of its economic fortunes for the four centuries following European contact.

Taking note of what was already apparent to local Native American populations, colonial observers envisioned the bay’s far-reaching potential. Referring to the Delaware Bay as part of a “Terrestrial Canaan,” a 1676 promotional broadside for West New Jersey singled out the bay’s “great numbers of Sturgions, Lobsters, Oysters, and many other Sea-Fish,” as well as its capacity to serve as a gateway for natural resource use “a hundred Miles into the Country.” William Penn (1644–1718) cast the Delaware Bay and its resources as an organizing agent of Philadelphia’s regional dynamics and the city’s rise as an international entrepôt.

Following the pattern of the Dutch and Swedes who preceded them, English settlers continued the practice of harvesting the Delaware Bay’s rich stores of fur-bearing animals and coordinated these activities with trade among the Lenape Indians. But being intent on permanent settlement, the British instituted the commercial use of the bay’s waterborne and terrestrial resources. Wider consumption of shellfish (oysters, clams) and finfish (shad, sturgeon, rockfish) raised concern over the sustainability of these stocks enough to prompt New Jersey to enact in 1719 one of the first laws in America regulating the use of natural oyster beds.

Soils along the bay’s shore were not as fertile as those along the Delaware River, but some areas did produce profitable yields of grain crops and corn, and farmers working along the Delaware Bay and its tributaries during the colonial and early national periods availed themselves of vessel transport afforded by this estuarine system. The environs around Greenwich, New Jersey—which straddled the colony/state’s inner and outer coastal plains—was most notable in this regard, and Greenwich emerged as the Delaware Bay’s most prominent eighteenth-century port and supplier to Philadelphia..

Amid these agricultural developments, construction of earthen dikes and banks enabled farmers to reclaim tidal marshes and meadows, transforming the bay’s shoreline. Once drained, these banked meadows allowed efficient harvesting of cordgrass, provided grazing for livestock and sheep, and, when sufficiently relieved of prior salt water content, could be used to raise a variety of crops. The bay’s moderate climate allowed colonial settlers—particularly those who arrived from New England’s colder temperatures—to pasture animals at longer monthly intervals in salt meadows and reclaimed tidal lands.

Shallops and flatboats brought agricultural commodities from the bay shore to Philadelphia, as well as a variety of products derived from the region’s timber supply. Eighteenth-century newspaper accounts and wills from the Delaware Valley highlight the importance of woodlots, particularly important in bay shore areas where soil conditions hindered profitable agriculture. Among those who prepared timber for market were the area’s Swedish and Finnish settlers. Having brought their well-known woodman’s skills to the New World, they were conspicuous participants in the Delaware Bay region’s wood economy. Delaware Bay residents harvested merchantable cordwood for export to Philadelphia and provided other wood products such as barrel staves, ship planking, naval stores (tar, pitch), and charcoal. The bay region’s impressive stands of Atlantic white cedar provided valuable roof shingles and house sheathing as well as material for boatbuilding, a regional tradition that endured until the end of the twentieth century.

While agriculture and wood harvesting carried forward into the nineteenth century, joined by an increasing emphasis on truck farming that continued into the twentieth century, the economic ambitions gripping the Philadelphia region transformed the use of the bay’s waters. Central to these commercial and industrial goals was the need to move commodities, particularly in bulk, to and from Philadelphia through the Delaware Bay to points all along the East Coast of the United States. The Navigation Act of 1817 limited such shipping, known as the coastwise trade, to American-flagged vessels. Duly incentivized by shipping demand and legal protections, bay shore residents from New Jersey and Delaware built, crewed, and owned coastal schooners (principally two- and three-masted). Experienced in working the water, they seized on the opportunities presented by this emerging maritime economy.

Arguably the Delaware Bay’s most significant tributary, New Jersey’s Maurice River sported a robust schedule of coastal schooner and barkentine construction between the 1830s and 1880s. An important 1882 survey of U.S. shipbuilding by Henry Hall (1845–1920) showed the Maurice River towns of Mauricetown, Dorchester, and Leesburg were the beneficiaries of these activities and singled out Mauricetown as “being dependent on building [vessels] and navigation [coastwise trade]” with “50 to 60 sea captains living in the place, [where] almost everybody owns shares in vessels.”

These same economic ambitions ultimately impacted the Delaware Bay’s most valuable marine resource—the oyster. Well-established as a culinary staple throughout the Delaware Bay/River corridor—from Philadelphia’s finest dining rooms to an array of oyster bars and cellars serving ordinary citizens—New Jersey stood ready to exploit the market potential of its rich oyster beds. Legislation in the mid-nineteenth century authorized the transplanting of seed oysters from natural spawning areas to barren bay bottoms privately leased from the state. Oystermen found that transplanting oysters to the higher salinity levels of Maurice River Cove improved growth, enhanced the quality of their meats, and offered greater control in cultivating their product for market.  When ready for market, schooners and sloops transported oysters to Philadelphia.

The arrival and improvement of rail connections along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay shoreline, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, dramatically transformed the oyster industry and attracted unprecedented levels of investment from throughout the region. The West Jersey and Seashore Railroad (WJSR), a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CRRNJ) financed the construction of modern shipping facilities at, respectively, “Maurice River” on the eastern side of the Maurice River and at “Bivalve” on the river’s western side. Servicing far-flung markets from rail connections in Philadelphia and New York City, these facilities helped drive an ever-increasing volume of oyster harvests. Each of these multiunit facilities teemed with activity as workers bagged, barreled, and shipped oysters and, eventually, removed them from their shells and canned them in new shucking houses. This work linked Philadelphia’s commission merchants and restaurateurs—many of whom operated from the city’s Dock Street Market—to vessel captains, policy makers, and scientists, as well as to African Americans who arrived from the Chesapeake to work on oyster boats and as shuckers. All this activity reflected the oyster industry’s one-time status as the economic bedrock of the Delaware Bay region with its inextricable ties to Philadelphia.

New transportation methods also transformed the Delaware Bay’s shad and sturgeon fisheries. Each species returned to its natal grounds to spawn in the spring, a ritual that energized a number of small communities on the New Jersey and Delaware sides of the bay. Of all these fishing sites, Bayside—outside of Greenwich—was arguably the most prominent due to CRRNJ rail connections linking it to Philadelphia and New York markets. The combination of shad and sturgeon skiffs, floating cabins, and shoreside processing buildings defined this amphibious extension of Philadelphia’s economic sphere. But neither fishery was immune from overfishing and pollution. When sturgeon fishermen met in Philadelphia around 1900 to organize the Sturgeon Fishermen’s Protective Society, it was too late to stem the tide of depletion. The combined effect of pollution and fishermen unwilling to curb their catch meant that the sturgeon fishery—once plentiful enough to allow people to affordably purchase caviar sandwiches—was in the midst of its final days.

Rail and steamship service operating from Philadelphia opened the Delaware Bay to recreational activity during the second half of the nineteenth century, and this trend continued in the twentieth as automobiles further democratized leisure pursuits. Hotels, such as the Warner House at the confluence of the Delaware Bay and New Jersey’s Cohansey River, were emblematic of this enthusiasm and accommodated visitors from throughout the mid-Atlantic region and beyond. But smaller guesthouses and cottages were more the norm. By the late nineteenth century, Fortescue, New Jersey—centrally located on the Delaware Bay—epitomized the modest accommodations that typified vacation life along the bay. Some visitors swam, others engaged in recreational fishing and crabbing, while others simply sat on the beach and gazed at the bay’s glistening waters. The bay shore’s plentiful waterfowl and shore birds attracted hunters from Philadelphia’s most prominent social circles, and they frequented plush accommodations such as the Sora Gun Club on the Cohansey River. Thomas Eakins’s (1844–1916) paintings of hunting scenes on the bay brought national attention to these activities and, in turn, fostered interest from the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society, and a host of documentary photographers and writers motivated by the region’s local color. The Delaware Bay inspired participants of the nature study movement, including writer Dallas Lore Sharp (1870–1929), a Delaware Bay native whose rise to national prominence was grounded in experiencing the bay’s natural endowments. The cumulative effect of cultural and environmental commentary laid the foundation for conservation of the bay’s tidal marshes throughout the twentieth century, as well as promoting the roots of ecotourism at birding sites whose reputation garnered international fame.

When, in the early nineteenth century, federal and state authorities began planning the implementation of modern navigational aids in the Delaware Bay and along its shorelines, they unabashedly signaled this estuarine system’s critical role in advancing the fortunes of the greater Philadelphia area. The city’s status as America’s largest freshwater port underscored the urgency of these measures, and the Delaware Bay became a crucible for some of the nation’s most important developments in lighthouse technology and a focal point of work conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Anchored to the bay’s floor, channel lights at Brandywine Shoals (1850), Fourteen Foot Bank (1885), Cross Ledge (1877/78), Miah Maull Shoal (1909), and Ship John Shoal (1877) epitomized the environmental dominion and economic ambition that drove these engineering measures. Joining these channel lights were a collection of shoreline lighthouses whose appearance conformed to regional vernacular building idioms in New Jersey and Delaware. These navigational aids form a technological backdrop of longstanding challenges that have confronted the Delaware Bay, such as biological invasions—most notably oyster diseases MSX (haplosporidium nelsoni) and dermo (Perkinsus marinus).

This technological context has been central to historical debates over the effects of water diversion farther up the Delaware Estuary and ecological concerns surrounding the dredging of a deeper ship channel and barge traffic on the bay’s tributaries. Passage of federal legislation in the 1880s made dredging a focal point of efforts to improve the navigability of the Delaware Bay and River. While deepening the channel allowed larger vessels greater access to Philadelphia, it also punctuated the environmental cost of accidents (oil spillage, fires) involved in such shipping. Deepening the bay and river channel also raised the possibility of elevated salinity levels farther up the estuary and the potential ecological toll of changes in its water chemistry.

Starting in the 1950s, modern environmentalism reframed the utopic vision of the Delaware Bay cast by European settlers four centuries earlier. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Delaware Bay was still an ever-present backdrop of economic ambitions driving redevelopment of the Port of Philadelphia, along with similar initiatives at ports in Salem, Paulsboro, Gloucester, and Camden, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. With intermodal shipping now firmly ensconced in Philadelphia’s economy, the Delaware Bay’s shipping lanes assumed renewed importance in regional planning. But greater environmental consciousness contributed to revised perspectives on the bay’s future. Operation of the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station (construction started in 1968) in Lower Alloways Creek, New Jersey, did not go unchallenged. Studies in the 1980s documented the generating station’s role in Delaware Bay fish mortality. Environmentalism’s most conspicuous impact led to unprecedented emphasis on recreational uses of the Delaware Bay and the rise of ecotourism in the region. These priorities led to renewed interest in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge (1937) in Delaware and the creation of the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge (1989) in New Jersey. Complementing these federal measures was the active acquisition of shoreline areas by the states of New Jersey and Delaware for public use. In the twenty-first century, the bay’s present and future remained immersed in contested perspectives over how its human use and ecological health could best be sustained.

Michael J. Chiarappa is Professor of History at Quinnipiac University and co-editor (with Brian C. Black) of Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh University Press, 2012). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms, part of the family of rotating storms that also includes cyclones and typhoons, rotate around a central “eye” and create high winds and heavy rains. During the Atlantic hurricane season, primarily from June through November, these storms typically have formed off the western coast of Africa (near Cape Verde) and have moved with the trade winds toward the Caribbean and the eastern United States. Since 1973, meteorologists have classified the storms as tropical depressions, tropical storms, or hurricanes based on sustained wind speeds, with hurricanes ranging from Category 1 (74–95 miles per hour) to Category 5 (157 miles per hour or higher).

The history of hurricanes to hit the region is well documented because of early interest in the sciences. In 1644, the Reverend John Campanius Holm (1601-83) created the first American weather records at Swede’s Fort near Wilmington, Delaware. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) studied the forward or “progressive” movement of hurricanes during the Eclipse Hurricane of 1743, the first storm to be measured with scientific instruments. Scientists also have found evidence of the strength of storms during this era through geological markers, such as changes in sediment. The Great Storm of 1693 was strong enough to alter the coastline of the Delmarva Peninsula.

Snow Hurricane of 1804

The increased professionalization of the sciences in the nineteenth century produced clearer and more consistent records of notable storms. The Snow Hurricane of 1804 made landfall in Atlantic City in October, although the snow did not fall until the storm reached New England. The Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane of 1821 made landfall in Cape May, New Jersey. Equivalent to a Category 4 storm (130 to 156 mph), it affected much of the Philadelphia area with high winds and storm surge. In 1846, the Havana Hurricane caused storm surge throughout the Delaware Valley and caused extensive damage to Philadelphia wharfs.

In 1851 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started keeping hurricane records, which increased knowledge about storms during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Expedition Hurricane of 1861, a late season storm, coincided with the American Civil War. The storm delayed a naval expedition on its way to the Battle of Port Royal and damaged some ships. The storm’s damage to New Jersey rail lines hampered the Union war effort. Another storm of this era, the Gale of 1878, was no longer a full-fledged hurricane by the time it reached the mid-Atlantic region, but it caused extensive flood damage in Delaware and New Jersey (which had not yet fully recovered from damage to river banks from the San Felipe Hurricane two years earlier). High winds injured church steeples in Pennsylvania.

The frequency of storms hitting the Philadelphia area has varied with the position of a ridge of high-pressure centered over the central and western Atlantic. Whenever this ridge has been closest to the United States, it has pulled more storms toward the mid-Atlantic region; when the ridge is farther away, storms have been more likely to strike elsewhere. In the period of 1851 to 2012, the majority of Mid-Atlantic storms (60 percent) approached from the south, following the coast. Others took alternative tracks, either through the Piedmont region of North Carolina (11 percent) or along the Appalachian Mountains (11 percent). Rare storms have approached from the southwest and crossed the Appalachian Mountains.

During the early years of the twentieth century, the Mid-Atlantic experienced few storms while some of the strongest hurricanes on record struck places like Galveston, Texas, and Miami, Florida. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938, nicknamed “The Long Island Express,” primarily affected Long Island and New England. Before it made landfall, however, it caused flooding and wind damage along the New Jersey coastline, including at Atlantic City, Brigantine, and Wildwood.

Cycles of Twenty to Thirty Years

In addition to the effects of the Atlantic ridge of high-pressure, climate variations known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) have caused storm activity to vary in increased and decreased annual activity over cycles of twenty to thirty years. Following the inactivity of the early twentieth century, hurricane seasons became especially active again during the 1950s. In 1953, the World Meteorological Organization began giving the storms female names, a system aimed to improve communication with the public and standardize storm tracking. The system changed in 1979 to alternate names between male and female. In mid-October 1954, Hurricane Hazel came ashore in North Carolina and affected inland areas of Pennsylvania as a Category 1 storm, causing flooding and uprooting trees before moving into Canada. In August 1955, Hurricanes Connie and Diane struck the area within a week of one another. Connie caused flooding throughout the Greater Philadelphia region, but the drought conditions at the time in Delaware decreased the level of destruction. However, record flooding occurred in the Poconos and along the Delaware River when Diane hit the same areas of the region only five days later.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the mid-Atlantic region experienced a few major storms, primarily tropical storms or depressions. Hurricane Gloria in 1985 produced high winds, including a peak gust of 81 miles per hour in Ocean City, New Jersey, and caused extensive flooding throughout the Delaware Valley. Tropical Storm Floyd (1999) started out as a strong Category 4 hurricane in the Caribbean. Although it weakened as it traveled up the Eastern Seaboard, the storm caused widespread flooding and power outages across New Jersey and much of central and eastern Pennsylvania. Tropical Storm Allison (2001) formed in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting Texas and Louisiana before heading toward the mid-Atlantic region on a rare over-land path. Despite never evolving into a hurricane, Allison was especially destructive. The Philadelphia area saw extensive flooding, including in Bucks County, where the Neshaminy Creek crested at almost seventeen feet. In Montgomery County, flooding caused a gas explosion that killed six.

Hurricanes Irene (2011) and Sandy (2012) struck the Jersey shore unusually hard. On August 28, 2011, Hurricane Irene made landfall on Brigantine Island and caused extensive flooding throughout New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont. It also spawned tornadoes and caused storm surge along the New Jersey coast. Hurricane Sandy hit late in the 2012 season on October 29 and 30, starting out as a fairly weak hurricane that quickly strengthened over the Bahamas. Although no longer at hurricane strength by the time it reached the Jersey Shore and reclassified as a “post-tropical cyclone with hurricane force winds,” Superstorm Sandy made landfall at Brigantine, New Jersey, and exceeded most officials’ expectations in destruction to the shore, New York City, and other coastal areas. Ignoring evacuation orders, many stayed behind and risked the floods, winds, and storm surge. Because the storm occurred late in the season, many people simply had not prepared for a hurricane. The extraordinarily large storm caused 1.2 million power outages in Pennsylvania alone.

Storms such as Sandy and Irene suggested that climate change could be affecting the strength and frequency of strong hurricanes hitting the mid-Atlantic region. During the period from the 1970s through the second decade of the twenty-first century, the number of Category 4 and 5 storms approximately doubled. Although rotating storms strengthened around the world, the North Atlantic appeared to be more affected by the increase in ocean temperatures. Higher sea levels have created an increased risk of destructive storm surge, and as populations have become denser in coastal areas, more people in the greater Philadelphia region have been at risk of being in the path of a hurricane or tropical storm.

Megan C. McGee Yinger earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Penn State University-Harrisburg. She is working on a project that explores how American media prepare for and cope with natural and man-made disasters. (Author information current at time of publication)

As the son of an admiralty lawyer, Henderson’s enthusiasm for maritime history and artifacts began at a very young age. After years of collecting and curating, in 1956 and 1957 Henderson displayed a Port of Philadelphia exhibit at several institutions, including the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. After exhibiting parts of his collections at other institutions, Henderson established a charitable trust and founded the Philadelphia Maritime Museum on February 6, 1960.

Located at first in a rented room at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 219 S. Sixth Street, the Philadelphia Maritime Museum opened on May 19, 1961. Over the next year, the trustees established an advisory board, the members of which were called Port Wardens, and Henderson brought on two part-time directors and a librarian to catalog his collection and design exhibits. Over the next decade, his determination, a growing base of wealthy museum members, and larger-than-expected crowds propelled the museum’s continued development, including further cultivation of collections and professional museum staff. The museum generated public interest by offering lectures, educational workshops, diverse programming, and exhibits.

Continuing Expansion

Seeking to expand, in 1965 the Maritime Museum moved to a former bank building at 427 Chestnut Street. The new location made it possible to add a maritime library, which had been part of the original plan for the museum. With additional training of its personnel and a growing collection, by this time the museum had become firmly established as the preeminent authority on the history of the port of Philadelphia and surrounding ports.

As the size of the Maritime Museum expanded, so did the nature of its programming. In the midst of the Space Race, in 1968 the museum opened an “Underwater Museum” gallery to explore another frontier by focusing on “the activities of a new breed of man—homo aquaticus—the underwater-man.”  In need of increased space and capacity to accommodate its continued growth, the Maritime Museum purchased the former home of the Philadelphia National Bank at 321 Chestnut Street, where it opened to the public on December 12, 1974. Later, in 1982, it added a boat-building facility called “Workshop on the Water” at Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River. This workspace and exhibit area operated on the covered-steel lighter barge Maple, which was given to the museum in 1980. A practical extension of the museum’s mission, Workshop on the Water preserved and taught the skills and traditions of wooden boat building and sailing. In subsequent years, the workshop continued to support professionals and enthusiasts in maintaining, restoring, and building boats.

Looking to further expand and be on the water, in the early 1990s the Maritime Museum acquired a building on Penn’s Landing that originally housed the Port of History Museum, which was built in the years following the 1976 Bicentennial. A $15 million renovation and expansion beginning in 1994 added space for exhibits, educational programs, storage areas, and a library. The newly renamed Independence Seaport Museum opened to the public in July 1995. A few months later, in January 1996, the museum took responsibility for two National Historic Landmark vessels, the cruiser Olympia and submarine Becuna. Preservation and maintenance of these historic ships proved expensive, though, and the Independence Seaport Museum announced in 2010 that the Olympia required over $10 million worth of repairs and maintenance that the museum did not have. After much consideration, partnership-building, and fund-raising, it was determined in 2014 that the museum would remain as the Olympia’s steward. It embarked on a first phase of maintenance to the cruiser, and continued to raise funds for further repairs.

The Independence Seaport Museum fell on hard times in 2007 after a scandal involving its former director, John S. Carter (b. 1950), who was convicted of embezzling over $1.5 million from the institution. Following a period of introspection, the museum returned to its mission of engaging with the Delaware River Watershed through history, science, art, and community. It carried out the mission through programs such as changing exhibits, a community gallery, citizen science labs, environmental programs, summer camp programs, Workshop on the Water, and public and private events. In 2017, the museum received a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to expand its River Alive! exhibition, focused on the science, ecology and stewardship of the Delaware River watershed. The  museum remained a collecting institution and home to the J. Welles Henderson Research Center, named for the museum’s founder, seeking to document, interpret, educate, and engage with the Philadelphia region’s waterways.

Grace Schultz earned an M.A. in History with a concentration in Public History from Temple University and is an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphians became active participants in trade with the Pacific after the American Revolution. With plentiful timber nearby and the expertise of settlers who had been shipbuilders in Great Britain, Philadelphia became a center for shipbuilding and a shipping industry that played a crucial role in connecting the city to the Pacific. In 1784, Robert Morris (1734-1806), the Philadelphia financier active in the Revolution, partnered with Daniel Parker of New York to launch the Empress of China, the first American ship to trade with Canton. Reflecting Philadelphia’s prominence in the shipping industry, John Green (1736-96) of Philadelphia was hired to captain the vessel. That same year the United States sailed from Philadelphia and became the first American ship to trade with India. By 1800, forty ships owned in and launched from Philadelphia engaged in the China trade.

In the early nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars cut Philadelphia off from its established trade routes and markets in the Caribbean, the city’s traders and merchants such as Stephen Girard (1750-1831) increased investment in commerce with China. These traders were instrumental not only to bringing Chinese goods to Philadelphia, but also to connecting dispersed parts of the Pacific region to each other. Because China offered little market for goods from the United States, Philadelphia merchants plied complex trade routes that moved furs from the Pacific Northwest of North America, hides from Chile, sandalwood from the Hawaiian Islands, and metals from the region later known as Indonesia into China. Return voyages brought silks, tea, and porcelain to the Philadelphia region and the nation.

Resources Fuel Commerce

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s growth as an industrial and financial center and the Greater Philadelphia region’s natural resources helped to further connect the nation to the Pacific World and fueled commerce between the city and regions throughout the Pacific. Just as the shipyards had established commercial ties between Philadelphia and the Pacific, railroads extended this commerce. In 1837, Austrian artist Francis Martin Drexel (1792-1863), established in Philadelphia the banking house Drexel & Co. The bank provided a transcontinental financial link between Philadelphia and San Francisco during the California Gold Rush. Following the Civil War, Francis’s son Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826-1893) founded Drexel, Morgan & Co. (renamed J.P. Morgan & Co. in 1893), which was a major financier for U.S. railroad companies. The Baldwin Locomotive Works, established in 1835 at Broad and Spring Garden Streets, became the leading U.S. locomotive manufacturer by the 1880s, creating opportunities for commerce and transit between Atlantic and Pacific regions through the transcontinental railroad. Baldwin also exported its locomotives around the world, including to Australia, which experienced its own nineteenth-century transportation revolution through the spread of railways. Similarly, the Edge Moor Bridge Company, incorporated in Delaware in 1869 by Eli Garrett and the Philadelphia engineer William Sellers, exported iron and steel bridges to Australia and South America.

In 1897, University of Pennsylvania botanist William P. Wilson opened Philadelphia’s Commercial Museum as a center for information on international trade. Entrepreneurs from the Philadelphia region came to the museum to learn about foreign markets and goods. This coincided with the city’s rise as an industrial power and its adoption of the name “Workshop of the World.” Philadelphia’s industrial and manufacturing productivity joined the city to a global economy that included the Pacific both as a source for raw materials and as a market for finished products. This dominance, however, was short lived. By the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Commerce began providing much of the information that the Commercial Museum once did, and Philadelphia lagged behind other cities and ports in industry and trade.

While the Great Depression dramatically reduced Philadelphia’s industrial and economic output, World War II provided an opportunity for military production that buoyed Philadelphia but brought the city into violent contact with Japan. Philadelphia’s Navy Yard became a center for ship and aircraft construction; the Navy Yard also contributed to the development of atomic weapons, and the Frankford Arsenal produced arms and conducted munitions research. This military production ended along with World War II, but experienced a brief resurgence in the 1950 during the Korean War.

Notwithstanding the increase in war-related industrial activity, following World War II, Philadelphia’s industries suffered from increasing globalization and competition from industrial manufacturers in the Pacific region. The second half of the twentieth century was a period of general deindustrialization and economic contraction in Philadelphia. Improved shipping technology, standardization of production machinery, and increased use of synthetic fabrics helped Asian manufacturers to undercut Philadelphia’s many textile and clothing firms. Similarly, in the 1970s, the increase in imports of Japanese automobiles contributed to the decline of Ford, GM, and Chrysler factories in Greater Philadelphia.

Impact of Intellectual Curiosity

The pursuit of knowledge has spurred Philadelphians toward interest in the Pacific since the Revolutionary Era. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and John Bartram (1699-1777), was the first notable organization for the study of natural history in the city, but others followed, notably the American Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge in 1768, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his Philadelphia Museum in 1786, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1812. These institutions made Philadelphia a center for scientific knowledge, publishing papers, housing collections, and promoting exploring expeditions of importance for the study and development of natural history in the United States. This pursuit of knowledge was a significant factor in the way many Americans living on the Atlantic coast learned about the Pacific World, a distant and exotic region that few would see for themselves. Several scientific projects connected Philadelphia to the Pacific. The American Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge emphasized in its manifesto that European plants did not thrive in North America and that the colonies should instead be considered more environmentally and agriculturally similar to China. The society noted that Philadelphia was at the same latitude as Beijing and that plants such as mulberry, persimmon, ginseng, and tobacco grew well in both North America and China. The group proposed introducing more plants from China to promote North American agriculture and economy. The Corps of Discovery Expedition, better known by the names of the expedition leaders, Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838), sought to connect Philadelphia and the Pacific geographically. American Philosophical Society member Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who launched the expedition while president of the United States, held an abiding interest in the exploration of the North American continent and research into a continental route to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis, who studied at the University of Pennsylvania and consulted with several key figures in Philadelphia’s learned societies, organized much of his expedition from the city. Upon the expedition’s completion, Lewis and Clark gave many of the specimens they collected to the American Philosophical Society and the Philadelphia Museum.

These institutions helped establish Philadelphia as a center for scientific knowledge and exploration of the Pacific World. Charles Willson Peale’s legacy extended to his children, who carried on their father’s interest in natural history to bring to Philadelphia greater knowledge of the Pacific. Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885), the sixteenth of Peale’s children, became a naturalist and explorer for several expeditions, most notably the 1838-42 U.S. Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Northwest, Oceania, and Australia. Titian Peale specialized in collecting animal specimens, bringing back 2,150 bird, 134 mammal, and 588 fish specimens. Other notable Philadelphia naturalists on the expedition included Charles Pickering (1805-78) from the Academy of Natural Sciences, and William Brackenridge (1810-93), a Scottish-born horticulturalist. The ornithologist John Cassin (1813-69), who became curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1842, helped revise Titian Peale’s official report on the zoology he observed, helping to spread knowledge of distant species to American naturalists.

A Dutch Merchant’s Influence

Others connected with the China trade also helped spread knowledge about this remote region and its cultures. The Dutch merchant Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739-1801), who became a U.S. citizen in 1784 and thus claimed the record for the first American to visit China, introduced Philadelphians to a better understanding of Chinese material culture. When he settled in Philadelphia in 1796, Houckgeest built a country home called “China’s Retreat” that held mementos from his travels and was staffed by Chinese servants. Houckgeest also published an account of his visit to China’s emperor, further disseminating information about the nation to Americans. From 1818 to 1831, the merchant Nathan Dunn collected many Chinese artifacts and housed them in his summer home known as his “Chinese Cottage.” By 1838, Dunn chose to open a Chinese museum at Ninth and George (Sansom) Streets in Philadelphia, in the same space as the Peale Philadelphia Museum. Often known as the museum of “Ten Thousand Chinese Things,” Dunn’s collection educated and entertained the Philadelphia public. Dunn’s museum reflected great interest in Chinese culture: in its first year of operation, it attracted one hundred thousand visitors. This interest, however, or at least enough interest to be profitable, did not last long. By 1842, Dunn moved his collection to London.

Three decades later, the 1876 Centennial Exposition brought exhibits from Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia, as well as the Latin American Pacific nations from Mexico to Chile. Out of the eleven nations that erected their own buildings for the exposition, only Japan represented the Pacific. This was, however, a significant step in educating Americans about the culture of Japan, which had been closed to the West until 1853. The Japanese exhibit included the first Japanese garden to be constructed in the United States. The site of the original Japanese exhibit, located in Fairmount Park, continued in the twenty-first century to feature a Japanese garden and host cultural activities.

Interest in art and artifacts from the Pacific found an outlet in Philadelphia’s cultural institutions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, established from the art gallery of the Centennial Exhibition, collected Japanese and Chinese art, including ceramics, metalwork, and textiles, which were displayed in prominent exhibits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded in 1887, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (more familiarly known as the Penn Museum) demonstrated strong interest in collecting ethnographic artifacts and material culture objects from Oceania, insular Southeast Asia, and Australia. The Penn Museum sponsored several expeditions to the Pacific and also purchased items from international dealers, housing them in a permanent Oceanian section of the museum.

Artifacts and Controversy

The practice of collecting artifacts and specimens sometimes led to controversy over the appropriation or theft of important cultural objects. In 1924, the Penn Museum purchased a large collection of ceremonial items from a Tlingit clan from coastal Alaska. In the early twenty-first century, Tlingit groups sought the return of these items, but met with resistance from the museum. In 2016, the federal repatriation review committee, under the auspices of the Native Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, determined the items must be returned to Alaska.

In addition to the collection of artifacts, literary arts connected the Philadelphia area to the Pacific world. Through their work, Philadelphia-area authors introduced Americans to life and culture in the Pacific. Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) settled in Bucks County after spending the first forty years of her life in China. Buck’s experiences with peasant life in China led her to publish The Good Earth (1931), which won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for the novel. Buck published several other works of fiction about life in Asia and translations of Chinese fiction, including East Wind: West Wind (1930), Sons (1933), All Men Are Brothers (1933), A House Divided (1935), and The Big Wave (1948). Doylestown native James A. Michener (1907-97), provided many Americans with a compelling, though often romanticized, view of Polynesia and Alaska through his prolific writing. Michener, who was stationed in the South Pacific Ocean as a naval historian during World War II, used his observations to write Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into the Broadway musical South Pacific (1949). Michener later published many other short stories and novels about the Pacific World, including Return to Paradise (1950) about the South Pacific, The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) about wartime Korea, Sayonara (1954) about cultural conflict in post-war Japan, and Hawaii (1959) and Alaska (1988), two epic novels about both places’ long histories and experiences with U.S. colonialism. Buck and Michener both went on to become philanthropists and activists after achieving fame through their writing. Buck promoted cross-cultural understanding and humanitarianism through the Welcome House Adoption Agency (1949) and Pearl S. Buck International (1964), and Michener helped found the James A. Michener Art Museum (1988), all located in Bucks County.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Philadelphia remained a center for the study of Euro-American and European exploration in the Pacific and its history. In 1969, the Academy of Natural Sciences led a team to search Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for artifacts discarded from Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour when, in 1770, the ship struck a reef and nearly sank. One of the Endeavour’s ten-pound cannons became part of the academy’s collections. The Endeavour cannon, recovered from a shipwreck that occurred as Philadelphia was beginning to take interest in the Pacific, can serve as a reminder of the complex networks of economic and cultural exchange that have tied the city to a distant ocean. University-based programs focused on areas of the Pacific also proliferated throughout Greater Philadelphia’s institutions of higher education. Princeton University became a leading center for East Asian studies, and its East Asian Library and Gest Collection assembled a large body of rare books and archival material from China, Japan, and Korea.

Immigrants from the Pacific

Philadelphia’s population of immigrants from Pacific nations was small but significant. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Philadelphia’s rate of immigration from foreign countries was lower than that of many other U.S. cities, and most of the city’s immigrants came from Europe. Nevertheless, communities from the Pacific World, particularly China, did much to shape Philadelphia’s modern history. Philadelphia became home to a growing population from the Pacific World in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870s, in the face of anti-Asian hostility, Chinese migrants made their way east from the railroads and gold mines of the North American West. The migrants first settled around Ninth and Race Streets, near what was then Philadelphia’s Skid Row.

This small community established Philadelphia’s Chinatown. At first, Chinese residents of the city were restricted to working in domestic service, laundries, or small groceries; small eateries and community associations served as places for cultural and social cohesion. By the turn of the twentieth century, the neighborhood’s “chop suey joints” gained notice from non-Asian Philadelphians. Flavors of the Pacific expanded the already diverse food culture, which had been shaped since colonial times by the city’s shipping industry and cosmopolitan upper class.

The Asian and Pacific Islander population of the city remained below two thousand during the first half of the twentieth century, after the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted new immigration. During World War II, the Greater Philadelphia region experienced an increase in its Asian population through the relocation of Japanese Americans from federal concentration camps. Seabrook Farms, located in southern New Jersey’s Cumberland County, was a major supplier of vegetables to the U.S. military and a beneficiary of Japanese American workers employed through a program of the War Relocation Authority. Between 1944 and 1946, 2,700 Japanese Americans came to work at Seabrook. Following World War II, new immigration contributed to a significantly larger and more diverse Pacific population. Cultural institutions such as the Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church at Tenth and Vine Streets served not only as a religious center but also as an organizing point for Chinese involvement in city politics as Chinatown residents worked to protect their interests.

Meanwhile, armed conflicts in the Pacific region had significance for Philadelphia and its population. Philadelphians in the military who deployed to the Pacific returned home with greater knowledge of the region, while anti-war activists sought to bridge cultural differences to mount resistance to the war in Korea and, later, Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, Southeast Asian refugees began settling in Philadelphia. Often placed in areas already suffering from racial and economic conflict, they frequently became targets of violence. However, Vietnamese and Cambodian communities persisted and grew; Philadelphia became home to some of the largest Vietnamese and Cambodian populations on the East Coast.

The Philadelphia region’s many universities fostered not only education about the Pacific but also the exchange of people between the two regions. In 1982, Temple University became the first American university to establish a campus in Japan. In the early twenty-first century, the universities of the Philadelphia area attracted a large number of students from the Pacific region, with the majority of foreign students originating from China.

While Philadelphia’s geographic position places it firmly in the Atlantic World and on the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, intercourse with the Pacific has nonetheless been a significant factor in the history of the Philadelphia region. Connections to Pacific people and places have helped Philadelphia develop commerce and industry, grow into a center for the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and become home to a diverse and multicultural population.

Lawrence Kessler holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Inspired by patriotic fervor during the Quasi-War with France, the people of Philadelphia raised money in one week during June 1798 to build the USS Philadelphia to help increase American naval power to protect commerce. Completed in 1799, the Philadelphia served in both the West Indies and the Mediterranean Sea, where it was captured in the Barbary campaigns and then sunk by an American force in a valiant but unsuccessful effort to free the ship.

The impassioned atmosphere that led to construction of the Philadelphia followed the outbreak of war between France and Great Britain in 1793. Despite a declaration of neutrality by President George Washington (1732-99), the French government authorized seizure of American shipping. When United States efforts to negotiate peace failed, the U.S. and France entered a period of naval conflict known as the Quasi-War in which both sides seized merchant vessels and naval warships. The political temper in the United States became very tense as the Federalists whipped up hyperpatriotism against the French. Philadelphians joined a larger movement in American cities to construct ships for the United States Navy, and their fundraising campaign quickly raised the money needed for the USS Philadelphia. Josiah Fox (1763-1847) designed the ship and in 1798-99 Samuel Humphreys (1778-1846), Nathaniel Hutton, and John Delavue supervised construction.

Philadelphia was then a preeminent commercial port in America and home to the federal government. As a shipbuilding center since before the American Revolution, the city served as a hub for the U.S. Navy.  It contained shipbuilding facilities that not only constructed the USS Philadelphia but also the USS United States, one of the first three frigates built for the U.S. Navy.

Captain Stephen Decatur Sr. (1751-1808), a Philadelphian, received command when the USS Philadelphia was commissioned in 1800. The ship was then stationed in the West Indies, where it seized five French ships and recaptured six merchant vessels from the French.

The USS Philadelphia returned to Philadelphia in 1801, then participated in two tours in the Mediterranean to combat the Barbary corsairs, or pirates, from the North African states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco, who preyed on American and other ships. The USS Philadelphia cruised near Gibraltar and blockaded the coast of Tripoli. In 1803, with Captain William Bainbridge (1774-1833) of New Jersey in command, the USS Philadelphia recaptured an American warship from a Moroccan vessel and blockaded Tripoli. When the ship ran aground on an uncharted reef, Captain Bainbridge and the crew were taken captive. In February 1804, Stephen Decatur Jr. (1779-1820) led a dangerous mission to free the USS Philadelphia from Tripoli harbor, but ended up setting the ship on fire to prevent its use by the enemy.

The USS Philadelphia’s history highlights the importance of Philadelphia as a national commercial and military center where private citizens swiftly raised funds for its construction. The ship had a prominent role in the early actions of the U.S. Navy against France and the Barbary states. Stephen Decatur Jr.’s bold destruction of the ship in Tripoli harbor was memorable though unfortunate, described in a report to the United States Congress as “one of the brightest ornaments of our naval escutcheon.”

Nathaniel Conley is a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas whose research focuses on the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania with emphasis on the lower class and the border between slavery and freedom.

By the time of the exchange’s founding, the Port of Philadelphia had long been a key aspect of the region’s economic life.  By 1750 Philadelphia had surpassed Boston as the largest city and busiest port in North America and held that position until it was eclipsed by New York in 1825.  During the post-Civil War era, as Philadelphia became an industrial giant and a key hub for commercial trade, demands on the port reached new levels with the rise of iron, steel, coal, and oil production, along with the increasing use of the railroad to transport these materials. To improve efficiency, the exchange built reporting stations along the Delaware to track ship arrivals. The observation stations reported to a central point in the city and from there the information was distributed to any party concerned with the ship while it was in port.

The exchange took an increasingly active role in proposing and instituting rules and regulations governing local shipping after April 29, 1882, when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted it a perpetual charter to “acquire, preserve, and disseminate all maritime and other business information, and do such other and lawful acts as will tend to promote and encourage trade and commerce of the Port of Philadelphia.” In 1887, the exchange issued its first eighteen Maritime Rules, covering points on which disputes tended to arise, such as ways of determining the readiness of ships or methods for handling hazardous cargo. These and other regulatory actions became the model for many U.S. ports as well as the foundation of international shipping governance.

At the time the exchange was formed, the Port of Philadelphia consistently handled three principal commodities: grain, sugar, and petroleum. The exchange formulated and approved standard practice for the carriage of these goods and became one of the first to adopt forms of charters for specific commodities or trades. These charters defined issues such as the loading, unloading, and discharge of vessels; how many days a ship was allowed in port (lay days) and the port charges resulting from overstay (demurrage); and rules regulating the delivery and receipt of special cargoes. In most ports these were matters decided by Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce, merchants, or combinations of the respective groups. In Philadelphia the advent of the Maritime Exchange streamlined the process.

To assure that the Port of Philadelphia would remain competitive, the exchange also played a role in the development of the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River, and the harbor. Over time, advances in ship design, construction, and operation created the need for the port to accommodate deeper drafts and longer ships. From 1885 through 1938 the exchange promoted actions such as the removal of Smith’s and Windmill islands from the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden and projects to widen and deepen the channel. Similarly, the exchange maintained and improved the Schuylkill River, the main tributary to the Delaware River and a key channel for moving commodities from the interior of the country to the port.

The interests and actions of Philadelphia Maritime Exchange always reached beyond the water to related issues such as the railroad transportation of commodities, quarantine of goods and immigrants on land, immigration, outbreaks of yellow fever, and civic affairs. The exchange actively promoted technological advancements such as electricity and telephones that required cables across the river and were key advocates for establishing bridges across the Delaware River in response to population growth in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Over the years, it supported humanitarian aid to foreign countries, endorsed state legislation such as the “Pure Stream Bill” to assure water quality, and opposed the sale or charter of government-owned vessels to foreign countries.

By the late 1980s, the exchange became the primary advocate for all segments of the tristate port industry after a sister organization, the Joint Executive Committee for the Improvement of the Harbor of Philadelphia and the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, closed its doors. In keeping with its broadened geographic scope, the activities of the exchange expanded to more extensive connections to legislators, regulators, policymakers, and other industry members concerned with international transportation matters including trade and quota issues, maritime security, automation, safety, environment, and dredging.

The increase in scope of the exchange led to a name change in the 1990s to the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River & Bay. The exchange’s mission, however, remained focused on promoting and encouraging commerce and international trade while working closely with public port organizations on issues with impact on the port and related businesses. Maintained by membership dues collected from merchants, importers, ship owners, tug and lighter operators, suppliers, and others connected with the maritime trade of the lower Delaware River, by 2016 the exchange had a membership more than 275 and remained the voice of safe, efficient, and cost-effective commerce on the Delaware River and Bay.

Terry L. Potter is the Director of the J. Welles Henderson Archives & Library at the Independence Seaport Museum. She holds a Master’s Degree in American History from Rutgers University, Camden.

During the eighteenth century, Philadelphia remained the most important economic city in the colonies and employed the most skilled shipwrights in the new nation.  In 1801 the federal government established the Philadelphia Navy Yard in Southwark at the site of a shore battery built in 1748, toward the end of King George’s War (1744–48), which inspired its construction. The site was chosen in large part because it lay just outside the colonial limits of Old Philadelphia, where pacifist Quakers objected to such martial projects. Originally called Wicaco by the Lenni Lenape and settled by the Swedes, Southwark got its name in the 1760s after local shipbuilders petitioned the provincial government to rename the town after London’s famed shipbuilding district.

Just nine years after it opened, the Southwark Navy Yard faced its first shutdown scare when Congress debated closure in 1810. But British naval aggression, which soon led to the War of 1812, saved the nascent facility. This was the first, but far from the last, time foreign conflict proved fortuitous for Philadelphia’s naval firmament.

The war’s end brought renewed worries about imminent closure, held at bay only by the continued construction of the 74-gun Franklin, the Navy Yard’s first major warship, which launched before fifty thousand onlookers on August 21, 1815. The Southwark yard laid keel on another ship-of-the-line, the Pennsylvania, in 1821, but budget cuts delayed its launch until 1837. Redesigned into 136-gun, four-deck behemoth, the Pennsylvania was the U.S. Navy’s largest sailing warship. Ironically, it never saw combat, making just one voyage, from Philadelphia to Norfolk, where it  laid up until burned in 1861 to keep it out of Confederate hands.

Production problems at Southwark’s small, out-of-date facilities were exacerbated during the Civil War (1861-65). The U.S. Navy’s shift to steam power was well underway when Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861, and the war triggered the development of ironclad warships. The cramped Southwark site lacked the space for the machine shops required to build state-of-the-art warships.

League Island Naval Yard

Fearing that the Navy would leave the city, Philadelphia’s political and business establishment offered a new site for the yard at League Island, at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, which they proposed to sell to the federal government for a single dollar in 1862. Politics delayed the deal’s consummation for six years while New England congressmen sought to bring more shipbuilding jobs to their constituents.

In 1869, Camden, New Jersey lawyer George Maxwell Robeson (1829-97) became secretary of the Navy. The local Republican bigwig showered his shipbuilding friends along the Delaware with government contracts. For League Island, he also ordered the construction of a freshwater basin, new machine shops, foundries, and other more mundane improvements, like roads and residences. Blueprints for the new yard’s development drafted in 1871 guided construction for the next 125 years.

For eight years, the Navy operated the two yards simultaneously. As League Island’s facilities were built, the navy slowly shifted outfitting and repair work from the Southwark yard, which closed with great fanfare during the nation’s Centennial year in 1876.

Just a few years later, Philadelphia faced a future without a naval facility once again, when the Navy decided to close the new yard in 1883 after a corruption scandal involving falsified payment records. But the Navy dropped the plans, and the yard remained busy during a broader naval renaissance between 1881 and 1891 that saw renewed investment in building and expanding the American fleet.

But the lack of a modern industrial plant, machine tools, shipbuilding ways, and dry docks at the League Island site meant the Navy Yard did not build the new steel warships filling the reinvigorated navy’s ranks. Instead, those contracts went to private shipbuilders along the Delaware, who drew upon Pennsylvania foundries for steel and mines for coal. Even as facilities expanded in the 1890s, the Philadelphia Navy Yard assumed the role that became its primary purpose for most of its active life: an outfitting station and reserve fleet storage facility.

Despite a rush of improvements, the Navy Yard still was not a first-class shipbuilding facility when the sinking of the Maine heralded the Spanish-American War in 1898, but the Caribbean and Pacific conflict fueled its expansion: The back channel was dredged, officers quarters built (including the Commandant’s Office Building and the Marine Corps Barracks), and modern, steel shipbuilding shops constructed.

Philadelphia lacked a facility large enough for modern battleships until Dry Dock No. 2 was completed in 1907. A string of accidents and frequent groundings caused by the narrow channels and cramped waterways around League Island landed Philadelphia’s Navy Yard back on another closure list. However, objections to the reorganization raised by a group of naval officers stationed at League Island changed the mind of the new secretary of the Navy, George von Lengerke Meyer (1858-1918). Instead of closing the yard, he then authorized some of the most extensive improvements in its history.

World Wars: The Navy Yard’s Golden Years

Many of the buildings that give the modern Navy Yard its character were built before and during World War I, although the Navy Yard still lacked modern shipbuilding facilities heading into the war. Shipbuilding Ways No. 1 was not finished until June 1915, just months after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. The new shipbuilding ways went into work immediately to build a marine transport ship, the Henderson, in line with the expanding Marine Corps Reservation at the base.

The Great War brought another expansion wave to League Island, which was effectively split into two: On the western side, a naval shipyard, known as the “new Yard,” with new dry docks, expanded shipbuilding ways, steel shops, a new foundry, and a 350-ton hammerhead crane, then the world’s largest; on the eastern side, a navy base with a new receiving station, training center, and the Marine Corps Reservation.

Around the same time, naval aviation facilities cropped up on League Island. The Aero Club of Pennsylvania had built a hangar and airfield on the island’s eastern end in 1910; seven years later, the Navy added a new hangar there, plus an aircraft factory. The aircraft factory and airfield, later named the Henry C. Mustin Naval Air Facility, focused mainly on seaplanes.

Despite the improvements, Philadelphia Navy Yard launched just two ships before the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The Reserve Basin once again filled with a mothball flotilla in the interwar period, and the workforce shrank from more than twelve thousand to roughly five thousand, with many put to work converting and scrapping old warships.

The Great Depression, a devastating event for most, signaled good news for the Philadelphia Navy Yard. New Deal programs brought funds to improve its physical plant. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), who previously had served as undersecretary of the navy, lavished funds on new warships, and Philadelphia turned out a dozen ships between 1934 and 1938.

The German invasion of Poland put sudden steel in the spines of Navy leadership, and the necessary upgrades to turn Philadelphia into a first-class shipbuilding facility were finally funded. Dry Dock Nos. 4 and 5 were built in 1941 and 1942, respectively. In 1940, work began on the battleship New Jersey, which went on to serve with distinction in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, plus U.S. intervention in the Lebanese civil war, making it the most decorated battleship in U.S. history.

During World War II, the Philadelphia Navy Yard became a self-contained community, replete with its own sports leagues, bands, and newspaper. It was by far the Navy Yard’s most prolific period, when it built 48 new warships, converted 41 more, repaired and overhauled 574, completed and dry-docked 650, and outfitted 600. The Naval Aircraft Factory built 500 planes and the Receiving Station processed 70,000 Navy recruits. Over the course of 1941, the workforce rose from 24,000 to 33,000. In 1944 it hit 47,695 full-time civilian employees; adding in military officers and high school students in the summer, employment topped 60,000.

Unbeknownst to nearly all who worked there, the Navy Yard was home to experiments instrumental to the construction of the atomic bomb. In 1944, a wooden building storing uranium for the Manhattan Project exploded, killing two and burning nine. At the time, few noticed—industrial mishaps were common at the yard, given the frenetic pace of construction and thousands of hastily trained workmen. The Naval Boiler and Turbine Laboratory at the yard was used to separate U-235 isotopes from uranium ore to produce nuclear fuel. “Little Boy,” dropped by the Enola Gay on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, most likely used fissile material produced in Philadelphia.

The deadly accident, plus the Navy Yard’s proximity to Philadelphia’s large population, meant the base would never become a nuclear naval facility. Still, a small atomic plant at the Navy Yard operated until September 1945, and some of the research conducted at the Yard guided the construction of the U.S. Navy’s first atomic-powered submarine. These activities, plus rocket technology experiments and degaussing operations (demagnetizing ship hulls to protect against magnetic mines), may have inspired the urban myth of the U.S. Navy’s efforts to render a ship invisible, known as the Philadelphia Experiment.

Uncertainty returned to the Navy Yard following Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. During the Cold War, the newly renamed Philadelphia Navy Base and Naval Shipyard resumed its more traditional role as a port where ships were mothballed and overhauled. The workforce fell to nine thousand by July 1946. The Korean War brought another surge in work reactivating reserve warships. Research and development facilities also expanded, but the shipyard did not construct a single one of the 350 warships built during the conflict.

Vietnam brought another short-lived boom, reactivating more warships (including the New Jersey) and building a few more. But a congressional mandate in 1967 to move new ship construction to private yards meant that the Blue Ridge, a command ship launched in 1969, was the last U.S. naval vessel built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. As of 2017, the Blue Ridge remained active, making it the oldest deployable warship in the U.S. Navy.

After Vietnam, the Philadelphia Navy Yard entered the slow, ebbing decline that led to its eventual closing in 1996. The Marine Corps Reservation closed in 1977, ending the Marines’ almost continuous 250-year presence in Philadelphia since its creation in 1775. Periodically, the entire Navy Yard faced closure, only to be saved by the efforts of the Delaware Valley’s congressional delegations.

Programs to upgrade older warships with state-of-the-art weapons systems kept the Philadelphia Navy Yard somewhat busy during the 1980s and 1990s, first with destroyers and cruisers in the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization Program, and later with the aircraft carrier Service Life Extension Program (SLEP).

In 1990, Philadelphia won its last SLEP contract, to overhaul the 80,000-ton aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, which arrived in 1993 and stayed until work was completed in 1995. Despite the best efforts of local politicians—including a desperate lawsuit by Senator Arlen Specter (1930-2012) that Specter himself argued before U.S. Supreme Court—the base closed on September 26, 1996. Not everything shut down immediately. The Navy continued to operate the Propeller Manufacturing Center, the Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, and the Philadelphia Naval Ship Systems Engineering Station.

After the closure, area politicians scrambled to recruit shipbuilding companies to use the Navy Yard’s large dry docks. Mayor Ed Rendell (b. 1944) pursued a deal with German shipbuilder Meyer Werft that fell through in 1995 after Governor Tom Ridge (b. 1945) rebuffed the proposal’s $167 million in government incentives as “pure fantasy.” Ironically, two years later, Ridge supported a more expensive deal to bring Norway’s Kvaerner (which later merged with Aker, adopting the latter’s name) to Philadelphia.

In 2000, Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) acquired control of the Navy Yard’s remaining 1,200 acres and drafted plans to develop it into an office park. Following a master plan adopted in 2004, PIDC spent $150 million to improve the Navy Yard’s infrastructure. More than 150 companies opened offices at the Navy Yard, spending $750 million on private development—much of it to  renovate historically significant naval buildings.

By 2017, more than twelve thousand employees worked at the Navy Yard, exceeding employment during any other point in the Navy Yard’s history except for World War II. PIDC’s 2013 update to the Navy Yard master plan called for even more private development, eventually to expand to 13.5 million square feet of office, industrial, laboratory, and commercial space employing thirty thousand people.

Jim Saksa is a reporter for WHYY’s PlanPhilly.

The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, or PhilaPort, is an independent agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania whose mandate is to govern port facilities and activities on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. The river serves as a busy commercial highway and has supported the growth and development of Philadelphia since well before the city and port were incorporated in the early eighteenth century. While port governance has changed over the years, the port remains a significant economic engine for Philadelphia and its environs.

Since the founding of the city in 1682, Philadelphia’s port has been a center of international commerce, enabling trade with distant markets in Europe and the Caribbean. William Penn (1644-1718) incorporated the port at the same time as the City of Philadelphia in the Charter of 1701. From the decades following its establishment through the first part of the twentieth century, the port operated under city supervision. The Department of Wharves, Docks, and Ferries, a division of the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Commerce, oversaw the construction and maintenance of piers and port facilities. The department’s director was authorized to make surveys and soundings, prepare plans, and regulate, fix, and establish bulkhead and pierhead lines and distance between piers, and set rules and regulations for wharves, piers, and bulkheads.

The building and maintenance of port facilities, however, was costly and a financial burden for the city. In 1965, the city separated the port from its budget by creating the Philadelphia Port Corporation with authority to issue municipal bonds for the purpose of improving and expanding the port. The corporation serviced its debt by leasing the port facilities to private shipping and cargo companies. In exchange, the City Corporation marketed the port.

State Assumes Control

By the late 1980s, the Port Corporation was not adequately managing its facilities. The city-run agency posted a $7 million operating deficit in 1988 and could not afford to repair existing facilities, much less invest in new ones. Aware of the city’s inability to effectively manage the port, Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr. (b. 1938), asked the state to assume control.

In 1989, the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed, and the governor signed, legislation creating the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority. The new state-run authority freed Philadelphia from a multimillion dollar drain on its annual budget, including port operating costs and debt service on bonds, while also making state funds available for capital and marketing projects at the port.

Enabled by the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority Act (P.L. 291, No. 50, Cl. 53) of 1989, the agency was empowered to manage, lease, acquire, and own port facilities, port-related projects, and equipment within the port zone. PhilaPort’s jurisdiction runs along the Delaware River beginning with Pennsylvania’s border with the state of Delaware in Delaware County, through Philadelphia County, ending in upper Bucks County and encompassing up to a mile inland from the river. As with other port authorities, PhilaPort was authorized to borrow money, make and issue negotiable notes, bonds, and other evidences of indebtedness or obligations of the authority, and secure the payment of such bonds. PhilaPort also acquired the power of eminent domain and zoning supersession, which it can exercise when necessary to locate port facilities. The authority was granted such powers by the legislature to ensure that Philadelphia’s port could compete with other ports and provide economic development benefits statewide.

PhilaPort was created to enhance trade and commerce along the Delaware River while also contributing to economic development and job creation. Its approach to economic development has been three-tiered. First, it has encouraged the use, growth, and development of its own terminal and port facilities. Second, it promotes ports within Pennsylvania. Third, it encourages the extensive use of the Delaware River. The port is responsible for thousands of direct jobs, such as those held by workers on docks, and indirect jobs that include warehouse employees in the Philadelphia area and throughout Pennsylvania. PhilaPort manages fifteen facilities: Tioga Marine Terminal, Tioga Liquid Bulk Terminal, 3200 E. Tioga, Piers 78 & 80, Pier 82, Pier 84, Piers 96, 98, & 100, Packer Avenue Marine Terminal, Pier 98 Annex, Pier 122, Pier 124, Southport Auto Terminal, PhilaPort Distribution Center, Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market, and Citizens Bank Regional Maritime Training Center. PhilaPort is a “landlord port,” meaning that it leases its facilities to private operators. In 2021, PhilaPort was the thirteenth largest port in the country when measured by TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) handled, with 435,833.74 TEUs.

Big 2016 Investment by State

In November 2016 Governor Tom Wolf (b. 1948) unveiled a $300 million state investment to fix ship berths, buy new cranes, update and relocate warehouses, and double cargo-handling space. The investment, made possible by a bond, was expected to create two thousand waterfront jobs and nearly seven thousand jobs for truckers, rail workers, suppliers, and port-related businesses, as well as jobs for construction workers. The investment came at a time when competition among East Coast ports was particularly fierce in light of the Panama Canal expansion, completed in June 2016, that allowed larger ships to bring goods from Asia. The investment spearheaded a development plan and signaled the commonwealth’s commitment to creating and maintaining a robust and efficient port.

The authority rebranded itself as PhilaPort in 2017. The port board of directors and staff felt that the authority needed a new, more memorable and recognizable name, particularly to distinguish it from the neighboring Delaware River and Bay Authority (DRBA) and the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA). On the heels of the $300 million state investment, the name change was part of an aggressive effort to market Philadelphia to shippers around the world.

Investment in PhilaPort, in addition to the rebranding, was driven in large part by the dredging of the Delaware River. The decades-long plan to deepen 103 miles of the river along the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware shoreline from forty to forty-five feet was completed in February 2020. Led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the project was devised to allow bigger ships, which were expected to be traveling from the expanded Panama Canal, to navigate the river more easily. Further, the deeper channel allowed for more efficient transportation of containerized, dry and liquid bulk, roll-on/roll-off, and project cargoes to and from Delaware River ports.

Officials at PhilaPort maintain relationships with other agencies and departments at various governmental levels. To market the Delaware River, PhilaPort coordinates with the Port of Camden across the Delaware River; the Diamond State Port Corporation, which operates the Port of Wilmington; and the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, which is a nonprofit trade association advocating for port and port-related business in the Delaware River region. To ensure that port operations run smoothly, the port also works with federal agencies including the United States Department of Transportation, United States Coast Guard, United States Army Corps of Engineers, United States Department of Homeland Security, and United States Customs and Border Protection.

Elizabeth M. Marcello has a Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University. Her scholarship is concerned with how public authorities fit into transparent and democratic planning processes. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Pirates were outlaws on the sea who attacked all ships, regardless of their nation of origin. They plagued shipping routes, which had at times a devastating effect on trade in Philadelphia. Many pirates first served as privateers, who were employed by nations such as England as alternatives or in addition to a formal navy during times of war.  Privateers received a letter of marque, or commission, to raid enemy ships. When the conflicts came to an end, however, many of the privateers became pirates, continuing to rob ships of their cargoes, which the pirates shared.

Soon after Philadelphia’s founding, the city’s growing population and economic importance attracted pirates who threatened the region’s thriving trade. Piracy offered local sailors the opportunity to earn higher profits and benefits that they would not receive on merchant or naval vessels. Life on board pirate ships tended to be much more democratic than on other ships as pirates could even depose an unpopular captain and discipline was much more lax.

Pirates regularly operated around the Delaware River by the late seventeenth century, which fueled fears about the safety of the local waterways. In 1699, the colony arrested four men believed to serve under the notorious pirate Captain William Kidd (c. 1645-1701). The Pennsylvania Assembly enacted several statutes to prevent pirates from moving freely in society and to keep others from collaborating with them. Some merchants in the Delaware Valley willingly tolerated piracy, however, because of its economic benefits. Pirates spent their booty freely in port cities such as Philadelphia and contributed to the region’s economic development. William Markham (1635-1704), Pennsylvania’s deputy governor, even allegedly received a bribe from the pirate John Avery (1659-c. 1696), who raided ships throughout the Indian Ocean and was subject to an English manhunt. Markham’s relationship with Avery extended beyond simply accepting a bribe as he also allowed one of his daughters to marry the infamous pirate captain.

Piracy continued to be a major concern for many merchants in the early 1700s, despite the unofficial toleration of some officials and the potential benefits of piracy for some segments of the Delaware Valley economy. Lieutenant Governor William Keith (1669-1749) issued a warrant for the arrest of Edward Teach (c. 1680-1718), better known as Blackbeard, for his attacks on merchant ships. Keith feared that Blackbeard maintained contact with former pirates, who now lived in Philadelphia and aided him in his raids against Philadelphia’s merchants. The local newspaper provided periodic reports of pirate activity in the Philadelphia region by the early 1720s. Pirates even managed to prevent ships from leaving Philadelphia for an entire week in 1722. The Pennsylvania Assembly sought to eliminate property crimes such as robbery by making them subject to capital punishment, which could be used in cases against pirates.

A Trial for Piracy

Perhaps because local authorities realized the financial contribution of pirates to the region, Philadelphia witnessed only one trial for piracy in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1730, English sailors serving on board a Portuguese ship mutinied and became pirates before finally being arrested and condemned to death in Philadelphia.  During an era when pirates could hope for little mercy, four of these condemned pirates surprisingly received a pardon from Pennsylvania authorities after their ringleader escaped. Indeed, many Philadelphians may have supported pirates, as testimony in a 1718 case alleged that Pennsylvania merchants provided pirates with ammunition and supplies.

After 1730, piracy ceased to be a major problem for Philadelphia although privateers occasionally disrupted the city’s shipping. Both colonial officials and the British government sought to reduce the threat of piracy. The Revolutionary War, however, allowed for a resurgence of pirates by the 1780s. When the Continental Congress employed privateers to supplement its meager naval forces, several crews turned to piracy. Local newspapers complained about these “villains” who disrupted the Revolutionary War effort, but Pennsylvania’s courts condemned only four men for piracy in the 1780s. One condemned pirate was even sentenced to have his body gibbeted to deter other potential pirates. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania’s government again surprisingly opted for leniency in his case as well as most of the other condemned pirates and executed only one convicted pirate during this time.

By the 1790s, the Pennsylvania legislature removed piracy from the list of capital crimes. Cases of piracy declined into the nineteenth century. The state did witness several cases of piracy in the early nineteenth century, but applied the death penalty only in cases in which the pirates committed murder as well. Indeed, in 1837, convicted pirate James Moran was the last individual publicly executed in Pennsylvania for any crime. Although Philadelphia merchants could occasionally fall victim to pirates in other corners of the globe such as the Mediterranean Sea, piracy ceased to be a major concern in the Delaware Valley, thus ending Pennsylvania’s ambivalent policy towards piracy as well.

Tim Hayburn received his doctorate in Colonial American History from Lehigh University.