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 history of barbering in Philadelphia reflects larger trends in the history of the region and nation. In the eighteenth century, men did not place a high priority on grooming. While beardedness was stigmatized, even among the “lower sort,” scruffiness was a fact of life. Infrequent trips to the barber shop—once a week or less—were the norm for most men. Barbers might face a weekend crush, as patrons prepared for religious services, but otherwise confronted weak demand for their services. This was due, in large degree, to the absence of elite customers, who were shaved and groomed by trained body servants.

To overcome this slack demand, colonial and early republic barbers turned to making and repairing wigs. Worn by elite men and women, powdered wigs were big business for eighteenth-century barbers. Barbers also made house calls, especially to the city’s leading women, where they sculpted elaborate hairstyles. Finally, Philadelphia’s barbers catered to traveling elites temporarily deprived of their household staff.

African American Dominance

While demographic information is scant, it is likely that most early Philadelphia-area barbers were men of African descent. Prior to the passage of Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual emancipation law, many enslaved Philadelphians worked in personal service. As black men moved out of bondage, many took the skills they had acquired during enslavement and turned them into a livelihood.

Philadelphia’s barbering trade continued to be dominated by men of color in the early nineteenth century. Although it offered opportunities for wealth, most whites regarded barbering as beneath the dignity of republican citizens. Thus, both freeborn Philadelphians of color and new arrivals born into slavery found few white competitors in the trade. Due to these favorable prospects, the number of black barbers grew dramatically over the antebellum period—with grooming professionals representing a large share of the region’s black middle class. So closely linked were black barbers and wealth, in fact, that when artist Anthony Imbert (1794/5–1834) illustrated a wrapper for the racist Life in Philadelphia series by Edward Clay (1799-1857), he chose a barber of color as the subject.

Many of these black barbers made their living by grooming wealthy white men (most barbers had stopped styling women’s hair after the Revolution). Though standards of comportment had increased since the eighteenth century, regular grooming remained the province of elites—many of whom eschewed body servants in the nineteenth century. To satisfy the tastes and prejudices of these elites, Philadelphia’s black barbers built and operated luxurious, whites-only pleasure palaces. Among the most prominent of these was the shop of Joshua Eddy (1798–1882) on Chestnut Street, which helped make Eddy the city’s wealthiest barber of color.

Although most barbers of color operated segregated shops, many actively participated in organizations committed to combating racism. Barber Joseph Cassey (1789–1848), for instance, served as the city’s first agent of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. On the whole, however, barbers had a well-earned reputation for conservatism—due, no doubt, to their dependence on white patronage.

Influence of German Immigrants

Beginning in the 1840s, the demographic makeup of Philadelphia’s barbers underwent a dramatic shift. Representing a mere fifth of Philadelphia’s barbers in 1850, whites accounted for over half a decade later—a percentage that would continue to grow in coming decades. Of the white barbers who plied their trade in 1860, roughly two-thirds were German immigrants. Arriving in droves in the 1840s, Germans brought a long tradition of barbering and none of the cultural baggage that barred native-born whites from the profession.

Due to growing competition from Germans, black barbers took an increasingly grim view of their profession’s future. By the 1850s, the average barber of color was middle-aged and fewer young men entered the profession as teenage apprentices. Only 5 percent stayed behind the chair for more than a decade. And a significant number of Philadelphia’s poorest black haircutters repeatedly wound up in the city’s almshouse.

A hardening of white racism and a growing discomfort with the touch of black professionals also contributed to the decline of black barbering. This discomfort was exacerbated by the popularity of fictional British barber Sweeney Todd, who was first introduced in the anonymously authored novel The String of Pearls, which appeared in serial form in the mid-1840s. This novel, along with numerous Sweeney Todd copycats who appeared in print over the following decade, inspired widespread fears about murderous barbers. While this tale negatively impacted all barbers, it had a particularly pernicious effect on those whom white customers were already inclined to fear.

For Philadelphia’s black barbers, white anxieties about race, intimacy, and violence proved nearly insurmountable. Although African Americans continued to make up a larger percentage of the barbering population in Philadelphia than in other northern cities, their share shrunk with each passing decade. Representing a fifth of Philadelphia barbers in 1880, barbers of color constituted a mere tenth by the turn of the twentieth century.

“Color-Line” Shops End

During these decades, the era of the “color-line” shop—in which black barbers served white patrons—came to an end. With few white Philadelphians willing to submit to a black man’s touch, barbers of color turned instead to the city’s growing black community for patronage. This dramatic shift was reflected in the geography of Philadelphia’s black-owned shops. Concentrated along Philadelphia’s white-dominated Market Street in the twilight years of color-line establishments, by 1920, most black-owned shops had either moved to South Street, near the predominantly black Seventh Ward, or to North Broad, near its intersection with Fairmount. Though born of hardship and discrimination, these “black barbershops” became beloved neighborhood institutions for both longtime residents and for the tens of thousands of southern African Americans who flocked to the city as part of the Great Migration. Centers of sociability, activism, and community organizing, these shops served, in the words of an adage, as “the black man’s country club.”

White barbers, meanwhile, took important steps to exorcise the specters of Sweeney Todd and black dominance from their trade. They did so by assuring would-be customers—many of whom fled the shop during the postbellum heyday of the beard—that they would be greeted by trained and certified white professionals. This was an especially urgent task for the 80 percent of white Philadelphia barbers who were either immigrants or first-generation Americans—and whose trustworthiness was therefore suspect in the eyes of many customers.

To achieve these goals, white barbers organized professional organizations. Two of the most important—the Journeyman Barbers International Union and the Associated Master Barbers of America—had strong presences in Philadelphia and the surrounding area. Save for a brief period of interracial cooperation during the 1930s, these organizations remained rigidly segregated until the mid-twentieth century. While the Philadelphia chapters of the JBIU and AMBA raised the profile of white barbers, they showed scant regard for black barbers or their role in the trade’s history.

The white barbers who filled the ranks of these professional organizations were overwhelmingly of Italian descent. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, first- and second-generation Italian immigrants had successfully challenged Germans and their descendants for dominance of the trade. Trained at institutions such as Philadelphia’s Tri-City Barber School—Pennsylvania’s oldest barbering academy—as well as in traditional apprenticeships, Italian American barbers included local celebrities such as Vincent Ionata (b. 1920), proprietor of a Suburban Station shop patronized by local politicos, and Charles Pittello (1915–2000), who catered to Frank Sinatra (1915–98), Bob Hope (1903–2003), and other stars in his Adelphia and Warwick Hotel shops.

African American Resurgence

By the late twentieth century, however, African Americans once more returned to their erstwhile position as the region’s leading barbers. This was due, in large measure, to “white flight”: the panicked departure of many white residents and their barbers for the region’s growing suburbs. But it was also due to the enduring importance of barbers and their businesses in African American communities. Though shops of the late twentieth century were far less luxurious than their nineteenth-century counterparts—with plastic chairs and linoleum floors replacing ornately carved wooden furniture and glistening wall-length mirrors—barbers continued to serve as marriage counselors, youth mentors, and community organizers. In Wynnefield, for instance, barber Robert Woodard hosted a 2004 discussion by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson on gun violence. Philly Cuts’s owner Darryl Thomas (b. 1972) invited University of Pennsylvania medical students to test patrons’ blood pressure in 2011. And the Camden shop of Russell Farmer (b. c. 1920) played host to a citywide celebration of Black History Month in 2012.

For the proprietors of these shops, as well as their overwhelmingly male workforce, barbering proved an attractive career option. Not only has it provided a steady income and a position of respect, but it also offered ex-convicts—numerous in the age of mass incarceration—opportunities for advancement that would be difficult to come by in less personal, less understanding workplaces.

Still, barbers have faced a number of daunting challenges. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the long hair and beard fashion nearly dealt a death blow to the profession—with twenty thousand barbers leaving their posts nationwide, according to industry group Hair International. This was particularly devastating for African American barbers, as the labor intensive “process,” or “conk” as it was sometimes called, gave way to the comparatively low-maintenance Afro. Barbers also contended with the specter of violence. Often open late at night with large amounts of cash on hand, barbershops have been frequent targets of robbers, with numerous barbers shot and, in some cases, killed since the 1980s. Lastly, twenty-first-century barbers faced stiff competition from salons—with more than five times as many salons as barbershops in Pennsylvania in 2002, according to the state Department of Cosmetology, as there were barbershops.

Despite these challenges, however, the barbering profession endured. In fact, in the early twenty-first century, barbering underwent something of a renaissance with upscale establishments such as Center City’s Groom or Pompadours in Maple Shade, New Jersey, joining the ranks of better-established shops. Catering to a growing population of well-off white males, these shops both reflected and participated in the process of gentrification sweeping the region during the early twenty-first century.

Nevertheless, a number of the trade’s basic features stayed constant. Barbering remained, in large measure, a profession of and for men. It continued to be an attractive option for ambitious men of modest means. And Philadelphians continued to enhance their appearance and participate in shops’ social pleasures. Part social club, part community center, Philadelphia’s modern shops maintained a tradition reaching back to the city’s colonial past.

Sean Trainor teaches history and humanities at the University of Florida, Penn State University, and Santa Fe College. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Business History Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Early American Studies, Salon, and TIME. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The city of Philadelphia was built with bricks, giving it an appearance many neighborhoods retained into the twenty-first century. An abundance of local clay allowed brickmaking to flourish and bricks to become the one of the most important building materials in the region. Because it could be accomplished with just a few rudimentary tools, brickmaking was one of the first industries practiced in colonial America. For two centuries, Philadelphia was America’s preeminent brickmaking city. Though brickmaking declined as clay deposits were depleted and concrete blocks became more economical, locally made bricks, and local brickmakers, made possible the distinctive built environment of Philadelphia and the surrounding region.

“Brickmaking was a poor man’s game, as it required no capital to start with,” noted New York brickmaker James Wood  in 1830. This was especially true early on, when firing bricks required only enough bricks to build a kiln and, most importantly, an abundance of clay. Philadelphia sat atop a bed of high-quality brick clay just below the surface, so extensive that even after two centuries of mining it still provided enough clay to produce more than 200 million bricks a year by the end of the nineteenth century. The best quality brick clay was in the “Neck,” between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. New Jersey had wide-ranging deposits of clay running diagonally across much of the state. Arguably, the best quality was found in Middlesex County, however suitable clay could also be found across the southern portion, particularly along the Delaware River in Burlington County.

Archaeological remains, such as kilns, indicate that brickmaking began almost as soon as settlers arrived in the Philadelphia region. In the area that became Delaware, brickmaking occurred in New Castle, known then as New Amstel, at least as early as 1656 and supported construction of many of the city’s early buildings, such as the courthouse (1732) made with Flemish bond brickwork. Burlington County, New Jersey, with its rich clay deposits, had enough brickmakers by the early 1680s that it appointed two brick inspectors tasked with reporting any violations of a New Jersey law regarding the uniformity of handmade bricks. But the center of brickmaking was Philadelphia. In 1683, William Penn (1644–1718) described “divers brickeries going on.” Merchant Robert Turner (1635–1700), who built the first brick house in Philadelphia, reported to Penn in 1685, “Bricks are exceeding good, and better than when I built: More Makers fallen in, and Bricks cheaper. . . . many brave Brick Houses are going up.” Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–c. 1720), the founder of Germantown, reported a number of brick kilns in the area in 1684, and Turner noted that Pastorius himself intended to begin brickmaking the following year. Brick was also used for public buildings: the courthouse at Second and High Streets, also known as the Guild Hall or the Great Towne House, begun in 1707, became one of the oldest public buildings in the colonies built of brick, and the Pennsylvania State House, one of the city’s most widely recognized structures, was constructed with locally made brick beginning in 1732. By the end of the eighteenth century, 80 percent of Philadelphia’s houses were made of brick. Early Philadelphia brickmakers demonstrated pride in their trade. On July 4, 1788, they marched in the Grand Federal Procession celebrating the ratification of the Constitution wearing aprons and carrying trowels and a green flag featuring a kiln.

A Family Business

Brickmaking was frequently a family business, spanning generations. Mechanics who worked in the trade became brickyard owners, often in partnership with family members. Intermarriage between brickmaking families cemented business ties. Among Philadelphia’s most prominent early brickmakers were brothers-in-law Daniel Pegg (c. 1660–1702) and Thomas Smith (?–c. 1690) and their relatives, the Coats family and William Rakestraw Jr. (c. 1678–1732). Peter Grim, who was in business by 1814 and who later, in the early 1830s, established a brickyard in Trenton and supplied the bricks for the New Jersey state prison, had many relatives in the business by midcentury. George, Michael, and Christian Lybrant all ran brickyards between 1800 and 1850. Nelson Wanamaker (c. 1812–62), father of department store pioneer John Wanamaker (1838–1922), worked with his father, John S. Wanamaker, in his brickyard in the Neck before John senior moved to Indiana in 1849. Family businesses continued their dominance until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

The process of making bricks changed little from its origins through the mid-nineteenth century. Brickmakers dug the clay, allowed it to weather, tempered it, molded it, let it dry, then burned the bricks in a kiln. Brickmaking began in early winter with the digging of clay, which was left exposed to the weather until the spring, allowing frost and rain to wash away salts and break up the clay. In the spring, brickmakers tempered the clay, mixing it with sand and water to get the right consistency and color and churning it in a “ring pit” with a horse- or oxen-drawn shaft.  After the clay was tempered, a “wheeler” hauled it to the molder, the most experienced member of the brickmaking crew, who filled the wooden brick molds and removed excess clay. The “offbearer,” often a boy, then transported the filled molds to a drying yard and emptied the molds, leaving the bricks to dry in the open for a few days before stacking them in an open-sided shed for further drying. Once ready for burning, brickmakers stacked the bricks in a kiln, where they were “burned” over several days. They then sorted the bricks by firmness and color. Brickyards in the region typically produced about 2,400 bricks per day per crew (one molder and two offbearers).

The most significant costs of brick manufacture were for labor and fuel. Labor accounted for about 60 percent of production costs. Fuel, in the form of cordwood, accounted for another 30 percent. Each kiln burn required about twenty-five cords of wood, the fuel of choice into the late nineteenth century, even as area forests disappeared. By 1850, Philadelphia brickyards consumed about 38,000 cords of wood, or the equivalent of 1,360 acres of forest, a year.

Rapid Expansion

Brickmaking expanded rapidly in the region. In Wilmington, a 1791 list of area manufacturers included several bricklayers and brickmakers. By 1794 the Plan of the City and Suburbs of Philadelphia recorded fourteen brick kilns within city boundaries. Several of the earliest kilns were established in Germantown and Northern Liberties, with the latter the center of the early industry in the area. By 1799 brickmaking employed enough people that workers founded the Bricklayers Company, which persisted well into the twentieth century. In 1811, there were thirty brick kilns in Philadelphia, and by 1857, the city had at least fifty brickyards. A number of yards had also been established in and around Trenton and elsewhere in New Jersey by this time. By 1875, the number of brickmaking companies in Philadelphia peaked at about seventy-eight, and by the final decades of the nineteenth century there were many others in the surrounding region, including in West Chester, Norristown, Landsdowne, Bordentown, Maple Shade, Millville, Camden, Wilmington, and elsewhere.

These brickyards employed a significant number of the region’s laborers. In 1810, at least six hundred men and boys were engaged in the brickmaking business in Philadelphia alone; by 1850, nearly two thousand worked in the industry. In that year, many yards employed about twenty-five men and boys, and six yards employed more than fifty workers each. The numbers continued to grow, so that by 1880 nearly three thousand men worked in the trade before the numbers started to decline at the end of the century. Though the exact numbers of laborers involved in the many smaller brickyards in the rest of the region are not known, the output of bricks suggests that growing numbers of men in southeastern Pennsylvania and in southern New Jersey also entered the brickmaking trade. In the early twentieth century, the Sayre & Fisher Brick Company in Middlesex County, New Jersey, founded in 1850 by James Sayre (1813–1908) of Newark and Peter Fisher (1818–1906) of New York, became the world’s largest brick manufacturer for a period. Sayre & Fisher employed hundreds of workers, especially new immigrants, who made up the bulk of the population of the town, soon renamed Sayreville. Much company housing, some built from the company’s bricks, survived into the twenty-first century. By its one hundredth anniversary, Sayre & Fisher had produced over six billion bricks. The plant operated until 1970. Brickmaking never became very significant in Delaware, however.

During the nineteenth century, the invention of new steam-powered machinery transformed brick production in many regions of the country, but Philadelphia brickmakers were slow to adopt these innovations. All brick had been made by hand until the mid-1830s, when Nathaniel Adams (1797–1862), who came to Philadelphia from the brickmaking region in the Hudson Valley, invented a molding machine; by about 1840 he installed a horse-powered machine in a Philadelphia brickyard. However, workers angry at the prospect of losing pay to a machine destroyed his machinery. A few years later, his brother, Samuel, installed one of his brother’s machines and then was forced to flee the city. Most Philadelphia brickmakers continued to hand mold bricks through the end of the century. The most popular innovation among Philadelphia-area brickmakers was the brick press. Samuel Fox (1777–1870) had one in his yard in 1838, a simple machine that allowed hand-molded brick to be pressed a second time to make a denser and more uniform block. By 1850, several local yards reported having presses, and Philadelphia became the leading producer of pressed bricks, commonly used for front façades and decorative purposes.

At the close of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was producing about 220 million bricks annually. High demand for housing along with the high shipping costs for heavy material meant that it was much more economical to use locally made bricks. In 1903, Pennsylvania, led by Philadelphia, ranked second in the nation as a producer of clay products (behind Ohio), but it ranked first in the manufacture of common bricks and pressed bricks. New Jersey was not far behind, ranking fifth. Delaware, on the other hand, did not have a significant brickmaking industry.

Brickmaking declined in the twentieth century, however, and disappeared from the region by the twenty-first century. The turn of the twentieth century brought competition in the form of concrete and other building materials and new architectural styles. Concrete blocks—one eight-inch-wide concrete block could take the place of twelve bricks—began to displace bricks in foundation walls and as backup for wall facings. Brick usage decreased dramatically after the 1920s. In some areas, clay deposits had been depleted. By the mid-twentieth century, most brick manufacturers in the region had ceased operations. By the twenty-first century the region had many wholesalers that supplied brick and other masonry for construction, but it no longer was home to any active manufacturers, who operated primarily in the South and South Central United States.

Philadelphia’s built environment, however, continued to proclaim the city’s proud history as the nation’s leading brickmaking city into the twenty-first century. Without its many distinctive brick buildings, Philadelphia would lose much of the character its residents and visitors have come to enjoy.

Sarah K. Filik is a graduate of Rutgers College and obtained an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has been a board member of the Sayreville (N.J.) Historical Society for several years. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Tamara Gaskell is Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities and co-editor of The Public Historian. Previously, she was editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and Pennsylvania Legacies, while director of publications at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and an assistant editor of the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Before 1750 the majority of clockmakers in the colonies were trained in England. However, Pennsylvania in particular became noted for the influence of German designs on its clock production. Although English Quakers dominated Philadelphia, William Penn’s “holy experiment” attracted tens of thousands of settlers from Germany, Switzerland, and Ireland. These immigrants included many skilled artisans from northern Europe, including clockmakers, making Pennsylvania a prime site for producing high-quality clocks.

One of the earliest clocks to make its way to the Philadelphia region was the “Dial of Ahaz,” named after the King of Judah who supposedly invented the sundial in the eighth century B.C.E. The Ahaz sundial was made by Christopher Schissler (ca. 1531-1608) in Germany in 1578 and arrived some time before 1700 with a mystical religious group known as the Pietists or the Hermits of the Ridge. This group, dissatisfied with Protestant and Catholic ritual and led by Johannes Kelpius (1667-1708), came to Pennsylvania in 1694 and settled in Germantown. The group’s interests in mathematics and the astronomy used to calculate the time of the millennium made them prime candidates for clockmaking.

The Eminent Christopher Witt

An entire school of clockmakers trained under another Pietist, Christopher Witt (1675-1765), who arrived in Germantown in 1704 and began making clocks as early as 1706. It is believed that Witt gave the Dial of Ahaz to Benjamin Franklin as a gift. Witt went on to apprentice another important clockmaker in the German tradition, Christopher Sauer (1695-1758). A brass dial, tall-case clock made by Sauer around 1735 became the earliest American-made clock in the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania clock production was set apart from New England by the high quality and individual construction of the tall case clock, a design that consisted of parts often made separately in England, France, and America. These included a case, dial, and mechanism and required collaborative work among cabinetmakers, iron founders, engravers, braziers, ornamental painters, and mathematicians. The weight-and-pendulum design housed in a tall case became known as a “grandfather clock,” the name of which can be traced to a Philadelphia songwriter. In 1876, Henry Clay Work (1832-84) wrote these lyrics: “My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf so it stood twenty years on the floor.” In Pennsylvania, clocks were a symbol of family and stability, often passed down as important heirlooms through generations.

Businesses and government relied on clocks to facilitate meeting times and to regulate working hours. As business and trade increased, the variability of watches necessitated the construction of a public clock. The first of these in Philadelphia was housed in the old courthouse built in 1710 at Market and Second Streets. Made by English clockmaker Peter Stretch (1670-1746), the device told time aurally by ringing a bell.

As the city grew and the center of town shifted farther west, Philadelphia needed a new public clock. According to legend, Benjamin Franklin asked his friend Edward Duffield to make a clock for public display after growing tired of being constantly stopped by workmen on the street wishing to know the time. At this time, personal watches were still a luxury item. Duffield’s clock hung outside his shop at Second and Arch Streets from the 1740s until the Revolutionary War. In 1753, a new public clock was installed at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall). The clock faces on the building’s east and west gable ends were made by Peter Stretch’s son, Thomas (1697-1765). It was not until 1828 that a clock designed and constructed by Isaiah Lukens (1779-1846) and Joseph Saxton (1799-1873) was installed in a new tower, built to replace the long-demolished original.

David Rittenhouse

When David Rittenhouse moved from Germantown to Philadelphia in 1770, clock making continued to be his chief source of income. Rittenhouse made approximately seventy-five clocks in his lifetime and, in a distinctly Pennsylvania tradition, each was unique. Thomas Jefferson described one Rittenhouse orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, as “a machine far surpassing in ingenuity of contrivance, accuracy, and utility, anything of the kind ever before constructed. …He has indeed made a world, but by imitation approached nearer its Maker than many man who has lived from the creation to this day.” The orrery’s clockwork mechanism represented a view of an orderly, clockwork universe, something essential to the values and ideals of the new republic.

By the 1820s clocks ceased to be a luxury item and became so common that they were considered just another piece of household furniture. Around 1835, the Pennsylvania tall clock began to be supplanted by the cheaper, mass-produced New England shelf clock. Consequently, the definition of “clockmaker” began to shift. Various individuals who had no part in the final construction of a clock and who had no knowledge of its mechanisms could separately manufacture individual parts. Under this division of labor, a clockmaker referred primarily to a tradesman who polished a clock’s teeth and steel parts and adjusted the mechanism to maintain accurate timekeeping.

While mass production of clocks flourished in New England, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware remained known for a tradition of artisanal clocks of the highest quality and individual character. In Delaware, between 1740 and 1840, forty-five clock and cabinetmakers had establishments in Wilmington alone. In New Jersey, notable clockmakers included Isaac Brokaw (1746-1826) in Elizabethtown and Aaron Dodd Crane (1804-1860) in Newark. Brokaw was known for his handcrafted clock pieces, down to the hand hammering of brass dials. Crane published several patents for improving clock mechanisms and the market for his clocks extended as far as New York and Boston. These tall case clocks illustrated and reflected the diverse and collaborate nature of the wider Philadelphia region’s artisanal and scientific communities.

Influence of Mass Production

With the proliferations of mass-produced clocks and smaller, inexpensive watches at the beginning of the twentieth century, artisanal clock production slowed. However, public clocks continued to play an important role in shaping the landscape of Philadelphia. The synchronization of time became necessary to coordinate and regularize the flow of rail travel, leading to the 1893 implementation of Standard Railway Time across the United States. Public clocks in Philadelphia could be seen at its many transportation hubs, including the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station built in 1881. In 1892, a twenty-one-foot Victorian-style clock stood at Broad and Chestnut Streets in front of the ticket office for the Reading and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads. After being moved to Twelfth and Chestnut Streets in 1901, the timepiece was nicknamed “Lover’s Clock” since it was used as a meeting place for couples on dates.

Public clocks dramatically shaped the iconography of Philadelphia’s skyline. The city’s most iconic timepiece, the fifty-ton clock at City Hall, 362 feet above Broad and Market Streets, was the largest and highest in the world when installed and put to service at midnight December 31, 1898. Time could be determined from approximately a mile away, allowing citizens to adjust their home clocks to official Philadelphia time. The 150 incandescent light bulbs that illuminated the clock were originally bright white. By the 1940s, the plate glass of the clock faces were yellowed by sulfurous coal smoke, producing the now-iconic amber glow of the City Hall clock. In 1963, the city officially changed the cleaned bulbs to a tinted yellow color, creating the most recognizable fixture of the Philadelphia skyline. Several blocks north on Broad Street, the four-faced clock atop the Inquirer Building, the tallest building north of City Hall when constructed in 1924, could be seen from miles away. Even after cheap wristwatches and cell phones replaced the need for the manufacture of clocks, the public clocks of Philadelphia continued to define the city’s landscape and iconography.

Michelle Smiley is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation considers the history of photography and its technological development in the United States. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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

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

Flour Inspection Act

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

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

Area Reigned Until 1815

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

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

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

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

The earliest craftsmen in “Penn’s Woods” had ready access to an abundance of native trees suitable for cabinetmaking as well as imported tropical hardwoods—especially mahogany—due to Philadelphia’s role as a major port city. Walnut, cherry, and maple were the primary native woods of choice, with tulip poplar, pine, cedar, and oak frequently used as secondary woods for drawer sides, bottoms, back boards, and the like. From these materials came an astonishing range of products made by more than 440 cabinetmakers, joiners, chair makers, carvers, carpenters, and turners who were active in Philadelphia and its environs between 1682 and the 1760s.

Furniture, account books, and drawings survive to document cabinetmaking during Philadelphia’s first decades. Most workshops were fairly small at this time, run by the master cabinetmaker with the assistance of several apprentices and possibly a journeyman. The earliest known signed and dated example of Philadelphia furniture is an escritoire or desk-and-bookcase dated 1707 and stamped by Edward Evans (1679-1754). Raised on a farm along the east bank of the Delaware River in West New Jersey, Evans completed his apprenticeship in 1704. His clients included William Penn (1644-1718), who paid him £7 for making a chest of drawers, and prominent merchants including Isaac Norris, James Logan, and William Trent. One of the best documented joiners of this early period, John Head (1688-1754), kept an account book that can be linked to surviving objects, including dressing tables, high chests, and clock cases. In a notebook, English joiner John Widdefield (1673-1720), who immigrated to Philadelphia by 1705, documented the production of items such as spice boxes as well as instructions on everything from sharpening tools to making coffins and clock cases.

Many of the cabinetmakers who worked during this early period trained their sons in the trade, in some cases establishing multigenerational woodworking dynasties. For example, woodturner Jacob Schumacher (Shoemaker) Sr., a Quaker and one of the earliest settlers of Germantown, emigrated from Mainz, Germany, in 1683 and moved to Philadelphia about 1715. In 1722 he bequeathed his woodturning tools to his son Jacob Shoemaker Jr. (1692–1772), a joiner/turner whose son Jonathan Shoemaker (1726–1793) became a cabinetmaker. Another multi-generational workshop originated with joiner Joseph Claypoole (1677-1744), and extended to his sons Josiah Claypoole (1716/17-1757) and George Claypoole (1706-93) and grandson George Claypoole Jr. (1733-93).

Emigré Carvers

Philadelphia’s cabinetmaking trade expanded greatly during the mid to late 1700s, leading to increasingly sophisticated craftsmanship and specialization. Highly skilled emigré carvers helped elevate Philadelphia furniture and architectural woodwork to new heights, and the work of London cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale (1718-79), who in 1754 published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director, influenced many designs. Two of these craftsmen, Hercules Courtenay (c. 1744-84) and John Pollard (1740-87), worked in the shop of Benjamin Randolph (1721-91), one of the foremost cabinetmakers in colonial Philadelphia. His shop was located on Chestnut Street, identified as the Sign of the Golden Ball beginning in 1769. Randolph’s shop produced both the lap desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and, together with Thomas Affleck (1740-95), the ornate furnishings for the Philadelphia town house of John Cadwalader (1742-86). Other prominent city woodworkers included Samuel Harding (?- 1758), Nicholas Bernard (?-1789), Martin Jugiez (?-1815), Jonathan Gostelowe (1744-1806), and Daniel Trotter (1747-1800).

Some of the most celebrated pieces of Philadelphia furniture were crafted during this period, including a high chest made in 1769 for Michael Gratz (1740-1811) and his wife Miriam Simon (1749-1806), prominent members of Philadelphia’s Jewish community. Made of highly figured mahogany with ornately carved foliate-and-shell motifs and pierced chinoiserie brasses, the Gratz high chest is an extraordinary example of Philadelphia furniture. Its elaborate scrollwork, sinuous curves, asymmetrical designs, and naturalistic motifs including shells and flowers, epitomize the rococo or late Baroque style that was popular in America during the mid to late 1700s.

Philadelphia’s diverse furniture makers—which included English Protestants, German Lutherans, French Catholics, Welsh Quakers, and others—developed a furniture tradition that was more regionally specific than it was to any one ethnic group. They generally conformed to a standard design aesthetic rather than developing their own more individualized expressions. For example, Philadelphia Chippendale chairs typically have certain construction features such as side rails that are tenoned through the rear stiles and two-part vertical glue blocks—regardless of the maker’s ethnicity. Outside the city, many cabinetmakers drew on Philadelphia styles, but others developed highly localized forms of decoration and construction techniques. In Lancaster County, for example, Pennsylvania German woodworkers inlaid some of their furniture with molten pewter or sulfur. Other craftsmen of Germanic heritage made painted chests decorated with images of flowers, birds, and even unicorns and camels. Typical Germanic construction techniques included the use of wooden pegs (rather than nails) to attach drawer bottoms and moldings as well as the insertion thin wooden wedges into the pins of dovetail joints for a tighter fit. Quaker cabinetmakers, primarily working in southern Chester County, embellished some of their work with line-and-berry inlay. Their construction practices reflected common English construction methods, including a preference for nails rather than wooden pegs.

Although well-documented examples are limited, consumers made a variety of choices about their furniture. In Philadelphia, affluent and status-conscious consumers were first and foremost concerned with acquiring suitably fashionable furnishings for their homes. It probably did not matter much to them how the objects were constructed, so long as they were well-built and suitable in overall appearance. Research into the city’s German population has suggested some preference for patronizing German craftsmen, but many of the best-documented objects made and owned by Philadelphia Germans show no trace of the owner or maker’s ethnic background. By furnishing their houses with fashionable furniture, elite Pennsylvania Germans were not rejecting their German heritage so much as they were expressing their social status.

Specialization and Diversification

Increasing competition among craftsmen prompted the 1772 printing of Prices of Cabinet and Chair Work, an attempt by Philadelphia joiners to standardize retail prices and journeymen’s wages. Competition also spurred specialization and diversification. For example, Welsh Quaker cabinetmaker David Evans (1748-1819), who lived and worked at 115 Arch Street, began to batch-produce coffins and Venetian blinds in the late 1780s. Leonard Kessler (1736-1804), a German Lutheran who made furniture for leading German families such as the Muhlenbergs, became an undertaker and invested in a potash works. William Savery (1721/22-87) became one of the city’s foremost chair makers. While Savery made primarily slat-back, rush seat chairs, other craftsmen such as Thomas Gilpin (1700-66), Francis Trumble (c. 1716-98), and Joseph Henley Sr. (c. 1743-1796) specialized in Windsor chairs. Philadelphia became such a center of Windsor chair making that venture cargoes were shipped to other colonies and the Caribbean.

The decades following the American Revolution, 1790-1820, saw the rise of a lighter, classically-inspired style influenced by the publication of George Hepplewhite’s Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide in 1788 and Thomas Sheraton’s Cabinet Maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book three years later. In Philadelphia, which served as the nation’s capital during the 1790s, leading cabinetmakers such as Adam Hains (1768-1846), Henry Connelly (1770-1826), John Aitken (?-1839), and Joseph Barry (1757-1838) readily adopted the new Federal style. An influx of French refugees also ushered in a vogue for furniture in the French taste.

During the Federal period, Philadelphia also became home to a small but highly important group of piano makers, many of whom first trained as joiners. In 1789, German émigré Carl or Charles Albrecht (c. 1760-1848) built the earliest known American-made piano. A prolific maker, by 1798 Albrecht had produced at least ninety-three pianos in his shop at 95 Vine Street for clients including Peter Muhlenberg (1746-1807) of Philadelphia; Peter Dieffenbach (1755-1838) of Berks County, Pennsylvania; and Abner Lord (1760-1821), a Connecticut native who moved to Marietta, Ohio, about 1800. More than twenty examples survived into the twenty-first century in museum and private collections.

Advances in transportation between 1820 and 1840, including improved roads, new canals, and the introduction of railroads, created new or expanded markets for goods throughout the United States. Philadelphia’s cabinetmaking trade grew significantly, propelled by more than 2,100 furniture makers, including 1,290 cabinetmakers, 300 chairmakers, and 250 turners. The output of these craftsmen—nearly 130,000 pieces of furniture, mostly chairs—reached far beyond Philadelphia to about fifty domestic cities and twenty abroad. New merchandising techniques, particularly wholesaling and furniture showrooms, also developed. Retailers could purchase ready-made furniture and ship it to distant locations for resale, while consumers could acquire furniture that was already made rather than ordering, and waiting, for pieces made to order.

Apprentice System Erodes

With increasing production, the traditional apprenticeship system began to erode. Master cabinetmakers increasingly directed the work of journeymen and apprentices rather than making furniture themselves. Conflicts over wages and increasing use of unskilled labor led to strikes in 1796 and 1825. In 1829, the Society of Journeyman Cabinetmakers, founded in 1806 as a benevolent organization, revised its constitution and pushed for set minimum wages and an eleven-hour working day. Unsuccessful in these efforts, the society founded a cooperative furniture wareroom in 1834; it soon became one of the largest furniture retail stores in Philadelphia.

Immigration also continued to shape the trade. Beginning in the 1830s, a new influx of Germans included many skilled cabinetmakers; by 1850, more than one-third of Philadelphia’s cabinetmakers were German-born. Foremost among them was Daniel Pabst (1826-1910), who helped usher in a vogue for curvilinear, rococo revival furniture.

The Philadelphia furniture industry prospered through the late 1800s, but it faced increasingly stiff competition from other regions, including New York, North Carolina, and Michigan. With its highly diversified array of small- to medium-scale industries, Philadelphia became known as the “Workshop of the World” by the early 1900s. But as mass production and marketing gave consumers access to standardized, inexpensive goods made by domestic and global manufacturers, the city’s furniture industry declined and virtually disappeared by the mid-1900s. By the 1970s even the Philco company, renowned for making high quality audio systems housed in “Mastercraft” furniture cabinets, switched to cheaper wood composites and faux wood components made of vinyl and plastic. The radios were also replaced with imports from Taiwan.

Not all furniture making switched to an industrial scale. Followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, part of a larger reaction to the industrial revolution that emerged in the late 1800s, advocated for a return to handcraftsmanship. In the early 1900s, members of the Rose Valley Association (a utopian living experiment in Media, Pennsylvania) made furniture—much of it with heavy carving in the Gothic style—for their own use and to sell to wealthy clients in the Greater Philadelphia area. Several decades later, craftsmen such as Wharton Esherick (1887-1970) and George Nakashima (1905-1990) found success making studio furniture in the mid-1900s and beyond. Their innovative designs combined naturalistic forms and use of figured woods with traditional joinery techniques—continuing Philadelphia’s longstanding heritage in cabinetmaking.

Lisa Minardi is an assistant curator at Winterthur Museum and a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where she is studying the German population of early Philadelphia for her dissertation. Her publications include numerous books and articles on Pennsylvania furniture, architecture, and folk art. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Moravian craftsmen who immigrated to colonial Philadelphia brought their skills as makers of instruments, from church organs to stringed instruments. One of the first keyboard instrument makers in the colonies, Johann Gottlob Klemm (1690–1762), immigrated to Philadelphia in 1733. Six years later, he made and signed a spinet, the earliest known American-made keyboard instrument. That same year Klemm completed an organ for the Swedish Lutheran Church (Gloria Dei) of Philadelphia.

With music an expected part of both Moravian and Lutheran worship, their churches were among the first to acquire organs. St. Michael’s Lutheran Church of Philadelphia dedicated an organ imported from Germany in 1751. By comparison Christ Church (an Anglican congregation) acquired an organ in 1728 from Ludwig Christian Sprogel (1683–1729), but it had failed by 1739 and the congregation did not acquire a new organ—built by Moravian craftsman Philip Feyring (1730–67) —until 1766. St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, which had numerous German members, also had an organ by 1748. Klemm also worked with the Swedish émigré Gustavus Hesselius (1682–1755), a painter, on an organ commission for the Moravian Church in Bethlehem. In addition to the Moravians, English instrument-maker Dr. Christopher Witt (1675–1765), who joined a German Pietist group of Mystics living along the Wissahickon Creek in 1704, sold an organ, possibly one that he had built, to St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Germantown in 1742.

Stringed instruments made by John Antes (1740–1811), a Moravian composer and instrument maker in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, included three examples that survived in museums and private collections: a violin dated 1759, a cello dated 1763, and a viola dated 1764. Among brass instruments, trombones had special meaning for Moravians as the instrument named in Luther’s German translation of the Bible as accompanying the word of God. Trombones typically came from Europe, however, because of the scarcity of sizable quantities of brass in the colonies.

Skills of the Instrument Maker

The making of keyboard instruments, essentially a highly specialized area of furniture production (joinery), required both technical expertise and detailed knowledge of many wood species. For example, mitered dovetail joints typically concealed all evidence of the joinery in a piano frame, which was usually built of solid mahogany to withstand the enormous strain exerted by the tension of the strings. Many instrument makers first trained as joiners and later specialized in building instruments. Both Klemm and his protégé David Tannenberg (1728–1804) worked initially as joiners before taking up instrument making. With nearly fifty organs to his credit, Tannenberg became the most renowned organ builder in early America. Keyboard instruments were complicated to build; a large organ could take a year or more to finish, while a piano might take one hundred or more working days depending on its complexity.

Most keyboard instruments in colonial American homes were in the harpsichord family, in which the strings are plucked. Their volume and tone could only be varied in limited fashion. By the late 1700s, pianos surpassed harpsichords. Distinguished by the use of small hammers that strike the strings, a piano’s sound is controlled by varying the pressure on the keys. The earliest known reference to a piano made in America appeared in Philadelphia in 1775 when Johann Michael Behrent (?-1780) announced that he had “just finished for sale, an extraordinary instrument, by the name of PIANOFORTE, of Mohogany, in the manner of an harpsichord, with hammers.”

Charles Albrecht (c. 1760–1848), a German, immigrated to Philadelphia in the mid-1780s and worked as a joiner. By 1789, his work included a mahogany piano later preserved in the collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent—the oldest known American-made piano. In 1792, Albrecht offered for sale “TWO new and elegant PIANO FORTES which he will warrant to be good.”  By 1798, Albrecht’s shop made at least ninety-three pianos, more than twenty of which survived into the twenty-first century. Later examples feature gilded and painted floral decoration on the nameboards, likely made by an ornamental painter. Albrecht employed numerous apprentices and journeymen, including Joshua Baker (b. 1773) and Charles Deal (b. 1793), but he also advertised pianos imported from London in 1799, 1800, and 1802.  His brother, George Albrecht (?-1802), also made pianos in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

By the 1790s instrument makers working in Philadelphia included the Scottish immigrant Charles Taws (c. 1742–1836), who moved to the city from New York. Taws began advertising in 1790, when he offered for sale “of his own manufacture, a few elegant and well toned Piano Fortes.” Listed in the Philadelphia city directories first as an “organ builder” and in subsequent years as a musical instrument maker, in 1793 Taws advertised his pianos as “superior to any imported” from London or Dublin. By 1805, however, Taws began advertising imported London pianos, which he praised as superior to local products, and in 1813 he derided “HOME MADE instruments.” Given the limited market for pianos, touting imported models as less expensive and of higher quality than locally made ones was evidently advantageous for business owners such as Albrecht, Taws, and others.

Beyond Philadelphia

Instrument makers also worked in smaller urban centers and towns outside of Philadelphia, including Wilmington, Delaware, and Lancaster, New Holland, Shaefferstown, Reading, and Nazareth in Pennsylvania. In 1839, the German émigré guitar maker Christian Frederick Martin (1796–1873) relocated his six-year-old business from New York City to Nazareth. An early Moravian settlement founded in 1740, Nazareth remained the headquarters and principal factory location for the C.F. Martin & Company into the twenty-first century.

Philadelphia dominated the American piano trade in the early nineteenth century, and in 1830 could boast of eighty piano makers. Skilled instrument makers included new influxes of German immigrants, among them Christian Frederick Lewis Albrecht (1788–1843), who in 1823 opened a shop in Philadelphia (no connection between him and Charles Albrecht is known). During the 1820s, the company known as Loud & Brothers, started by London immigrant Thomas Loud Evenden (1792–1866) and family members, led the local piano industry. In 1824 alone, the firm made an astonishing 680 pianos at its Philadelphia manufactory on Chestnut Street. By 1831 Loud & Brothers also made upright pianos. As the nineteenth century progressed, the company also made the pump organs that became a staple element of genteel Victorian parlors.

Philadelphia soon lost ground to New York and Boston, however. In 1829, approximately 2,500 pianos were built in the United States: Philadelphia made the largest number, nine hundred, followed by eight hundred made in New York and seven hundred in Boston. The locus of the piano industry shifted with the emergence of major manufacturers in Philadelphia’s rival cities. In New York, German immigrant Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (1797–1871) founded Steinway & Sons in 1853. Boston also became a major production center, led by Alpheus Babcock (1785–1842), who moved there from Philadelphia in 1837.

On a gradually smaller scale, Philadelphia continued to produce pianos. C.F.L. Albrecht’s company lived on after his death in 1843 and in 1887 was acquired by Blasius & Sons; they continued to make pianos into the 1920s. Other major firms included the Philadelphia Piano Manufacturing Company of Hunt, Felton & Co., which operated by the 1850s at 211 N. Third Street. In 1891, Irish émigré Patrick J. Cunningham (?–1941) founded the Cunningham Piano Company, with a factory at Fiftieth and Parkside Avenue and show room at Eleventh and Chestnut Streets. After thriving for several decades, the company ceased production in the 1930s when demand for luxury pianos plummeted during the Depression. After World War II, Louis Cohen, a former employee, bought the company and relocated it to Germantown. There, the business focused on piano restoration rather than manufacture. In 2000 Cunningham resumed selling new pianos, assembled in China from parts made in Italy, Japan, Germany, and other countries.

After piano manufacturing declined in the 1900s, particularly during the Depression era, some Philadelphia companies developed a new niche in the restoration of musical instruments. Others became importers of foreign-made musical instruments. These businesses remained in the twenty-first century as the remnants of Philadelphia’s once-leading role in the production of American musical instruments.

Lisa Minardi is executive director of Historic Trappe and the Lutheran Archives Center at Philadelphia. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where she is studying the German community of early Philadelphia for her dissertation. Her publications include numerous books and articles on Pennsylvania furniture, architecture, and folk art. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Skilled papermakers, including William Rittenhouse (1644–1708), a German-born Dutch Mennonite, and Thomas Willcox (c. 1689–1779), an English Catholic, were among the immigrants who came to southeastern Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. Rittenhouse settled near Germantown, where fellow Mennonites had founded a community and the Wissahickon Creek and its tributaries provided water power for papermaking. Willcox settled in Concord Township, Chester County (later part of Delaware County), where Chester Creek provided the same. In addition to their importance in early American papermaking, both men were religious leaders in their communities.

William Rittenhouse established British America’s first paper mill on the Monoshone Creek, a tributary to the Wissahickon, in 1690. It was the only paper mill in the colonies for twenty years. Claus Rittenhouse (1666–1734), William’s son, managed the mill with his father and became its proprietor following his father’s death. In 1710, Claus’s brother-in-law, William DeWeese (1677–1745), also a Dutch immigrant, built a second paper mill on the Wissahickon Creek nearby. Claus and several partners purchased the mill from DeWeese in 1713, while DeWeese and his son went on to build other paper mills in the Germantown area in the 1730s and 1740s. Several generations of the Rittenhouse family made paper at the original mill site through the mid-nineteenth century. Later renamed Historic Rittenhouse Town, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992.

The colonies’ third paper mill was that of Thomas Willcox (c. 1689–1779), who in 1729 built what became known as Ivy Mills on Chester Creek in Concord Township, Chester County. Willcox was a key supplier of paper to Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and other local printers. He and his descendants later specialized in making currency for colonial governments, the United States Treasury, and various South American and European countries. They also made checks for major banks. The Willcox family built another paper mill in nearby Glen Mills in 1836 and ran Ivy Mills until it closed in 1866. The Ivy Mills site, including the mill ruins and surviving nineteenth-century houses, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Expanding Industry

Philadelphia’s rapidly growing population in the eighteenth century created a major demand for paper. By 1739 there were five paper mills in southeastern Pennsylvania; ten years later there were eleven. Powered by the region’s many waterways and the developing technical expertise of its mill operators, the Philadelphia area remained the center of America’s papermaking industry throughout the colonial period. Of the twenty-six paper mills operating in the thirteen colonies by 1769, twenty were in the Philadelphia area. Domestic production was not enough to meet local demand, however; most paper was imported in the eighteenth century.

Colonial Philadelphia was an important publishing center, and the city’s printers and publishers often had financial stakes in local paper mills to ensure a reliable source of paper for their businesses. Pennsylvania’s first printer, William Bradford (1663–1752), was a partner in the 1690 Rittenhouse mill, which was originally a partnership between Rittenhouse, Bradford, and two others before Rittenhouse bought out the other three. Germantown printer Christopher Sauer (1695–1758), the first German-language publisher in North America, and his son owned or had an interest in several mills in the Philadelphia area, while Benjamin Franklin was affiliated with at least four local paper mills by the late 1740s.

Another related industry was the manufacture of paper moulds, the screened frames used in early papermaking. Philadelphia engineer Nathan Sellers (1751–1830) began making paper moulds as early as 1776. The firm he established with his brother in 1779, N & D Sellers, was the nation’s primary manufacturer of paper moulds through the early nineteenth century. Sellers was a leading figure in a group of Philadelphia-area mechanical engineers and inventors that made the region a key center of technological innovation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Papermaking was one of many industries that saw major mechanical breakthroughs through the efforts of this group.

Innovation and Automation

Paper was generally made by hand in America until the introduction of mechanized production in the early nineteenth century. In 1816, Thomas Gilpin (1776–1853) patented the nation’s first papermaking machine and the following year put it into operation at his family’s Brandywine Paper Mill, which had been established in 1787 by Thomas’s brother Joshua Gilpin (1765–1841) on the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware. Thomas constructed the machine based on English models, using information provided by Joshua, who had toured Europe in the early nineteenth century and sent back materials on new papermaking technologies being developed in England. Early on, the Gilpins conferred with Benjamin Franklin on developments in the industry and later they supplied paper to another prominent Philadelphia publisher, Mathew Carey (1760–1839). The Sellers family also played a key role in the mechanization of papermaking. Coleman Sellers (1781–1834), Nathan’s son, took over the N & D Sellers firm in 1817 and invented various papermaking devices in the 1820s and a complete papermaking machine in 1832. By the 1830s, machine-based production had largely replaced traditional hand papermaking in America.

Although machines replaced water power in this period, paper makers continued to establish mills on waterways. A number of paper mills operated during the nineteenth century along the Brandywine Creek and its tributaries, running through central Chester County and northern Delaware. In 1833, James Guie (?-1893) opened the mill later known as Eagle Paper Mill on Beaver Creek, a tributary to the Brandywine Creek near Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Specializing in waterproof buckskin paper, the mill remained in operation for over 100 years. In 1843, Augustus Jessup (1797-1859) and his son-in-law Bloomfield Moore (1819-78) started the Jessup and Moore Paper Company on the lower Brandywine Creek in Kentmere, Delaware, not far from the Gilpin’s Brandywine Paper Mill. Jessup and Moore acquired other paper mills, both along the lower Brandywine and throughout the greater Philadelphia region, and the company eventually became one of the largest makers of book and magazine paper in the nation.

Demand for paper grew dramatically in the antebellum period, as America’s printing and publishing houses, many based in Philadelphia, produced an increasing number of newspapers, magazines, and books. Paper mills were established throughout the greater Delaware Valley to meet the demand. The Roxborough-Manayunk area became an especially important papermaking center in this period. This part of the city saw dramatic industrialization in the early nineteenth century, with the Schuylkill River and Manayunk Canal powering textile, paper, and other mills that were later converted to steam-production. Among the major paper producers in this area were the Flat Rock Paper Mill, owned by the Nixon family (descendants of William Rittenhouse); the Wissahickon Paper Mill, owned by the Megargee family; and the McDowell Paper Mills. All were family-run operations that were established in the 1820s through 1840s and continued in various capacities into the early twentieth century. Family members built new mills or established partnerships with other mills in the region over the years, resulting in a web of interrelated family-run paper businesses throughout the greater Philadelphia area.

The introduction of paper made from wood pulp in the 1860s transformed the American paper industry. Paper had traditionally been made from cotton or linen rags, which were pulverized into fibers that were then formed into paper. Papermakers depended on rag collectors for their raw materials, and rags were often in short supply. In some cases, they were actually imported. Wood pulp proved a cheaper and more plentiful raw material and largely replaced rag-made paper over the course of the late nineteenth century, although straw was also used as a raw material. The American Wood Paper Company built the Manayunk Pulp Works adjacent to the Flat Rock Paper Mill in 1864. Martin Nixon (1818–88), part owner of the Flat Rock mill, managed the new pulp works.

Transition and Specialization

The industry’s transition from rag to wood pulp production coincided with Philadelphia’s decline as the nation’s preeminent papermaking center. Much of the paper industry’s growth in the late nineteenth century occurred in New York and New England, particularly Holyoke, Massachusetts, which became known as “The Paper City.” While no longer the national leader, the Philadelphia area continued to support a significant papermaking sector. In 1880 there were seven paper mills in Philadelphia, employing 452 workers; in 1912, there were eight, four in the Roxborough-Manayunk area. Among the largest were the McDowell and Dill & Collins mills. The latter firm had a mill in Port Richmond and also took over the Flat Rock mill. There were also dozens of paper mills operating in the surrounding counties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Philadelphia was also an important center for specialty papermakers, including manufacturers of wallpaper and roofing paper in the nineteenth century, and later, in the twentieth century, cardboard, toilet tissue, and paper towels. Scott Paper, founded by brothers Edward Irvin (1846–1931) and Clarence (1848–1912) Scott in Philadelphia in 1879, was among the nation’s largest makers of toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues for much of the twentieth century. From 1971 to the mid-1990s the company headquarters was in Tinicum Township, Delaware County. John Connelly (1905–90) worked in the Philadelphia plant of Container Corporation of America in the 1940s before starting Connelly Container, a very successful cardboard box–making company, originally located on the site of the former McDowell Paper Mill in Manayunk. Both Scott Paper and Connelly Container eventually stopped local manufacturing operations and were acquired by other companies in the 1990s.

By the early twenty-first century, most of the Philadelphia-area paper mills had closed, leaving only a few major papermakers in the region. Newman Paper Board Company, established in 1919 and located on the Delaware River in lower Northeast Philadelphia, remained a family-run business into the early twenty-first century and was Pennsylvania’s leading recycler and supplier of rigid paperboard. Paperworks Industries, established in 2008 through the merger of several paper companies and headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Montgomery County, operated a historic Manayunk paper mill for several years before closing it in 2017.

Although the industry declined in the twentieth century and operated at a fraction of its nineteenth-century heyday, Philadelphia played a key role as the birthplace and longtime center of early American papermaking.

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 from 2011–16 directed a major archival project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the collections of the region’s many small historical repositories.

As early as the 1640s Swedish boat builders fabricated several small craft on the Delaware River in their short-lived New Sweden colony, but large-scale shipbuilding started when William Penn (1644-1718) settled his great proprietary grant of Pennsylvania between 1681-1682 with skilled Quaker artisans and maritime merchants escaping the religious persecution (sufferings) in old Britain and seeking economic opportunity in the New World. In fact, six years before he founded Philadelphia, Penn had helped shipwright James West (d. 1701) develop a small shipyard in 1676 along the Delaware Riverfront in what later became Vine Street in the city of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Penn recruited Welsh, Irish, Scot and English Quaker craftsmen who were involved in shipbuilding in Bristol, England, and more fully along the Thames River, already by 1682 a great center of ship construction and merchant houses. Indeed the Southwark section of London’s Thames riverfront soon gave rise to the Southwark shipbuilding and merchant community along the Delaware riverfront of Philadelphia. When the Philadelphia riverfront became too crowded with merchant docks and buildings for establishment of shipyards, many shipwrights moved a few miles upriver to the Kensington neighborhood that soon rivaled Southwark as a shipbuilding center on the Delaware River.

The first settlers of Penn’s colony turned to shipbuilding as a major industry because they found an abundant supply of trees, particularly live oak for masts, pine for hulls, and pine tar for caulking both across the river in the West New Jersey colony and in the nearby interior of Pennsylvania woodlands. Deposits for iron forging of anchors, nails and other ship parts was discovered nearby. A lucrative trade in lumber, furs, and agricultural products soon developed that demanded the construction of local ships far more cheaply, and in many cases better, than in Britain so that Pennsylvania and West New Jersey merchants across the river might carry on trade to Europe, Africa and the West Indies.

Flurry of Shipbuilding

Demand for merchant ships, particularly scows, sloops, brigs, and schooners, created a flurry of shipbuilding along the Delaware riverfront. By 1720 there were at least a dozen shipyards in Philadelphia and the surrounding waterfront producing wooden sailing ships of up to 300 tons. Around these private yards, workers’ housing, taverns, churches, and shops developed to form a vibrant riverfront community. Leading merchant houses operated docks and warehouses in the neighborhood, creating great wealth for Philadelphia. By 1750, Philadelphia with its cheaper labor, skilled ship carpenters, iron forges, and an abundance of trees had replaced Boston as the major colonial shipbuilding center.

The Colonial era was in some ways the golden age of Philadelphia shipbuilding, with master shipbuilders and carpenters including Joshua Humphreys (1751-1838), Manuel Eyre (1736-1805), the Wharton family, and Penrose brothers designing and building fast coastal sailing ships and Atlantic brigantines. The approach of troubles with Great Britain in the 1760s, though, connected in part to American colonial violations of British navigation laws and maritime regulations, threatened Philadelphia’s shipbuilding primacy. As affairs moved toward protest and then revolt, Philadelphia became the center of a Continental Congress that required naval defense. Benjamin Franklin’s Committee for the Defense of the Delaware raised money for small gunboats of the Pennsylvania Navy to defend the river and city. Meanwhile, the Continental Congress raised money for the Continental and later a U.S. Navy. These developments stimulated Philadelphia shipbuilding that included the construction of many small row gunboats, floating batteries, and even four innovative fast frigates. These frigates, designed by naval architect and Southwark shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys, became the prototype of the U.S. Navy’s first 44-gun frigates such as the Constitution.

British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78 set back Philadelphia shipbuilding. Frigates were burned, gunboats sunk, and tiny riverfront shipyards from Southwark to Kensington closed. But after British evacuation of the Continental capital, shipbuilders returned to construct warships for the revolutionary government. Independence and Philadelphia’s dominance of the China trade gave local shipbuilders, most notably the Grice shipyard, contracts to construct fast China traders and frigates for the U. S. Navy. Indeed, the old Humphreys and Wharton shipyard in Southwark served between 1794 and 1797 as the site for construction of the 1,576-ton, 44-gun frigate United States for the U.S. Navy. In 1801, the Southwark yard became the location of the first Philadelphia Navy Yard.

However, after the brief revival of shipbuilding during the Federalist era, Philadelphia maritime prominence fell on hard times. Britain closed the West Indies trade to American ships. The wars of the French Revolution created problems for American neutral trade. Jefferson and the Republicans advocated a coastal defense and a gunboat navy and refused to fund the deepwater navy of larger warships, while in 1807 instituting an Embargo against all but coastal American shipping. Meanwhile, New York and Baltimore began to take prominence both in trade and in shipbuilding. The War of 1812 momentarily revived Philadelphia’s shipbuilding as private Delaware River shipyards secured contracts for Jeffersonian gunboats and privateers, while the Humphreys and Penrose shipyard, adjacent to the Southwark Navy Yard, constructed gunboats and laid the keel for the 74-gun ship Franklin.

Shipyard Setbacks

Philadelphia had lost its leadership in overseas trade by the time of the War of 1812, and Delaware River shipyards suffered setbacks. Many small privately owned yards simply ceased to construct boats or ships. Nevertheless, a number of early 19th century industrial and economic developments revived Delaware River shipbuilding in the years before the Civil War. An abundant supply of Pennsylvania coal promoted steam powered technology most notably development of the railroad across the river in New Jersey (the Camden and Amboy Railroad) and in Pennsylvania. Moreover, machine shops, iron forges, textile, and other industries blossomed in the region, and much of it contributed to the reorganization of shipyards into larger industrial plants, subcontracting with machine shops, iron and later steel producers. This meant that the small craft shipyards of colonial times would eventually be replaced by larger industrial firms.

The first to recover and adopt a larger corporate organization was the Philadelphia Navy Yard along the Southwark riverfront. With government contracts, the yard was able to build machine shops on site. It meant that the navy yard could experiment with the innovative screw propeller technology of John Ericsson (1803-89), building the trailblazing first propeller driven warship, Princeton. The screw propeller one day replaced all paddle side-wheeled warships that were so vulnerable to cannon fire. At the same time, the yard built two huge covered ship houses that allowed wooden warships to be under construction continually with a year-around skilled workforce protected from the weather. This led to the construction of the largest wooden warship ever built for the U.S. Navy, the 120-gun Pennsylvania, launched in 1837.

Meantime, a private shipbuilding yard was organized by the Cramp family on the Kensington waterfront that would become one of the most important shipyards in Philadelphia and American history. In the years before the Civil War, the William Cramp (1807-79) & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company began assembling wooden sloops, tugs, schooners and passenger ships, many powered by steam. As the Cramp’s yard expanded, it became a modern industrial plant, incorporating all the latest technology in propulsion, steam engines and hull design, and iron siding. It worked with the Philadelphia engineering firms of Merrick and Towne, Reaney & Neafie (and Levy) and Richard Loper (1800-81), the latter a pioneer of contract shipbuilding and an inventor of innovative curved screw propellers for ships. In 1849 Cramps launched Caroline, claimed to be the fastest propeller driven vessel in the world. This also prepared the firm to build one of the first great battleship during the Civil War, New Ironsides, and several innovative iron turret ships (monitors) for the U.S. Navy in its battle against Confederate ironclads. The Philadelphia Navy Yard was not far behind, building monitors and experimenting during the Civil War with steel plating and steam engines. Soon, the government yard (that also housed the U.S. Marine Corps) became overcrowded in the Southwark neighborhood. Shortly after the war the U.S. Navy began to relocate its plant and lay up iron monitors in a wet basin at League Island just down river. After Philadelphia presented the site as a gift in 1868 to the federal government, the U.S. Navy moved the navy yard entirely by the mid-1870s to this island located at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers.

More Decline After Civil War

Post-Civil War Philadelphia suffered a shipbuilding depression. Skilled shipyard workers were laid off, machine shops closed, the Navy Yard was in transition, with no shipbuilding dry dock yet dredged, and the fading of an entire wooden shipbuilding craft. But the Cramp shipyard kept Philadelphia’s shipbuilding industry alive, constructing iron tugs to tow Pennsylvania coal barges, fast propeller-powered steamships, and other commercial vessels. The Kensington yard was, thus, in a perfect position to join the large contracts that the government issued to construct the New Navy to compete in the late 19th-century world of imperialism.

The first shipyard on the Delaware River to benefit from the U.S. drive to compete with European navies to secure overseas empire was actually John Roach’s (1815-87) Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding and Machine Works downriver in Chester, Pennsylvania, supported by the machine shops and industries of Wilmington, Delaware. The yard laid the keels for the “ABCD” warships of the New Navy (Atlanta, Baltimore, Charleston, and Dolphin). The Roach shipbuilding company ran into financial problems, however, and Cramp, with intimate political connections, took over contracts for future iron and steel shipbuilding. Cramp became during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the most significant shipyard in the United States, constructing modern battleships, cruisers, and torpedo boat destroyers for the U.S. Navy and warships for Latin American and Russian contractors. Its corporate organization, subcontracting to dynamic Philadelphia industrial firms and receiving U.S. government support propelled the yard to the center of American naval development. Several U.S. presidents attended ship launchings, attesting to the Philadelphia yard’s political and naval importance. At the same time the Philadelphia firm built innovative modern Atlantic commercial steamships, passenger, and cargo vessels.

By the First World War (1914-18) Cramp was the most important shipbuilding place along the Delaware. But there were major competitors. In 1899, New York shipbuilder and Wilmington, Delaware ship engineer Henry G. Morse (1850-1903) located his New York Shipbuilding Corporation’s shipyard in Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from the old Southwark navy yard. Soon, his innovative template construction and shipbuilding methods began to overshadow the assembly system at the Cramp’s industrial plant. At the same time, the Philadelphia Navy Yard, now on League Island, built modern dry docks, machine shops, and other support facilities, making it competitive with private shipyards. With three great shipyards in the Philadelphia area during World War I it was inevitable that the region would become a major contributor to the naval war effort. Moreover, the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Corporation (founded in 1916) of Marcus Hook, below Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey (later Pusey and Jones) Shipyard of Gloucester City, New Jersey, just below Camden, and the federal shipyard of Pennsylvania on Hog Island, below the city, constructed tankers, cargo ships, and troop transports. Entire shipyard worker communities including Yorkship and Morgan villages in Camden City and Noreg Village (later Brooklawn), Camden County, New Jersey, were founded around the shipbuilding industry. These villages provided homes for laboring families of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European, mostly Polish, descent.

Strike Disruptions

But if war stimulated shipbuilding, the postwar era and accompanying economic depression devastated the industry in Philadelphia. Cramp closed in 1927 in bankruptcy. Owing taxes to the city of Philadelphia, the yard decayed and the plant rotted away. Labor unrest and strikes by shipyard workers unionized under the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America disrupted shipbuilding. Yet, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration kept shipbuilding alive in Philadelphia. The Navy Yard received government contracts for treaty cruisers allowed under the post World War I naval disarmament agreements, and also to modernize old battleships mothballed in the wet basin on League Island. Philadelphia’s commercial port actually prospered during the economic setbacks of the 1930s, with 300 wharves doing business. And, having supported Roosevelt’s presidency, Philadelphia and Camden received funding for naval ship construction both at the New York Shipbuilding company of Camden and the Philadelphia Navy Yard on League Island. As international crises led to a second world war, Philadelphia received more huge contracts to build modern warships, and in 1939, for construction of the first of many Federal Defense Housing projects for shipyard worker housing, including that for African-Americans and women. During the war, shipyard workers also sought housing in rural suburban communities surrounding the overcrowded urban shipbuilding centers of Philadelphia, and Chester, Pennsylvania; Camden, and Gloucester City in New Jersey and the Wilmington, Delaware region.

World War II was arguably the most important period for Philadelphia and Delaware valley shipbuilding as part of its place as the Arsenal of Democracy. The Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over 50,000 workers, including several thousand “Rosie the Riveters.” Indeed, women comprised 16 percent of the shipyard’s workforce. The yard built two great battleships New Jersey and Wisconsin, and over fifty warships including innovative torpedo (PT boats) and fast aircraft carriers. Meanwhile, New York Ship hired more than 30,000 workers who constructed battleships, aircraft carriers, and destroyers. Nearby Camden Forge and RCA Victor of Camden, New Jersey received large contracts to provide forgings and electronics for warships constructed in the greater Philadelphia region. Sun Shipbuilding of Chester expanded to twenty shipways and employed nearly 40,000 workers at its four yards. One of Sun Ship’s yards employed mostly African-Americans

Cramp Shipbuilding Company revived momentarily, as well, with 18,000 employees to produce naval vessels, mostly light cruisers, ocean tugs, and submarines. However, Cramp closed permanently after the war. New York Ship and the Philadelphia Navy Yard stayed alive for years with government contracts. New York Ship built several modern postwar warships, including the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. It launched the first (and only) nuclear-powered merchant ship Savannah and signed government contracts to construct nuclear submarines. New York Ship became the area’s largest postwar employer. However, mismanagement, labor unrest, construction accidents on the carrier, and growing restrictions on building nuclear warships so near a great city led to the closing of the Camden shipyard in 1967, contributing to growing economic and social problems in the city. The South Jersey Port Corporation assumed control of the old shipyard in 1971 and operated it as the Broadway Terminal, handling millions of tons annually of lumber, fresh fruits, scrap metal. Meantime, Sun Ship was sold to the Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Corporation (Penn Ship) and operated until closure in 1989. The former Penn Ship site soon hosted a cargo terminal, casino, racetrack, and a penitentiary.

Military Shipbuilding

The Philadelphia Navy Yard continued to build ships for the U.S. Navy including U.S. Marine Corps assault ships, and received Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) contracts to modernize conventionally powered (non-nuclear) aircraft carriers. But the yard could not support a nuclear navy since during World War II an accident in the uranium enriching plant on base had forecast the potential for a nuclear accident in the Delaware Valley. Without the ability to either build or modernize a nuclear navy, Philadelphia’s navy yard gradually became an outdated relic and closed for shipbuilding in 1996. The city of Philadelphia assumed ownership of the old navy yard in 2000, and in order to provide employment for the thousands of laid off shipyard workers in the region contracted with the Kvaerner shipbuilding corporation of Oslo, Norway to use the large dry docks of the 450-acre closed Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to construct modern tankers and container ships for Exxon and other companies. At the same time, the U.S. Navy leased the old wet basin and part of the former navy yard’s historic center for its Naval Facilities Engineering Command Mid-Atlantic and its Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility to lay up warships, including obsolete battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers for scrapping or removal as historic sites.

Meanwhile, the city of Philadelphia started to develop a plan to transform the 1,000-acre industrial plant on League Island into a multi-purpose post-industrial business, shopping, and tourism park. And, when Kvaerner encountered financial troubles that forced the Norwegian shipbuilder to merge with the Aker shipbuilding firm of Oslo, Norway, the Philadelphia and U.S. governments became partners with the private Norwegian firm to ensure the continuation of shipbuilding along the Delaware River. Soon, Aker began the construction of Aframax tanker hulls for SeaRiver Maritime, Inc. in the two great dry docks at the former navy yard. This public-private partnership to promote the construction of ships on the Delaware River revealed once again how important shipbuilding was and continues to be for the history of the greater Philadelphia region.

Jeffery M. Dorwart is  the author of histories of the Philadelphia Navy Yard; Fort Mifflin of Philadelphia; Naval Air Station Wildwood; Camden and Cape May Counties, New Jersey; Office of Naval Intelligence; Ferdinand Eberstadt and James Forrestal.  Dorwart is Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University.

Known also as cordwainers, a term from the Middle Ages used to describe someone who worked with Spanish leather made at Cordova, Philadelphia shoemakers grew from only a handful in the 1680s to over three hundred by 1774. Demand rose in response to the preference among colonists not to rely on the arrival of European goods as their primary source for footwear. The trade continued to expand throughout the eighteenth century, and by the early 1770s Philadelphia became a center for shoemaking, not only for neighboring colonies, but also for the West Indies.

This reliance on domestic production brought increased social status to Philadelphia’s cordwainers, a position they fought hard to protect throughout the eighteenth century. Faced with outside competition, in 1718 master cordwainers and tailors presented a joint petition to the Common Council of Philadelphia, seeking to protect their crafts within the city. While the Council failed to sanction what would have constituted a guild, cordwainers succeeded in creating such a de facto status for themselves in 1760 with the establishment of the Cordwainers’ Fire Company. Firefighting was the organization’s primary objective, but its limited membership and benefits, limited to thirty craftsmen who had served a regular apprenticeship, and the special fund created to assist in the apprehension of runaway apprentices, served as a way to insulate and concentrate the master cordwainer community.

Shoemaking continued to be one of Philadelphia’s most populous and lucrative trades throughout the eighteenth century. The craft not only contained the largest number of apprentices of any trade throughout the city, but also made up one the largest units during the 1788 Grand Federal Procession, with over three hundred participants. Due in part to expanding markets and building from ideals that began with their fire company, in 1789 master cordwainers formed a society designed to regulate their business and to protect their craft. The main objective was to prevent shoemakers within the city from advertising their prices in pamphlets or newspapers or selling their goods at public markets. The collective interest of master cordwainers now carried beyond the Revolutionary era as they sought to control competition in the market and to prevent the underselling of goods.

The Master-Journeyman Relationship

Traditionally the relationship between the master, who owned the shops, oversaw production, and trained their workers and journeymen, graduated apprentices who labored for wages under nominal supervision with the aspiration of obtaining master status, was one of mutual obligation and respect. Contention between masters and journeymen was not overtly apparent by the early 1790s. For example, in 1791 when a pair of outsiders set up shop in Philadelphia, advertised their prices in city newspapers, and attempted to undersell established cordwainers, both masters and journeymen fought their presence. However, while the masters and journeymen both challenged underselling, which affected both profits and wages, they did so as separate entities, showing early signs of dissension within the craft.

That dissension increased throughout the 1790s as journeymen societies grew within the craft. Once master artisans moved away from the workbench and sought markets outside of Philadelphia, journeymen saw their chances of reaching master status dwindling. Increasingly they viewed their goals within the craft as different from those of the masters.

It was during this period that the shoemaking process began to change. No longer was the product produced by a lone artisan. Mechanization did not impact the shoe industry until the mid-nineteenth-century, but increasingly owners used division of labor and outwork, sending parts of the shoe to be manufactured at home in an effort to increase the pace of production. Master shoemakers, such as John Bedford, began to produce for the larger market, instead of the community and aspired to gain increasing profits, not just competence. Bedford originally owned a small shop located at the corner of Gratzmere and Second Street. As his business grew, he moved his shop to the corner of Ingles and Second Street. Ultimately, he obtained a patent ironbound shoe store and warehouse at Market Street near Ninth Street and began to take orders for boots and shoes in the South. However, when Bedford returned from Charleston with an order of over $4,000, journeymen laid down their tools as they demanded a wage increase for the products to be produced for export. This strike not only halted production, but ultimately forced Bedford to default on a number of orders.

As journeymen societies grew throughout the 1790s they were increasingly successful at gaining wage increases and preventing ”scab workers,” those who agreed to work for lower wages, from entering the trade. In 1799 more than one hundred journeymen walked out when master cordwainers attempted to reduce their wages. The journeymen returned to their benches quickly, however, after an agreement between the two parties reduced the rate deduction to half its original size. Calm existed between the two groups for a half decade but their next clash proved to be one of the most significant moments in nineteenth-century labor history.

A Demand for Higher Wages

In the fall of 1805 journeymen laborers demanded a wage increase not only for export goods, especially those produced for southern markets, but also for the production of expensive boots, which took longer to make. The master cordwainers quickly rejected their petitions. The nearly seven-week strike that followed proved unsuccessful for journeymen shoemakers, as they were ultimately forced to return to their benches at the previous rate. The strike officially came to an end when master cordwainers, including John Bedford, tired of the constant dissension within their craft, took the issue to court. In November 1805 eight journeymen shoemakers were indicted by a Philadelphia grand jury on charges of combining and conspiring to raise wages.

The trial that began the following spring, known as The Commonwealth v. George Pullis, proved to be one of the most influential labor trials in the nineteenth-century. Master cordwainers argued that journeymen societies had formed illegal combinations designed to exact wage increases from employers. More importantly, they argued that the presence of these institutions was a threat to the social and economic stability not only of the city, but also of Pennsylvania as a whole. Due in large part to the presence of Federalist Judge Moses Levy (1757-1826), who proved sympathetic to the master cordwainers, the eight journeymen were ultimately found guilty of illegal combination and conspiracy and were each fined eight dollars. This court case ultimately established a precedent that outlawed collective action by laborers, such as labor unions, and was cited in similar cases throughout the industrial Northeast over the next thirty-five years. The precedent was not overturned until 1842.

Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, shoemaking continued to be one of the most populous professions within the city, while it also provided some of most influential labor leaders in Philadelphia’s history. As the link between master artisans and journeymen devolved into a relationship between business owners and wage earners, conflict within the trade revived. In 1827, cordwainer William Heighton (1800-73) began publishing the Mechanics’ Free Press, one of the nation’s first labor papers, and helped establish the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations (MUTA). In 1828 MUTA leaders, including cordwainer William English, formed a political organization known as the Working Men’s Party to fight for workers’ rights. English continued his work on behalf of Philadelphia laborers by founding the Trades’ Union of Pennsylvania and Mechanic’s Union of Philadelphia in August and November 1833, respectively.

Labor Momentum Ebbs Then Grows

From the Panic of 1837 through the end of the Civil War, labor movements throughout the city and nation lost momentum. Economic depression, nativist politics, and the secession crisis distracted many laborers from the fight for workers’ rights. However, during the last four decades of the nineteenth century shoemakers once again led Philadelphia’s labor movement.

Primary in that stage of organizing was shoemaker Thomas Phillips (1833–1916), who arrived in Philadelphia in 1852 and immediately became active in the city’s labor movement. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s Phillips took the lead in organizing the city’s shoemakers, pushing for an eight-hour day and the establishment of cooperatives. In 1869 he helped establish the Philadelphia lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin, a craft union that began in Milwaukee in 1867. In the early 1870s he became the first shoemaker to join the Knights of Labor and established Local Assembly 64 of that order, the first assembly of shoemakers in Philadelphia. In the late 1880s a rift developed between shoemakers and the Knights of Labor when it refused to support an 1887 strike. The following year Phillips orchestrated the shoemakers’ exit from the organization, becoming the same year the first general president of the newly created Boot and Shoe Workers’ International Labor Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. Phillips grew disgruntled with the lack of support he received as general president, including the organization’s unwillingness to pay his expenses for trips required by the union, and he left the labor movement altogether in 1890.

Shoemaking had one of the longest and most active histories of any trade within the city of Philadelphia. While the trade itself flourished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the labor strife and the labor leaders that emerged from the trade proved to have a lasting impact on this period of Philadelphia’s labor history. From the conspiracy trial of 1806 through the end of the nineteenth century, shoemakers led the fight for workers’ rights, not only in the city, but throughout the nation.

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.)