In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

CHAPTER
TWO
FROM HOLY EXPERIMENT
TO REVOLUTIONARY CITY:
MANUFACTURING IN COLONIAL
AND REVOLUTIONARY PHILADELPHIA
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William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians,
painting by Benjamin West, 1771. Legend
has it that William Penn made a treaty
with the Lenni Lenape, the area’s original
inhabitants, in 1682, soon after arriving in
Pennsylvania. This famous painting, done
almost ninety years later, is not historically
accurate—the people and buildings would
not have looked like they are depicted
here—but the image has become an
important one in Philadelphia history.
ORIGINAL PAINTING IN PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY
OF THE FINE ARTS, PHILADELPHIA.
The history of manufacturing in Philadelphia begins with the city’s founding by William Penn
in 1682. Prior to Penn receiving his royal charter in 1681 from King Charles II of England for
the land that would become Pennsylvania, the area that is now Philadelphia was a sparsely
populated region with perhaps a few hundred inhabitants. These included both the Lenni Lenape
Indians who had been living in the Delaware River Valley for thousands of years and Europeans—
primarily Swedes, Dutch, and English—who had been settling in the region since the late 1630s.
Neither group was engaged in manufacturing per se. While both made things that could be sold
or bartered, they were essentially subsistence societies that survived by farming, hunting and
fishing, and trading. With the exception of a few grist mills built by the Swedes beginning in
the mid-seventeenth century, which were more agricultural than manufacturing operations, the
inhabitants were not engaged in large-scale transforming of raw materials into finished products
for sale or distribution.
That all changed when William Penn arrived in the fall of 1682 and officially founded the
Colony of Pennsylvania and its chief city, Philadelphia. It was at this point that an actual city
began to take shape on the Delaware River, an urban concentration of people, institutions, and
businesses, the latter including manufacturers. Penn was an English nobleman who at a young
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
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