In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

Philadelphians lived in the city’s early years.
William Penn’s original plan for Philadelphia
was for a two-square mile city stretching
one mile north to south from Vine to Cedar
(now South) Streets and two miles east to
west from the Delaware to the Schuylkill
River. Penn anticipated settlers spreading
out over this entire area, occupying spacious
lots from river to river, creating a pleasant
“greene country towne.” The reality was quite
different; everyone wanted to live near the
Delaware River, the city’s primary access to
the world. The result was a much more
compact, densely populated city than Penn
envisioned, with settlement concentrated
within a couple of blocks of the Delaware
River. As the city grew in the colonial period
its populated area expanded westward to
around Sixth Street. This colonial era section,
a bustling urban area in the eighteenth
century, is known today as “Old City.”
(The original two-square mile city was
located within the much larger County of
Philadelphia. In 1854 the city and county
were consolidated and the city boundaries
were expanded to encompass the entire
County of Philadelphia, at which point the
city went from two square miles to its current
size of 128 square miles. This book focuses on
the entire 128 square-mile area that comprises
the present City and County of Philadelphia.
References to “the city” or the “the city proper”
in the pre-1854 period are to the original
two-square mile city; references to “outlying
districts” or “settlements outside the city”
are to areas that are now within the city but
were outside of it prior to 1854.)
There were also various settlements outside
the city where manufacturing took place
in the early years. In 1690 Dutch immigrant
William Rittenhouse established the first
paper mill in America near Germantown,
an area that is now part of Philadelphia but
was then a German settlement on the western
outskirts of the city. It remained the only
paper mill in the American colonies for the
next twenty years. “All sorts of paper are
manufactured here in Germantown,” wrote
William Penn in 1691, “and very good
German linen such as no person of quality
need be ashamed to wear.” As Penn noted,
Germantown was a center of linen manufacture
in the 1690s. Since paper was made from
linen rags in this period, a convenient selfcontained
eco-system developed in which
locally manufactured linen became rag
material for the paper mill once it became too
worn for its original use.
Clearly, there was a good bit of manufacturing
going on in Philadelphia’s earliest years. In
both Goodson’s 1690 list and Germantown’s
linen and paper industries we can, in fact,
see the first manifestations of some of the
hallmarks of Philadelphia manufacturing in
later centuries: a high percentage of workers
engaged in certain industries such as textiles
and food processing, but overall, a sector
that encompassed a variety of interrelated,
mutually supportive manufacturing activities.
All of this activity notwithstanding,
Philadelphia was much more of a mercantile
than a manufacturing city in the colonial
period. Its major businesses were in
commerce and shipping, not in making
things. Its wealthiest men were merchants,
not manufacturers. (“Merchants” in this case
refers not to shop keepers, but to overseas
traders who mostly dealt in large quantities
of goods.) These merchants, many of them
Quakers, exported farm and forest products
from the rich hinterlands surrounding
Philadelphia to Europe and the Caribbean
in exchange for goods from these regions.
@
Rittenhouse Paper Mill, near the site outside
Germantown where William Rittenhouse
built the first paper mill in America in
1690. This photograph, taken in 1889,
shows the fourth mill on the site; the first
mill was washed away in a flood in 1701.
THOMAS H. SHOEMAKER GERMANTOWN AND
PHILADELPHIA PORTRAITS AND VIEWS COLLECTION,
HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA.
CHAPTER TWO
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