In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

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Above: View of the Wakefield hosiery mills
in Germantown, c. 1850. Germantown
was known for its hosiery production and
Wakefield was one of the largest such mills
in the nation in this period.
PRINT DEPARTMENT, LIBRARY COMPANY
OF PHILADELPHIA.
Below: Joseph Ripka’s mills in Manayunk,
1856. Ripka’s cotton mills were among the
largest in the nation before he went
bankrupt during the Civil War.
PRINT DEPARTMENT, LIBRARY COMPANY
OF PHILADELPHIA.
Numerous other mills and factories were
located along Wissahickon Creek, which
drains into the Schuylkill River above the
Fairmount Waterworks, the landmark facility
that began providing Philadelphians with
drinking water in 1815. Pollution from industries
situated on the creek and the river
upstream from the Waterworks began posing
a threat to the city’s water supply, which led to
the creation of the Fairmount Park Commission
in 1867. The commission acquired large tracts
of land in the area to create Fairmount Park
and acquired and demolished the offending
factories along the waterways to protect the
city’s water quality.
GERMANTOWN
Close by Wissahickon Creek, the community
of Germantown continued to be an
important center of textile manufacture, as
it had been since the 1680s. The original
German settlers and their descendants had
long been known for making hosiery, which
local residents still produced by hand in the
early nineteenth century. Factory-based textile
production by non-Germans began with
William Logan Fisher’s construction of a
textile mill on the Wingohocking Creek in
1809 and a calico print works a few years later.
The former would evolve into the Wakefield
Mills Manufacturing Company, one of the
nation’s major producers of hosiery and fancy
knit goods. English and Scottish immigrants
established additional mills in Germantown
in the 1830s and 1840s. One such Englishman,
Charles Spencer, began by renting space on
the upper floor of a Germantown building in
1843 and by 1850 had prospered enough to
build his own hosiery and knit goods factory
that grew to employ some 350 workers. Fisher
and Spencer were among many Germantown
manufacturers in the mid-nineteenth century.
The 1850 Census of Manufactures noted
that the town had ninety-seven different
industrial establishments.
MANAYUNK
One of the largest concentrations of manufacturing
activity in early nineteenth-century
Philadelphia was along the Schuylkill River in
Manayunk, where water-powered mills flourished.
The Schuylkill Navigation Company,
chartered in 1815 primarily to transport coal
to Philadelphia from regions north and west
of the city, built the Flat Rock Dam and
Manayunk Canal and began selling mill sites
and water power rights to prospective millers.
Among the water-powered mills established
in Manayunk in the early 1820s were those
for processing cotton, making woolen rags,
fulling (beating and cleaning cloth), making
oil and grinding drugs, grinding saws, and
making hat bodies. By 1828 there were ten
mills along the Manayunk Canal, with plans
for a half dozen more. An observer at the time
noted that “A flourishing and populous village
has risen up suddenly and where we but lately
paused to survey the simple beauties of
the landscape...the eye is arrested by the less
romantic operations of a manufacturing
community, and the ear filled with the noise
of ten thousand spindles.”
It was the textile industry, particularly
cotton manufacture, that would come to
define Manayunk. There were some seventeen
textile factories in Manayunk by 1850,
employing over 2,000 workers, about a third
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
42