In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

of the town’s total population. Silesian immigrant
Joseph Ripka began building his textile
empire in Manayunk in the 1820s and by
the 1850s his complex of four- and five-story
cotton mills along the canal was among the
largest in the nation. Ripka and his extended
family also managed textile operations in
downtown Philadelphia and along the
Pennypack Creek in Northeast Philadelphia.
The latter included the Pennypack Print
Works, one of the largest mills in that area.
At the height of his operations in the 1850s
Ripka employed over 1,000 workers. He went
bankrupt and had to close his mills during
the Civil War, however, due to disruptions in
business with the southern plantation owners
that supplied his raw cotton and purchased
his finished products.
Other family-owned textile enterprises that
were established in and around Manayunk
and downstream at the Falls of Schuylkill
prior to the Civil War continued successfully,
mostly notably those of the Campbell,
Schofield, and Dobson families (with members
of the latter two families intermarrying).
Some of these companies profited greatly
from major war-time contracts for woolen
army blankets. Manayunk remained an
important textile center into the twentieth
century, as well as home to paper, chemical,
and other manufacturers.
depressing conditions for factory workers in
this period: twelve- or even fourteen-hour
days, six days a week, performing difficult,
monotonous work in unhealthy conditions
for low pay. Particularly distressing was the
plight of the child workers, some as young
as seven, who made up nearly half of
Manayunk’s textile workforce. A witness at
an 1837 state hearing on child labor in
Pennsylvania described how child workers
were “summoned by the factory bell before
daylight…had their first scanty meal at home
and commence work at six o’clock in the
morning and continue until eight o’clock at
night with nothing but [a] recess of fortyfive
minutes to get their dinner.” While particularly
acute in Manayunk, the problem was
@
Above: Early twentieth-century
photograph of the ruins of the Pennypack
Print Works on Pennypack Creek in
Northeast Philadelphia. Owned by members
of the Ripka family, Pennypack Print Works
was one of the largest mills in mostly
rural Northeast Philadelphia in the
nineteenth century.
LINCOLN CARTLEDGE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION,
HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF FRANKFORD.
Below: Child workers in a textile mill in
Macon, Georgia, in 1906. Scenes like this
would have been common in nineteenthcentury
Philadelphia, where children made
up a large part of the textile workforce.
PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION,
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
PLIGHT OF THE WORKERS
If Manayunk represented the epitome of
the early nineteenth-century factory town,
its textile mills, particularly those of Joseph
Ripka, also came to symbolize the worst of the
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