In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

On a positive note, a group of Frankford
textile mill owners and local businessmen,
wishing to provide their workers with decent
housing opportunities, met at a Frankford
hotel in 1831 and formed the Oxford
Provident Building Association, a memberbased
financial institution in which workers
could purchase shares and through which
they could secure home mortgages. This was
the nation’s first savings and loan institution,
signaling the birth of an eventual multibillion
dollar industry.
OUTWORK AND
MECHANIZATION
Not all textile workers labored in factories.
Philadelphia had an extensive network of
handloom operators and textile combers
(those who cleaned and straightened rough
fibers) engaged in “outwork”—working in
their homes and shops under various
arrangements with textile businessmen. The
Globe Mill in Northern Liberties often sent its
yarn out to handloom operators to be woven.
The adjacent neighborhood of Kensington
was known for its many handloom operators.
These traditional craftsmen were among those
who viewed the early nineteenth-century
introduction of mechanized factory-based
production methods as a threat to their livelihood.
In the 1830s a group of Kensington
handloom operators marched to Manayunk in
an attempt to destroy new labor saving
machinery that was being installed in the
latter town’s mills. A decade later, Kensington
weavers, most of whom were Irish Catholic
immigrants, would be involved in one of the
bloodiest chapters in Philadelphia history,
the anti-Catholic riots of the 1840s. While
primarily a religious and ethnic conflict, the
riots were fueled in part by societal disruptions
wrought by the Industrial Revolution in
this period. Outwork remained part of the
Philadelphia textile industry, particularly in
Kensington, but became less of a factor over
time as mills absorbed more and more of the
industry’s workers.
A significant figure in the mechanization
of textile manufacturing in early nineteenthcentury
Philadelphia was Alfred Jenks. Jenks
was originally from Rhode Island, where he
studied under Samuel Slater, the pioneering
English immigrant industrialist who had
developed the factory system for textile production
that was in wide use in New England.
In 1810 Jenks came to Philadelphia and
established a factory in Holmesburg for making
cotton machinery, the first such factory
in Philadelphia. Here he built machinery for
many cotton mills throughout the region,
including for Joseph Ripka and others in
Manayunk. As previously noted, Jenks moved
to Bridesburg in 1819 and with his son Barton,
himself a brilliant inventor, established the
Bridesburg Manufacturing Company, which
continued to make machinery for area textile
mills. Jenks power looms were installed at
the Globe Mill in 1840.
Another significant figure in early textile
industry mechanization is William Horstmann,
a German immigrant who started a silk weaving
workshop in Philadelphia in 1815 that
grew into a large enterprise for making tassels,
fringe, and lace. In 1824 Horstmann was the
first in America to use the Jacquard loom, a
mechanical loom that was controlled by
punch cards for weaving patterns into textiles.
The Jacquard loom would eventually become
widely used in textile manufacture. In 1854
the William Horstmann Company built a
five-story silk factory at Fifth and Cherry
Streets in downtown Philadelphia that
employed 400 to 500 workers and remained
in operation until 1880.
ANTHRACITE
While textiles were predominant, new
types of manufacturing were being implemented
in other industries throughout the
Philadelphia area in the early years of
the nineteenth century. Downstream from
Manayunk, at the Falls of Schuylkill (now
East Falls), engineer and inventor Josiah
White (1781-1850) and his partner Erskine
Hazard (1789-1865) established an iron
rolling mill and wire factory around 1809. In
1810 White received a patent for a machine
for “rolling and moulding iron,” the first of
six patents he would be awarded. Among
White and Erskine’s employees in 1812 were
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