In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

factories with a powerful energy source.
Fueled by anthracite coal and the steam
engine, the iron and steel industries grew significantly
in Philadelphia in the antebellum
period. Thus began the “smokestack” era, the
age of factories belching fumes into the
Philadelphia sky.
Another group of Philadelphians that
profited greatly from the anthracite coal
boom was the Coxe family. Recognizing the
potential of anthracite as a fuel source early
on, Tench Coxe purchased some 80,000 acres
of land in Pennsylvania coal country. He died
in 1824 before the profits could be realized,
but years later his descendants became very
wealthy from these land holdings.
SHIPBUILDING
AND THE NAVY YARD
Shipbuilding was among the many industries
that would be transformed by these
new technologies in the first half of the nineteenth
century, a period that saw a transition
from traditional methods of building sailing
ships of wood and cloth to construction of
iron and steel vessels powered by steam.
Representing the traditional approach was
Joshua Humphreys (1751-1838), the most
prominent ship designer and builder in
federal-period America. Humphreys learned
his craft as an apprentice in the Philadelphia
shipyard of the Penrose family and later
by designing and building military vessels
in the city during the Revolutionary War.
By the early 1790s his shipyard in Southwark,
located at what is now Washington Avenue
and Columbus Boulevard in South Philadelphia,
was busy building new commercial vessels and
refitting older ones for the city’s merchants.
@
Above: USS United States, built at
Joshua Humphreys’ Philadelphia shipyard
and launched in 1797. The United States
was the first ship built for the U.S. Navy,
which was established in the 1790s at
Humphreys’ shipyard in Southwark.
J. WELLES HENDERSON COLLECTION,
INDEPENDENCE SEAPORT MUSEUM, PHILADELPHIA.
Below: The building of the
USS Philadelphia at Joshua Humphreys’
shipyard in 1797-1798, is depicted in this
illustration entitled Preparation for War
to defend Commerce, published in Birch’s
Views of Philadelphia in 1800. The war
at the time was America’s Quasi-War
with France and construction of the
USS Philadelphia was funded in part by a
subscription that raised over $100,000
from city residents. After being captured in
a later conflict, the Barbary Wars with
Mediterranean pirate states, and used as
gun battery against American vessels in
the Tripoli harbor, the ship was destroyed
intentionally in 1804 in a daring naval
raid led by Philadelphian Stephen
Decatur, Junior.
CHAPTER THREE
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