In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

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In this 1840 advertisement, the Morris
Iron Works notes that in addition to its
foundry at Schuylkill Seventh and Market
Streets (now Sixteenth and Market),
it has “provided on the Delaware
[River, in Port Richmond]…a commodious
Shop and Wharf, with a Crane, expressly
for the Construction and Repair of
Steam-Boat Engines & Boilers.”
SOCIETY PRINT COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Philadelphia’s shipbuilding industry declined
in general in the early years of the nineteenth
century and then, in later decades, as construction
with iron, steel, and steam rendered
their earlier methods obsolete.
One company that successfully made the
transition from traditional to modern construction
methods was Cramp Shipyard.
William Cramp was born in Kensington in
1807 and served an apprenticeship with a
local ship builder before opening his own
shipyard in 1830. He secured contracts for
both commercial and military vessels and by
the late 1840s had moved to the large riverfront
site in lower Kensington that would be
the company’s home for a century. Here it
would grow into one of the nation’s largest
shipyards and Philadelphia’s biggest employers.
Charles Cramp joined his father’s firm in
the late 1840s and soon began to introduce
new construction methods using iron, steel,
and steam. As a boy, Charles had witnessed
the city’s first iron-hulled vessel, produced
in Kensington around 1838, being carted
by boilermakers through the streets to the
waterfront. Charles oversaw implementation
of more modern ship building techniques
at Cramp & Sons, even as his father continued
to carve wooden models of ships to be
built and personally select the trees to be cut
for the various parts of vessels.
THE IRON AGE
Shipbuilders worked closely with boiler
and engine makers at this time, as the latter
often had more familiarity with the new materials
and techniques than the shipbuilders.
I. P. Morris and Company, one of Philadelphia’s
largest iron foundries, was established in 1828
and located at Sixteenth and Market Streets.
In 1840 the company set up a shop on the
Delaware River in Port Richmond “expressly
for the construction and repair of steam-boat
engines and boilers.” Cramp & Sons worked
most closely with the Kensington firm of
Neafie & Levy, which was founded in 1844 as
Reaney, Neafie & Levy and specialized in
iron boats, marine steam engines, and screw
propellers. Also known as Penn Steam Engine
and Boiler Works, Neafie & Levy later became
a shipbuilding company itself, one of the first
American firms to make both iron ships and
the steam engines that ran them. They made
the U.S. Navy’s first submarine, the Alligator,
in 1862. Cramp & Sons partnered with Neafie
& Levy on several projects, including building
the Sampson, the nation’s first screwpropelled
tugboat, in 1846. During the Civil
War Cramp worked with Southwark iron
founder Merrick & Sons on the famous wooden-hulled
ironclad ship, the New Ironsides,
which launched from Cramp’s Kensington
yard in 1862. Eventually, Cramp & Sons
began making its own engines, and in 1891 it
acquired I. P. Morris & Company, but in the
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
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