In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

seen. The episode brought Hagner considerable
notoriety and thereafter he focused on the
emerging drug milling business. In 1820
Hagner moved to Manayunk and became one
of the early leaders in the industrialization of
that town, and in 1839 he moved to Northern
Liberties where he established a large steampowered
drug mill.
Philadelphia also had two of the nation’s
largest quinine manufacturing firms in this
period: Powers & Weightman, founded in
1818, with facilities at both Ninth and Parrish
and Falls of Schuylkill, and Rosengarten &
Sons, founded in 1822 and located in various
sections of the city prior to building a major
facility at Seventeenth and Fitzwater Streets in
South Philadelphia. Both of these companies,
calling themselves “manufacturing chemists,”
became large and prosperous making a variety
of medicines and chemicals. They would merge
in 1905.
By 1860 some thirty-five percent of the
total value of the medicines, drugs, and
extracts produced in the United States was
made by forty Philadelphia firms. Two companies
that would later become major drug
manufacturers—Smith, Kline, & French and
Wyeth Laboratories—started as pharmacies
in downtown Philadelphia in the years prior
to the Civil War. Smith, Kline, & French was
established by John Smith on North Second
Street in 1830, while Wyeth Laboratories was
founded by brothers John and Frank Wyeth at
1410 Walnut Street in 1860. In 1870 a Wyeth
employee named Henry Bower invented a
rotary compressed tablet machine that greatly
facilitated mass production of medicine
tablets and propelled the company into a
major manufacturing role. Both companies
still have a major presence in the Philadelphia
area: Smith, Kline, & French is now part
of the multinational pharmaceutical firm
GlaxoSmithKline, whose U.S. headquarters
is at the Navy Yard in South Philadelphia, and
Wyeth Laboratories is located just outside
the city in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.
BEER
Beer making was yet another industry
in which Philadelphia continued to excel.
The U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue
reported in 1793 that Philadelphia was
shipping more beer than all other American
seaports combined. Lager beer was especially
popular with Philadelphia’s large and growing
German population in the mid-nineteenth
century. Bavarian immigrant John Wagner
reportedly made the first lager beer in
America in the 1840s in a small brewery
on American Street near Poplar Street in
Northern Liberties. The Engel & Wolf brewery,
which started in Northern Liberties in
the 1840s and moved in 1859 to a large
new brewing complex on the Schuylkill River
known as Fountain Green, was one of the
@
Left: A c. 1855 view of Engel & Wolf’s
Brewery & Vaults at Fountain Green on the
Schuylkill River. One of the nation’s first
large-scale brewers of lager, Engel & Wolf’s
was one of the industries that was acquired
and demolished by the Fairmount Park
Commission in the 1870s in an effort to
protect the city’s water supply.
PRINT DEPARTMENT, LIBRARY COMPANY
OF PHILADELPHIA.
Right: Hagner’s Drug Mills in Northern
Liberties, c. 1875. Hagner operated what
is considered the first drug mill in the
United States in the 1810s at the Falls of
Schuylkill. He moved to Manayunk in 1820
and then established this drug mill in
Northern Liberties in 1839.
SOCIETY PRINT COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF PENNSYLVANIA.
CHAPTER THREE
55