In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

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Right: Downtown street scene, Philadelphia,
1897. Philadelphia was the nation’s third
largest city at the turn of the twentieth
century, with a population approaching
1.3 million. Some 250,000 city workers
were employed in manufacturing or
mechanical pursuits at this time.
STILL PICTURES RECORDS SECTION, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION.
Opposite, clockwise starting from the top:
Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1916.
This rooftop image of the Kensington mill
district looks out over the neighborhood that
was at the heart of Philadelphia’s textile
industry when the city was the largest
textile manufacturing center in the world.
IMAGE RETRIEVED ONLINE, NO SOURCE OR SPECIFIC
DATE CITED.
Views of the plants of two of
Philadelphia’s largest manufacturers in the
late nineteenth/early twentieth century:
CHAPTER
FOUR
The Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten
chemical plant in East Falls. Powers &
Weightman, even before its 1905 merger
with Rosengarten, was named the largest
chemical company in the world in the
Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce
publication The City of Philadelphia as
it Appears in the Year 1894.
PRINT DEPARTMENT, LIBRARY COMPANY
OF PHILADELPHIA.
The John B. Stetson hat factory in
Kensington. Stetson was named the
world’s largest hat manufacturer in both
The City of Philadelphia as it Appears
in the Year 1894 and twenty years later
in the February 1914 edition of
Moody’s Magazine.
JOHN B. STETSON COMPANY POSTCARDS,
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA.
FROM CENTENNIAL CITY TO
WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD:
THE LATE NINETEENTH AND
EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Philadelphia is “the greatest manufacturing city in the world,” declared English writer Arthur
Shadwell in his two-volume 1906 study, Industrial Efficiencies: A Comparative Study of Industrial Life in
England, Germany and America. “True, it does not compare with such monstrous aggregations as
London and New York,” he noted, “but they are not manufacturing cities in the same sense. They are
primarily something else, and the manufactures are mainly accidental or secondary…. Philadelphia
is primarily a manufacturing place and the industries are carried on in very large establishments on
a great scale.” Shadwell was particularly impressed with the diversity of the city’s manufacturing
sector. “It would require a volume to give an account of all the manufactures in Philadelphia,” he
wrote, “I am certain that no city in any country can show so great a variety of gross industries carried
on upon so large a scale…. Philadelphia has the makings of ten ordinary manufacturing towns.”
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
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