In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

The turn of the twentieth century period
when Shadwell did his study was indeed
the heyday of manufacturing in Philadelphia,
its Workshop of the World period. While no one
or two companies predominated, several of
the city’s industrial firms had become particularly
large and influential. The Philadelphia
Chamber of Commerce publication The City
of Philadelphia as it Appears in the Year 1894
included a section entitled “Largest in the
World” that listed twelve Philadelphia companies
that enjoyed that distinction. Ten
were manufacturers: Baldwin (locomotives),
Disston (saws), Bromley (carpets,
lace), Keystone Watch Case (watch cases),
Stetson (hats), Powers & Weightman
(chemicals), George V. Cresson (power
machinery), Abraham Cox Stove Company
(stoves), McNeely & Company (leather),
and Queen & Company (scientific instruments).
The publication, which features
company profiles and advertisements for
dozens of other local manufacturers that,
if not the world’s largest, were certainly
major firms in their own right, gives
a sense of the magnitude and diversity
of Philadelphia’s manufacturing sector
at this time—the wide range of industries,
the size and scope of their operations,
the incredible variety of products
they produced.
The 1894 Chamber of Commerce
publication was not just self-serving
boasting by an organization whose
mission was to promote the city. The
February 1914 edition of Moody’s
Magazine, the national investor monthly,
featured a fifty-six page section entitled
“Modern Philadelphia: Things In Which
Philadelphia Leads the World.” Along
with glowing descriptions of the city’s
financial institutions, department stores,
and two giant railroads, it includes lengthy
profiles of such manufacturers as Baldwin
Locomotive Works, Cramp Shipyards, S. S.
White Dental Manufacturing Company,
Freihofer Baking Company, J. G. Brill
Company (streetcars), John Lucas & Company
(paints and varnishes), and John B. Stetson
Company (hats). Two of these companies,
Baldwin and Stetson, were identified as the
largest in the world twenty years earlier in the
1894 Chamber of Commerce publication; the
others had come into their full prominence in
the intervening years. Again, it is the diversity
of the city’s manufacturing sector in this period
that is striking. While other cities would
come to be dominated by particular industries,
Philadelphia’s strength was in the wide
range of its manufacturers and products.
“Detroit made cars; Philadelphia made everything
else” is the (somewhat) facetious saying.
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