First City. Gary B. Nash

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First City - Gary B. Nash Early American Studies

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Delaware River valley. For example, a Philadelphia blacksmith or cabinetmaker was intimately tied to the countryside surrounding the city not only because of the demand for his handicrafts but also because that is where he got the materials for fabricating his products. The stove plate shown in Figure 21 was made from ore refined in one of the thirty-nine furnaces and forges that operated in Philadelphia’s hinterland. These operations drew heavily on slave and indentured servant labor for the incessant work of cutting timber and making charcoal.

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      Many Philadelphia artisans worked in small shops with only a few other craftsmen, and they prided themselves on fashioning their product, whether pewter bowl, ladder-back chair, or suit of clothes, from beginning to end. But some artisanal activities required the cooperative labor of many different craftsmen. The most important and complicated involved the construction of ships and buildings. Among the artisans involved in building and outfitting a vessel were ship carpenters, caulkers, wood carvers, painters, mastmakers, sailmakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, glassmakers, instrument makers, and ship chandlers. The products of these construction craftsmen’s hands were hardly collectible, and the endless impulse to modernize has wiped away almost all traces of the eighteenth-century ropewalks and shipbuilding sites, so documenting the work of such craftsmen is difficult. In the background of William Birch’s Preparation for War to Defend Commerce (Figure 22), we have one of the few glimpses of ship construction as it was carried out in the preindustrial period.

      House construction tradesmen, like shipbuilders, worked in groups with a premium placed on coordination and cooperation. In overall charge was the master carpenter, who was often the architect and general contractor as well. He subcontracted work to bricklayers, stonemasons, plasterers, painters, glaziers, joiners, and laborers. Edmund Woolley was such a master builder in Philadelphia, engaging and coordinating the labor of scores of artisans in the construction of the State House, later to be called Independence Hall. His supervision of the job was long—“a quagmire of contention, shortages of funds, and interminable construction.”12 Started in 1732, the interiors of the State House were not completed until 1748, and the brick tower, lodging the now iconic Liberty Bell, was finally finished in 1753. In an example of how the passing of time can alter public memory, Woolley for many years was credited as the master builder of the State House but not as its architect. Andrew Hamilton, speaker of the state assembly and famous for his defense of the New York printer John Peter Zenger, was for many years credited with designing the State House. But receipts found in the Penn Papers at the Historical Society in the early twentieth century suggest that Woolley prepared the drawings from which the State House was built.

      Most of the products from the hands of Philadelphia’s preindustrial artisans that have survived come from the luxury trades, whose craftsmen produced fine house furniture, silver, and other furnishings for the wealthy. For generations these have been the most sought after items from the early American past for two reasons. First, such artifacts symbolize a bygone era of careful craftsmanship and elegant taste, a time of the individually crafted rather than mass-produced articles. Second—perhaps more important—the exquisite desk, chair, or silver bowl, like a precious work of art, is an affirmation of the power and prestige of the elite and of the social system in which they governed.13

      The Historical Society acquired the furniture, paintings, uniforms, and other possessions of the elite from the beginning, and the commitment to collecting the products of the luxury trades has not wavered down to the present day. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did interest arise in collecting and studying the artifactual history of nonelites. Swimming bravely against the tide, Henry Mercer, an antiquarian collector and amateur archaeologist, began gathering ordinary objects—apple parers, claw hammers, tin dinner horns, straw beehives, fireplace tongs, flax brakes—anything from what he called the “valueless masses of obsolete utensils or objects which were regarded as useless.”14 His fascination with discovering people from the distant past through their material remains began when Mercer, as a boy, unearthed arrowheads, fragments of pottery, and other objects from a Lenape camping ground on his father’s property in Bucks County.

      Much later, when associated with a group of archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Mercer went about creating an object-centered rather than book-and document-centered museum at the Bucks County Historical Society in Doylestown. Only by collecting and displaying the ordinary and commonplace, he reasoned, could the story of the American people be truly told. For Mercer, work was at the center of how a society and nation were built; therefore, through collecting and examining ordinary objects historians could tell the stories of the people who did most of the work. His first exhibition in Bucks County, in 1897, displayed 761 ordinary objects in a show titled “Tools of the Nation Maker.” More than law books and politicians or field pieces and soldiers, Mercer argued, these simple tools and those who used them skillfully were the true makers of the nation. History was best written, he explained, “from the standpoint of objects rather than from laws, legislatures, and the proceedings of public assemblies.” Trying to overthrow a document-based academic textual history of the elites, Mercer used tools and everyday objects to illuminate the lives of ordinary people (Figure 23). Sure of his method and his populist instincts, he spent decades scouring “penny lots” at country sales—the flea markets of an earlier era—and “rummaging the bake-ovens, wagon-houses, cellars, hay-lofts, smoke-houses, garrets, and chimney-corners” across the countryside.15

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      Deeply involved in collecting ordinary objects, Mercer explained in 1909 that he was sure that “the history of Pennsylvania was here profusely illustrated and from a new point of view.”16 In no other way could a more inclusive history be presented. Councillors of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions paid little attention to Mercer’s ideas that history resides with the common people and that people will flock to see what was part of their ancestors’ daily life. So the fabulous collection he assembled of some 60,000 ordinary household objects filled up the fantastic six-story concrete castle he completed in 1916 in Doylestown for the Bucks County Historical Society, which he had helped found in 1880.

      Visitors came in small numbers to Mercer’s castle, but his ideas gained new currency during the Great Depression. Just seven years after Mercer died in 1930, the wealthy radio magnate Atwater Kent established a Museum of Philadelphia History that more or less adopted Mercer’s mission: to collect material culture that would bring to light the social and cultural importance of daily urban life. Exhibiting for the first time in 1939, the museum has collected about eighty thousand artifacts, though only a small fraction of them tell stories of Philadelphia life before 1850.

      The works of luxury craftsmen so prized by collectors cannot

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