the tall-case clocks of Peter Stretch, acquired by the Historical Society, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Atwater Kent Museum, are examples of English artisanry transplanted to Philadelphia. Immigrating to the city in 1702, when he was thirty-two years old, Stretch produced dozens of tall-case hour-hand clocks that graced the city’s finest houses. With two sons pursuing clock and watch making, the Stretch family became Philadelphia’s unofficial timekeepers. Peter produced the town clock in 1717; his eldest son made the clock for the State House in 1753. Stretch, like other American clockmakers, began copying European counterparts by putting minute hands on the clocks to make them easier to read—an example of the highly derivative nature of American craftsmanship. Reflecting Philadelphia’s growth and commercial vigor, Stretch’s restrained, flat-topped, plain-doored clocks of the early years became more ornate: rather than a molded base standing directly on the floor, a fancier clock stood on bun or bracket feet; rather than a simple flat top, the improved clock had carved moldings and cast iron or brass spandrels; mahogany sometimes replaced pine or poplar.
Philadelphia’s rising wealth turned the city into North America’s undisputed furniture capital by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The well-heeled merchant owners of fine city houses and country seats required a massive amount of furniture, and increasingly they wanted it stylish enough to signal their authority and power. Orders for bespoke work poured into the shops of several hundred chair, chest, and table makers. One of the best-known and most prosperous was William Savery. He finished his apprenticeship about 1741 and soon became one of Philadelphia’s leading chairmakers and a member of the Library Company. Engaged in producing top-of-the-line chairs, Savery also crafted handsome chests of drawers and tables. When the London cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck arrived in Philadelphia in 1763 bearing the third edition of Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, which the Library Company shortly acquired, Savery began to produce rococo furniture in the Chippendale style. Like Stretch, Savery was a member of the Society of Friends, and both were patronized by Quakers throughout their careers.
Of all the trades for which Philadelphia’s artisans became famous, none exceeded printing in establishing the city’s reputation as a capital of culture. By the end of the colonial era, the city was a center of book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishing, and its most famous artisan, Benjamin Franklin, was a printer. By 1795, Philadelphia boasted forty-three printers, evidence of a print explosion in its early stages. Some printers also made printing presses and type, Franklin being the first of his trade in the English colonies to do the latter.
From its beginnings the Library Company, American Philosophical Society, and Historical Society were avid collectors of early Pennsylvania imprints that came from the hands of a host of German and English printers. William Bradford, the city’s first printer, had established himself by 1685, and his Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense, or America’s Messinger, Being an Almanack for the Year of Grace 1686 is the earliest Philadelphia imprint in the Historical Society’s collections. The society made its first large purchase of titles in 1879, received its first large gift of early books and pamphlets in 1882, and a year later received from a descendant of William Bradford a rich collection of works produced by successive generations of Bradfords. By that time, the Library Company’s collections, after a century and a half of collecting, were unsurpassed, and the Philosophical Society had continued to develop its collection of Franklin imprints.
Eighteenth-century artisans are known primarily for what they produced: the beautiful and highly collectible objects created out of silver, pewter, wood, clay, leather, cloth, glass, steel, and iron. But behind the product lies a shrouded history of a person who was not only a craftsman but a head of family and a participant in the community’s affairs. Not a single piece of furniture was joined, nor a boot cobbled, nor a weathervane smithied, nor a pot turned except by a man wielding his tools in a social and political context. The distance between the workbench and street was very small in towns such as Philadelphia, and the relationship between the craftsman and his clientele had political and social dimensions. As Philadelphia developed, craftsmen became more and more involved in life beyond their shop doors. Peter Stretch was not only a clockmaker but also a city councilman for thirty-eight unbroken years and unceasingly involved in the affairs of his Quaker monthly meeting—seeing that the youth were orderly, mentoring orphaned children, presenting incoming Quakers with their certificates of removal from their previous meeting. William Savery was not only a chair and cabinet maker but a member of the Fellowship Fire Company and by 1757 keeper of the keys for its engine; ward tax assessor at age thirty-four; a supporter of the Friendly Association, which tried to forge an enlightened Indian policy in the difficult mid-century era; and an active member of the Society of Friends.
Although history books teach us to think of the urban economy as male-driven and the artisan’s world as masculine, Philadelphia’s economy depended in no small way on women’s paid and unpaid labor, and women by the hundreds were retailers, proprietoresses, and artisans. Most artisans lived and worked in the same structure; and in a world where home and shop were contiguous, the artisan’s wife would often tend the shop when he was away and help in the ordering and processing of materials. Other women took over their husbands’ or fathers’ trades when they died. For example, in the early national era, three of Philadelphia’s printers were women: Jane Aitken, who took over the business of her father, Robert Aitken, when he died in 1802; Lydia Bailey, who took over the business after the death of her husband, Robert Bailey; and Margaret Bache, widow of Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora from November 1798 to March 1800.
Female trades also flourished in the preindustrial city. Anyone walking through the commercial district of the late colonial era would encounter tavernkeeper Rachel Draper, upholsterer Elizabeth Lawrence, tallow chandler Ann Wishart, optician shopkeeper Hannah Breintnall, dry goods shopkeeper Elizabeth Rawle, and dozens more. At least one third of all retailers were women, and perhaps one fifth of all inns, taverns, and boardinghouses were female managed. Though males dominated the craft shops, they included female bakers and braziers, distillers and winemakers; mantua makers, glovers and tailors; tinkers and sieve makers; soap boilers and spinners. Women served as well as healers, nurses, and midwives; teachers and preachers; keepers of inns, taverns, and boardinghouses. Much of women’s work has been hidden from view because of the scarcity of records relating to both paid and unpaid labor. Yet account books of a few of these women found their way into the collections of the Historical Society and even into the holdings of Philadelphia’s College of Physicians. Skillfully exploiting these scarce accounts and supplementing them with tax records, wills, and early census reports, women’s historians in recent years have restored women to the urban economy.17
FIGURE 24. Woman’s pocket, c. 1745-55, PMA. Women’s dresses were not made with pockets during this period. Instead, separate pockets, like this one, were tied around the waist or neck to hold small necessities. Like most other clothes signifying status, pockets came in many fabrics and styles. Female domestics probably wore plain cotton or muslin pockets, while the mistress of a well-to-do household expected to have one highly decorated and made of silk and linen as pictured here.
More familiar than women whose labor made them a conspicuous part of Philadelphia’s street life was the labor of women in domestic settings. The chatelaine or “pocket” (Figure 24) was the badge of the mistress of the house and sometimes the shop—the manager who was responsible for conserving and distributing household stores. One historian has suggested that the pocket is a better symbol of eighteenth-century women than the spinning wheel because “this homely object symbolizes the obscurity, the versatility, and the personal nature of the housekeeping role. A woman sat at a wheel, but she carried her pocket with her from room to room, from house to yard, yard to street…. Whether it contained cellar keys or a paper of pins, a packet of seeds or a baby’s bib, a hand of yarn or a Testament, it characterized the social complexity as well as the demanding diversity of women’s work.”18
Symbols of Affluence,
