First City. Gary B. Nash

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FIGURE 22. William Russell Birch, Preparation for War to defend Commerce, engraving, LCP. Though this scene of Joshua Humphreys’s shipyard in Southwark was captured in about 1799, shipbuilding had not changed since before the Revolution. The frigate Philadelphia is under construction. Workmen at the top of the scaffolding use ropes and pulleys to lift a curved beam aboard the ship’s prow. In the background is Gloria Dei Swedish Lutheran Church. Birch’s engravings were commercially successful, but buyers of this one probably prized it for the rustic scene and patriotic overtones, not the representations of artisans’ work.

      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