Handcraft to Industry: Philadelphia Ceramics in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Early in the nineteenth century, Philadelphia potters, like many American craftsmen, began to feel the effects of nascent industrial and economic change that would transform small traditional handcrafts into industries. Economic historians long have debated about the rate at which expansion took place during the first half of the century. In the Philadelphia potteries, the beginnings of industrialization were evident in developments before and during the War of 1812 when embargoes provided temporary relief from the competition of English factory-made tableware and permitted American craftsmen briefly to emulate this mass-produced molded pottery. The crisis of 1819, however, and the economic fluctuations of the 1830s kept progress at a slow pace, though the depressions of the 1830s actually made an important, if negative, contribution by forcing out several of the city's traditional potteries and a substantial part of its handcraft labor force. In the 1840s, the environment finally was conducive to the exploitation of the growing potential for expansion and thus the decade witnessed unprecedented economic and industrial growth. Capitalization and output more than doubled; molded tableware, patterned after English styles, finally was successfully manufactured and marketed; new and more industrial products and techniques were introduced; several small potteries developed into factories of moderate size; and a semiskilled labor force threatened its traditional highly skilled counterpart. By 1850 there were still some conservative shops in operation and the use of powered machinery remained in the future, but small potteries where family members and an apprentice or journeyman made simple products by age-old hand methods were dying phenomena, progressively outnumbered by their industrial counterparts. The process of industrialization and economic expansion in the Philadelphia potteries is significant not only as part of the history of the trade in that city but also because comparison with available data suggests that the Philadelphia example reflects patterns of change over much of urban American pottery manufacture. In conservative rural areas change came more slowly but it appears that potters in other East Coast cities were affected by many of the same factors that influenced development in Philadelphia and that they responded in much the same way.