A depiction of 3rd Street and Market from The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 by William Russell Birch (often simply called Birch’s Views ). McCulloch’s shop, where the “Mechanics’ Lecture” was sold was the “third door above Market” on 3rd St. Image in the collection of The Library Company of Philadelphia. Learn more in the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
In 1789, a pamphlet was published in Philadelphia, an ode to the "mechanics" of the world. In this introductory episode of Season 2, we tell the story of the author of this pamphlet and lay out our plan for the episodes to follow.
Thank you to our sponsors for this season:
Our lead sponsor is Linode. Linode is the largest independent open cloud provider in the world, and its Headquarters is located just around the corner from Elfreth’s Alley on the Northeast corner of 3rd and Arch Streets, right next to the Betsy Ross House. The tech company moved into the former Corn Exchange Building in 2018 and employees have relished the juxtaposition of old and new: Outside, concealed LEDs light up the historic facade, inside are flexible server rooms but also a library with a sliding ladder, and a former bank vault is now a conference room. Linode is committed to a culture that creates a sense of inclusion and belonging and is always looking for new team members. Learn more about job opportunities at linode.com/careers.
This season is also sponsored by the History Department and the Center for Public History at Temple University. Many of the people who have worked on this podcast over the past two years have been alumni or graduate students at Temple University. A special thanks to Dr. Hilary Iris Lowe and the students in her “Managing History” course during the Fall of 2020 who did preliminary research and scriptwork for several episodes this season. Learn more about the department at www.cla.temple.edu/history/ and the Center at https://sites.temple.edu/centerforpublichistory/
Support also provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
Links
Full text of Andrew Adgate’s “Mechanics’ Lecture”: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N21432.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext;q1=United+States
Harmon Dean Cummings, "Andrew Adgate: Philadelphia Psalmodist and Music Educator”: https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=5546
Read more about why “unskilled labor” can be an unhelpful term: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-unskilled-labor-perpetuates-stereotypes-about-gender-education-2019-7
Sources
Adgate, Andrew (as Absalom Aimwell), “Mechanics’ Lecture,” see link above.
Cummings, Harmon Dean, "Andrew Adgate: Philadelphia Psalmodist and Music Educator” (dissertation), University of Rochester, 1975; see link above.
“Just Published and to be sold by John McCulloch,” The Independent Gazetteer, January 9, 1789. Via American Historical Newspapers.
Laurie, Bruce with Theodore Hershberg and George Alter, “Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 219–48.
Full Transcript
Script
It is early 1789, just a few months before the U.S. Constitution goes into effect. George Washington will soon be inaugurated president. And in Philadelphia newspapers a pamphlet is advertised for sale; interested parties could find it at the shop of John McCulloch, “in Third Street, the third door above Market.” “The Mechanics’ Lecture,” as this pamphlet is titled, was credited to Absalom Aimwell, and the 20-some pages of the “Lecture” are an ode to a wide variety of mechanics, from tailors to masons to barbers to clock-makers. Aimwell proceeds from one profession to another, extolling the virtues taught by each, and often connecting each trade to Biblical or Classical stories. For instance, in his consideration of tailoring, Aimwell begins in Eden, with Adam and Eve:
“they discovered their want of clothes. Necessity, the mother of cunning ARTS, soon put it into their heads to sew fig-leaves together, by which they furnished themselves with aprons. Thus we see that the first man was a MECHANIC. And what was his trade?—A TAYLOR!—and his wife a tayloress; for they both sewed.—I know it has been a common saying, that it takes nine taylors to make one man; but we find the truth is, that one taylor was the father of all men. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, emperors and nabobs, lords and beggars, are all the descendants of one TAYLOR!!”
The tone is bombastic, and though it is not clear if this lecture was ever actually delivered in person, it seems like the kind of thing meant to be shouted from a stage. Whether it sold well or not, the pamphlet had enough of an audience to find its way to the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and it is not surprising that it would have been interesting reading to the people walking by McCulloch’s shop. By 1789, Philadelphia was a bustling city--it was about to be the national capital!--and it was full of mechanics of various kinds. The area just North of Market Street was characterized by narrow alleyways and dense population, meaning cheaper accommodations for working-class Philadelphians. And just a few blocks Northeast of McCulloch’s print shop was Elfreth’s Alley, the epitome of the working neighborhood in Philadelphia for the next hundred and fifty years.
***
Welcome to The Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Elfreth’s Alley is a narrow street, one block long, with narrow brick houses crowding in from both sides. The homes were built between 1724 and 1836 and are still homes today. Since the early 1960s, there has been a museum in house #126. On this podcast, we tell the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered this special street for over 300 years. While this story starts in Philadelphia, we will explore connections across the city and around the globe.
Last season, The Alley Cast took a chronological approach, blitzing through two centuries, from the dressmakers who moved into #126 Elfreth’s Alley in 1762 to the preservation architect who reconstructed that same house in the 1960s. Our goal with those episodes was to give an overview of the Alley’s history while paying special attention to the stories of women on the Alley.
This season we return with a slightly different format. In each episode, we will explore one type of work, and trace the ways it changed over centuries. Like Absalom Aimwell, we’re going back to the beginning of some of the types of labor which have shaped this place and the people who have lived here.
However, our explorations will differ from Aimwell’s in significant ways. He focused his praise on recognized trades--primarily people who made things; often these trades have been considered “skilled” labor. Yet only focusing on master craftsmen excludes over half of the population, even in pre-Industrial Philadelphia. Aimwell also left women almost entirely out of his “Lecture” along with mariners, brickmakers, sawyers, stevedores, and many other manual laborers, let alone enslaved and bonded workers. This season we will tell the stories not only of woodworkers and house builders but of people working as children and those working in food service and boarding house operations.
There’s more to say about this second season of The Alley Cast and I’ll get to that later in this introductory episode of Season 2, but right now I want to talk about Absalom Aimwell. Who was he? What did he do when he wasn’t writing odes to mechanics? And what can we learn from his life?
First, Absalom Aimwell was a fake name. His real name was Andrew Adgate, and he was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1762. The only thing we know about Adgate’s childhood is that his father, by trade a blacksmith, was lost at sea in 1764, leaving behind his pregnant wife Phebe and young Andrew.
Norwich, a town known for its shipbuilding, shipping, and firearms production, apparently held no attraction to Andrew and at the age of 21, he followed a singing teacher and music publisher named Andrew Law to Philadelphia. It’s possible that Adgate had worked with Law before leaving New England, but at any rate, by April 1783, he was serving as a stand-in for Law at a singing school in Philadelphia.
The following year, Adgate created a singing school of his own, which became known as the Uranian Academy and which had the aim of propagating the knowledge of choral singing. By 1787 Adgate was the first singing teacher at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, which boasted that it was the “only incorporated institution for young ladies in the United States.” The following year, he directed the choral and instrumental ensembles at the commencement activities of the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1789, the year the Mechanics’ Lecture was published, it seems that Adgate perhaps left the singing schools behind him. The 1790 census shows him living at 38 North 3rd Street in a household with 5 men and 5 women and running a manufacturing operation making implements with which to card wool. Adgate’s business was sufficiently profitable to be named in a contemporary article about the industry, and he was able to invest in some land.
In August of 1793, yellow fever hit Philadelphia with a vengeance. Many of the city’s affluent residents fled the city. Those who did not or could not leave experienced the loss of 10 percent of the population to the plague. The area around the docks, including Elfreth’s Alley, was especially hit hard, as they were within range of the disease-bearing mosquitos which came ashore with inbound ships.
Adgate volunteered on a committee to visit the sick during the pandemic and succumbed to the disease himself around September 30, 1793 at the age of 31.
So what do we learn from Adgate’s life?
Like many of the people we will discuss in the other episodes of this season, Adgate was drawn to Philadelphia by opportunity. This city was one of the publishing hubs of the young United States and for an ambitious signing teacher, hymn books were where the money was. Throughout his time in Philadelphia, Adgate published many of these hymn books and guides to singing. The Mechanics’ Lecture was one of only two publications for which he used the Absalom Aimwell persona, likely to differentiate these secular works from his Christian songbooks. His collections of church hymns were successful enough to land him in lists of prominent early American musicians under his real name, which is the only reason we know anything about him today.
Also, Adgate’s living situation has much in common with many of the workers on Elfreth’s Alley we will learn about this season. Perhaps the other residents of 38 North Third Street were boarders, like those Ann Taylor took into her house at #116 Elfreth’s Alley. Or they were perhaps journeymen in Adgate’s factory, for whom he provided room and board, as the cabinetmaker Daniel Trotter did for Ephraim Haines, or as carpenter Isaac Zane sometimes did.
The other members of Adgate’s household may have been family--though he never married, he had some cousins who lived in town and his mother came to live with him too. In this, he would be like factory workers Ellen and William Dannehy, who we mentioned briefly last season, and many other residents of Elfreth’s Alley over the years.
Adgate was a “mechanic” himself, making cards--wooden handles with metal bristles--on a relatively small-scale. Many of the workers on Elfreth’s Alley whose stories we are setting out to tell did work on a similar scale. These are life-sized stories, not the biographies of tycoons. In his lecture, Adgate paid tribute to his father’s trade:
GENTLEMEN SMITHS, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE...I had the honour to be born the son of a mechanic...my father was a BLACKSMITH...I have before observed, that the advantages arising to all mechanics from the labour of your hands are very great:—without you, they could do nothing. You furnish the lords of the soil with plowshares, by which they are enabled to feed the world with bread. You furnish the soldier with weapons to defend his country, and he, when occasion requires, stands ready to beat down the foe. If a few Blacksmiths, with red hot nail-rods, could vanquish a legion of British troops*, what army could be able to withstand your force united?
In writing his Lecture, Adgate wanted to extol his fellow workers and celebrate their labor. We are looking at the work of past residents of the street neither to wax poetic about the good old days nor to pat ourselves on the back for how many problems we have left behind us in the past. Instead, we hope to make connections to our present and to examine the complex forces that have shaped working lives over three centuries.
I want to take a moment to discuss some of the language that often gets employed around labor and try to put it into context.
In the midst of industrialization in the late 19th century, workers within a single factory setting were often divided into two categories. There were those who had training in the more technical work of the factory and those who did not. These categories were often called “skilled” and “unskilled.”
Over the last hundred and fifty years, however, those two categories have been applied to labor at large, outside of the factory system. While highly-compensated work has often been assumed to be “skilled,” a wide variety of workers, from home health aides to bartenders, have been described as “unskilled.” This label has often been used to justify paying workers lower wages, and has often disproportionately been attached to jobs done by women and racial minorities. Moreover, the training required for employment does not always correlate to the importance of work or the potential risks it carries. The past year has made it apparent that essential workers exist at every level of the pay scale.
If we look back at the origins of these terms, we can actually see that so-called “unskilled” factory workers were often receiving on-the-job training and often had opportunities to move into “skilled” positions without necessarily entering management. In that setting, “unskilled” was a temporary status rather than a label for all non-managerial positions. Given all of this context, we will try to complicate these categorizations and treat all of the work we discuss with dignity.
One challenge we face in telling the stories of work on this street is that many of the people who have lived on and around Elfreth’s Alley have left scant traces of themselves in the form of artifacts or historical sources. In many cases, we are lucky to have the homes where they lived and historical maps of the neighborhood, two kinds of sources which help us to envision what it was like to live on the Alley and move through the surrounding neighborhood. In other cases we can turn to experts who have studied these jobs more broadly and make guesses about how their findings apply to the specific individuals who lived here. And sometimes we get lucky--sometimes a newspaper story about a robbery will give us a window into a boarding house on the Alley, or a list of Free Masons will tell us something about the social life of a woodworker. Our job is to try to stitch together the scraps we do find and acknowledge the gaps in our understanding.
And there will be gaps! One class of workers we have very little evidence of on Elfreth’s Alley is enslaved people. For the most part, the residents here weren’t wealthy enough to exploit enslaved labor. Those who did actively enslave people rarely left much evidence of these humans in bondage. For instance, we know that Paul Preston, an early blacksmith who lived on the corner of Front Street and the Alley, was taxed for two enslaved men, one woman, and a boy: we know little else about their lives. Where we have evidence of slavery, we will call it out, and continue to research and tell the stories of the enslaved.
We will also talk about the many other ways slavery affected the residents of the street, from haunting those who had lived in bondage to driving down wages for those living at the poverty line.
Andrew Adgate’s Mechanics’ Lecture was an ambitious undertaking, and so is ours. These episodes mark a beginning of learning, for the team that has been working on them and, we hope, for you, wherever you are listening. This is not the final word on work, by any means, and we may make mistakes. I hope you will be patient with us. There are many, many more working stories to be told, and we hope to tell some more at some point.
I am really excited about this new season of The Alley Cast--it has been great to work with so many interesting scholars along the way. I hope you will listen along as we release episodes over the next couple of months.
To close out this first episode of the season, here are some more selections from Adgate’s lecture paying tribute to a few of the professions we will explore this season. Following his declaration that Adam and Eve were the first tailors, he named them the first house builders as well.
That which was most necessary was first attended to, namely, an apron: and after our first parents had given themselves a tolerable suit of fig-leaves, 'tis probable the next thing that claimed their attention, was a house, to screen them from the inclement storms. A hollow tree might have answered for a short time, but as that could not have been convenient, a house must have been built. Now in building a house, gentlemen, which mechanic is first employed?—Certainly the mason lays the foundation, and without a foundation you know the building could not stand [...] but without CARPENTERS, their work would be incomplete; for a house, without a roof, would be but a poor shelter, and without the inside work would be but a shell.
The next two episodes of the Alley Cast will discuss the history of building houses in Philadelphia. Later on in the season we’ll have an episode on...well I’ll let Andrew Adgate tell you.
JOINERS AND CABINET-MAKERS, GENTLEMEN, Your trades cannot be considered in so fundamental a light as carpenters and masons; yet, they will readily grant, that their work is not complete till the Joiner gives it the finishing stroke. Let it be your care to join brethren, and cement them together like a glue joint...
I shall now address the makers of tables, trunks, drawers, &c.[...] With what pleasure do you finish a chair, knowing who is to sit in it? With what neatness do you finish a case of drawers, knowing what fine things are to rest in them?
As I’ve mentioned, we will also have an episode on boarding houses, one on child labor, and one about food service workers. While Adgate doesn’t have anything to say about tavern keepers or sandwich shop entrepreneurs, he does have some thoughts about bakers.
I have been at a loss whether to consider Bakers as mechanics, or not: But whoever sees them catch their loaves so dexterously, must confess that their trade is an art at least. And if we consider the many kinds of creatures which come from their manufactories, such as sheep, hogs, elephants, birds, women and men on horseback, appearing at the windows of every cake shop, we must conclude that Bakers are Mechanics.
History is a group effort! This episode was a collaboration between Ted Maust, Margaret Sanford, and Enya Xiang. Thanks to Jonathan Stewart for performing selections from Andrew Adgate’s Lecture. We are also grateful to the Library Company of Philadelphia for digitizing the Lecture--we’ll include a link to the full text on the episode page. The biographical sketch of Andrew Adgate is greatly indebted to Harmon Dean Cummings’ dissertation, “Andrew Adgate: Philadelphia Psalmodist and Music Educator”. A link to this dissertation will be on our episode page along with a transcript of this episode and other relevant sources at ElfrethsAlley.org/podcast and the link in the show notes.
Our theme music is the song “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions from the album Aeronaut, used under Creative Commons license.
This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize that words are not enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Thank you for listening to this introductory episode of Season 2 of The Alley Cast! Remember that one of the best ways you can support our work is by telling other people about this show and rating us on podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
Coming up next, the history of building houses in Philadelphia. We had so many interesting people to talk to and angles to explore that we had to split it into two episodes. Part 1 will be released next week.
Thank you and take care!