High chest of drawers and dressing table by John Head, circa 1726, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In this new episode of The Alley Cast, we explore the ingrained history of woodworking in Philadelphia, from William Penn's pamphlets advertising tree species, to the importation of mahogany felled by enslaved labor, to craftspeople such as John Head and Daniel Trotter. And while shifts toward industrialized methods doomed the artisan cabinetmaker for a time, we also look at the endurance and resurgence of wood craft in this city.
Thanks to Chris Storb for offering his broad knowledge at several points in the research process. His blog, at cstorb.com, is a wonderful resource for furniture history--I heartily recommend it!
Thanks also to Kathy Haas of Girard College’s Founders Hall Museum, who made a significant contribution to my understanding of Trotter’s and Haines’ relationship to Girard.
SPONSORS
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 Museum. 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 always looking for new team members. Learn more about job opportunities at linode.com/careers.
Center for Art in Wood
This episode was supported by the Center for Art in Wood, located just a short walk away from Elfreth's Alley on Third Street. Since its inception in 1986, the Center has been a critical resource for the study of art, craft, and design in the material of wood. Today the Center offers free admission to its changing exhibitions and access to its permanent collection, which now numbers some 1,200 objects and includes turned objects, sculpture, studio furniture, works on paper, and video, and organizes artist residencies, gallery talks, and more.
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 sites.temple.edu/centerforpublichistory/
SOURCES
“Aged Spoonmaker Bids Penn Goodbye,” Evening Bulletin, Saturday, June 11, 1910.
"Benjamin Randolph," Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), pp. 110–11.
Carson, Marian S. “Sheraton’s Influence in Philadelphia,” in Philadelphia Furniture and its Makers, edited by John J. Snyder, Jr. published by ANTIQUES, 1975, page 87.
Catalano, Kathleen M. “Cabinetmaking in Philadelphia, 1820-1840: Transition from Craft to Industry” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 13, American Furniture and Its Makers, (1979), pp. 81-138
Gibson, Jane Mork, “John Grass Wood Turning Company: Historical Background” Center for Art in Wood: https://centerforartinwood.org/johngrass/content/gibson-history.pdf
Golovin, Anne Castrodale. "Daniel Trotter: Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Cabinetmaker." Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 151-84: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1180528.
“History,” Center for Art in Wood
Igoe, Laura Turner, “Trees,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Lindey, Laurie A. “The London Furniture Trade, 1640–1720,” (Dissertation) Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, March 2016.
Martin, Terry “The Unmistakable Impact of Albert LeCoff,” American Woodturner, October 2016: https://www.woodturner.org/common/Uploaded%20files/HonoraryLifetime/2008LeCoff.pdf
Naeve, Milo M. “Daniel Trotter and his Ladder-back Chairs,” in Philadelphia Furniture and its Makers, edited by John J. Snyder, Jr. published by ANTIQUES, 1975, pages 81-82.
“A Philadelphia flaneur”, The Magazine Antiques: https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/a-philadelphia-flaneur/
Plice, Steven S. “History And Structure Of The Furniture Industry,” in Manpower and Merger, The Impact of Merger upon Personnel Policies in the Carpet and Furniture Industries (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 5–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv5qdjtn.5.
Salinger, Sharon V. “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1983): 62–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/1919528.
Stiefel, Jay Robert, “Philadelphia Cabinetmaking and Commerce, 1718-1753: The Account Book of John Head, Joiner,” Bulletin, American Philosophical Society, 2001.
Storb, Chris, “Daniel Jackson’s Unicorn Rocker,” cstorb.com
Storb, Chris, “John Head, Joyner,” cstorb.com
Woodhouse, Jr., S. W. “Benjamin Randolph of Philadelphia,” in Philadelphia Furniture and its Makers, edited by John J. Snyder, Jr. published by ANTIQUES, 1975, page 35
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Thomas P. Laitenen, performing the word of Daniel Pabst: “I am too old for the work now,” said Daniel Pabst, leading a reporter into the den of his home in 1910; “Another year will not find me here, I think, and so I have written my farewell poem now.”
Ted Maust: Pabst was 84 years old and a furniture maker of some renown. He had come to Philadelphia from Germany at 23 and put his training to work as a journeyman until he could afford to open his own shop.
Laitenen, as Pabst: "I brought all of Germany here with me, in my inward eye. The tall towers of Cologne (Köln), the wonders of Frankfurt-on-Main; the old grey castles perched in mid-air along the Rhine--they all were part of my work. But foolish laws over there forced me to America.
“I was born in Langenstein, which is a little village near Marburg, in Hessia (Hesse). The laws then compelled a man who had a trade to practice forever in his own village, and what place was there for me in that little town? So I first traveled, and then I came to America, where I shall die.
“I had all the necessary training after I was eighteen; It was just the learning what people wanted. Was it a big mantelpiece for a drawing room? Then I reared it on the shoulders of armored knights, or supported it in the claws of two fantastic gryphons. Was it something delicate in woodwork that would make a beautiful panel? Then again, I had the hounds after the stag and chiseled each leaf of the forest with the greatest care. Or beautiful ceilings with wonderous traceries: fine solid furniture that does not come out of the glue like your poor-modern machine stuff.
"Ah, but some of it was beautiful; People said they didn't have to go to Paris to get beautiful furniture; it was right here in the brain of Pabst. It was as I told you before, I was a furniture artist.
"But if I tried to earn my living that way to-day, I would starve. There would be no great ladies with carriages as they used to stretch before my factory at 5th and Spruce Streets. I have not kept in touch with your modern methods since I left the business, but I can tell from the little I see that your factories turn out any piece of furniture like any other-poor frail things that cannot last. [Sigh] the pity of it.”
Maust: Pabst was part of a long tradition of furniture makers in Philadelphia, which stretched back to the city’s origins, and included many Elfreth’s Alley residents. But while Pabst saw his way of life ending, snuffed out by factory furniture and socioeconomic change, furniture making in Philadelphia has survived.
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, PA. We trace the stories of people who lived and worked on this special street for over 300 years. While the stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding Old City neighborhood, we also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe.
Today on the Alley Cast, we’re talking about woodworking, focusing on furniture making. A quick look at United States Census data and Philadelphia city directories from the late 18th century through the 1860s shows that at least half of the homes on Elfreth’s Alley were connected to a furniture maker at some point in that period and there was at least one wood furniture maker operating on the street for that whole time--nearly a century. While the late 19th century and early 20th century saw a lull in wood furniture-making on the street itself, woodworking continued in the area around the Alley. And during the mid-to-late 20th century, woodworking experienced a serious revival in Philadelphia, as wood furniture became high art as well as a direct link to the past.
Episode 6: Cabinetmakers
One reason we are focusing on furniture above other wood trades is that the products of this labor are still around. While the results of an 18th-century shipbuilder lie at the bottom of the ocean, a table or chair or desk crafted the same year has a chance of still performing its assigned task or being on display as a work of not just history but also art. These objects take us right back to the very beginnings of Philadelphia as a city, and to learn more about the history of furniture making and woodworking in this area, I talked to Chris Storb, an artist and woodworker who has worked as a furniture conservator for many years, including for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Storb told me that at the beginning of Philadelphia, woodworking was everything--carpentry, boat building, as well as making furniture and tools. One of the men who came to this area on the same ship as William Penn brought over the workings of a sawmill immediately, as lumber was such a need.
Storb: “it's very interesting reading the promotional tracts that William Penn and a couple of others wrote in the early 1680s, as they wanted people to come here so we could collect the rents and sell them land that the you know, he had, he had been given by the King of England, with no idea of Native Americans being here, we're just going to come in and lay out our roads and it's going to be our land and that's what happened. But they always, talk about the wood and species here. So in Penn's brief account of the province in Pennsylvania, he writes black walnut, cedar, Cypress, chestnut, paper, Poplar, gumwood, Hickory, sassafras, Ash, beech, and oak, of which there are diverse sorts, red, white, and black. And these species weren't universally available across the whole Delaware Valley. But he wanted everybody to know when they came here, they were likely to have a supply in these woods because everything would was essential material for everything in your life from building your house, to making everything in it, woodwork as we'd like we have a saying that we could make a house and make everything in it that you needed. That's our, that's one of our mottos, but also also your fuel, for heating and for cooking. So we make things out of wood, but we also use it in other ways. We use it to do kilns, to to fire bricks and ceramics, it's indispensable for that obviously and to make glass and to make iron. We were surrounded by it. And and the trees came down fast because we had to clear the land was cleared for plantations to grow crops. So immediately you had this after the land gets cleared, you have this vast group of timbers that can be utilized in every different way from building your house, to making furniture, to cooking your food and heating your house.”
So pretty much every adult in early Philadelphia was dealing with wood in some way--they likely all had some ability with an axe or a saw. But there were some techniques for shaping wood not into only functional forms but also into elegant forms, which were a bit rarer.
In Britain, these trades were dominated by guilds, and could be sharply defined. For instance, a 1632 legal ruling split the joiners from the carpenters, allowing the former to build furniture and architectural features with joints such as mortise and tenon and dovetails, while limiting the carpenters to construction using nails and glue.
Turners specialized in using a lathe to create, among other things, spindles, furniture legs, and spokes. Carvers were experts in creating three dimensional flourishes in wood by removing wood using chisels, gouges, and other hand tools. Cabinetmakers, sort of a subset of joiners, took over much of the English furniture market in the early 18th century, replacing heavy chests and stools with light veneered chests of drawers and lighter tables and chairs. Many pieces of furniture required collaboration between these various trades and would have to move between the workshops of artisans belonging to different guilds.
Outside of London, however, the lack of a guild structure and the need for a multitude of wooden products created a fuzzier system, and more multi-talented wood workers. John Head came to Philadelphia from Suffolk, England in 1717, already a professional furniture maker. His shop was located on Arch Street, 40 feet east of 3rd Street, neighboring what is now the Betsy Ross House museum courtyard, and Head had business relationships with at least two property owners on Elfreth’s Alley. Though he called himself a “joyner” throughout his life, Head primarily made what are considered “cabinets,”
Storb: “cabinet maker became a term used, especially in London and primarily in London, for the type of furniture that began in the 1670s and 1680s, with which we're mostly familiar with vast amounts of furniture needed to be made to furnish the houses after the great fire in London in 1660 I guess and new forms came up. They were influenced by things that were coming from Asia. And there are a lot of what we call cabinets, essentially a dovetail box, doors that open to a series of small drawers. And so what's the dovetail box in London it's covered in, in veneer. So it's flush; that the turn cabinet making comes from. Now that's the kind of work that John Head did without the veneers he was working in that London mode of dovetail box, no, no joinery in terms of mortise and tenon joints and a panel inside it to make up parts of the components of the object. But he called himself a joiner. And I, you know, we don't know exactly why that is, but we suspect since he grew up lived and was apprenticed 50 miles outside of London. And somehow he started working in this new style in the 1690s, that the term joiner, an ancient term was just continued to be used. And they never adapted cabinet maker as a as a term joiner was just familiar. But he was also a Turner, because at that time, a lot of furniture forms had turning involved in them, whether its feet, columns, legs, and it was more distinct in terms of the trades, perhaps in London, but outside of the big city, you really had to do everything there weren’t, you didn't separate the types of woodworking that you do to make a piece of furniture. So we know he was making his turn legs and turn feet as well.”
Over his career in Philadelphia, which stretched from soon after his arrival in 1717 until around 1744, Head produced a wide variety of furniture in great quantity. His work was also of sufficient quality that over 40 pieces have been identified in private and museum collections.
Right around the time that John Head retired, Daniel Trotter was born. Trotter was first cousins with the Elfreth family who gave the Alley its name, and he himself was a big player in the street’s late 18th-century story.
At about the age of 14, Trotter was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker named William Wayne, and worked with Wayne until 1768, when he completed his apprenticeship at the age of 21. He then continued developing his skills, working as a journeyman for master cabinetmaker George Claypool in Philadelphia’s South Ward.
By 1771, he had entered into a partnership with John Webb, who would later live on Elfreth’s Alley himself. As Scholar Anne Castrodale Golovin puts it, “the parties involved [in partnerships like this] usually agreed on a specific number of years for the duration of the partnership, after which they were at liberty to withdraw.” In April of 1774, Webb and Trotter did just that, running a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette:
Fran Donato, performing the notice: ‘All persons that have any demands against the partnership of WEBB and TROTTER, cabinetmakers, are desired to bring in their accounts on or before the 13th of May next, as the partnership will then expire. Webb moves to front-street, nearly opposite the bank Meetinghouse; and those indebted, are requested to make payment. N.B. Said partners have for sale, a few pieces of furniture; also a neat two sail boat, which they will sell cheap for cash.’”
Big things were happening in Daniel Trotter’s life! Just a year before, in 1773, he had gotten married to Rebecca Connaroe and the newlyweds moved into what is now #114 Elfreth’s Alley, renting the house from the owner, Mary Saunderson. Daniel was also moving up in the world, financially, leaving the minimum tax bracket behind in 1773, as his partnership with Webb paid off and he was able to strike out on his own. Trotter established his own shop along Water Street, renting a building from Leonard Shallcross for the next two decades.
During Trotter’s career, his shop made bureaus, a variety of tables, chairs, wardrobes, desks, cradles, basin stands, bedsteads, portable writing desks, and looking glasses. Anne Castrodale Golovin suggests that Trotter “made both common and high-style furniture.” It’s probable that only the fancier pieces survive. Trotter sold many pieces to prominent merchant Stephen Girard, and those surviving pieces have been used to tie him to chairs in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Winterthur Museum.
Trotter’s work also included repairing furniture, and his early account books suggest he occasionally put his skills to more rudimentary work--putting a handle on an ax, fixing a chicken coop, installing a lock onto a door. Installation or disassembly of bedsteads was part of the job too. Once he had apprentices and journeymen, Trotter likely delegated these more menial tasks.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we can step inside Daniel Trotter’s shop. As we look around, we see no fewer than nine workbenches, used by Trotter as well as his apprentices and the journeymen working in his shop. Arrayed around the benches, perhaps hung on the wall, or, at least for the journeymen, in wooden chests, are a multitude of tools--planes to flatten boards and make them thinner, or to add decorative mouldings, drawknives to quickly shape blocks of wood into legs for a table or a highboy, chisels to prepare dovetail joints, and gouges to carve elaborate ornaments.
There would be stockpiles of various non-wood components of furniture--nails, glue, iron locks and brass drawer pulls, stains and finishes such as linseed oil and beeswax. Some of these products were likely pretty flammable, which led the Philadelphia Contributionship, the first fire insurance company in Philadelphia, to refuse to insure “"any...Joyners Shop...used as Stores for...hazardous Goods.”
And of course there is sure to be a stockpile of sawn lumber from the city’s sawmills, stacked to dry out, probably under an awning behind the shop. The stack would include showy woods--cherry and mahogany--as well as woods valued for their strength or ease of working--oak, maple, pine, poplar. There are also stores of lumber that have already been resawn, cut with handsaws into much thinner pieces from the thick lumber. In bins or drawers, there are collections of wood scraps for which the cabinetmakers might yet find a use.
Trotter’s records show that he worked in the following woods: Walnut, mahogany, cedar, hemlock, poplar, oak, white pine, heart pine, with smaller quantities of more specialized woods: gum, apple, cherry, satinwood, something referred to as "purple Wood," as well as wood veneers and inlays. Many of these woods were probably sourced regionally, logged North of Philadelphia, often in New Jersey, and floated down the Delaware River. By the early 19th century, the heavy logging for fuel as well as building and craft had devastated the region’s forests.
The mahogany, the showiest, finest wood that Trotter used, and the wood he worked most often in, came from both the island of Santo Domingo and the Bay of Honduras, now part of Belize. Chris Storb describes the way mahogany was processed before arriving in Philadelphia:
Storb: “There are some prints and illustrations of the work going on there, both by both British sawyers who emigrated and the slaves from the islands and from Western Africa. And they seem to be cutting it into bolts that were square, they would square these bolts. So they'd be almost a cube, they could be six, eight feet in every dimension. And then they would roll it to where the ships and of course the trees close to the shore, were the first ones that were felled and exported. And over the 18th century, it got harder and harder to to fell trees and get them to the market. Sometimes the boards were sawn in on the islands and shipped back.”
Storb: “the first cutting into boards would happen when there was still a lot of high moisture content in in the trees. And in the in the, that you've that you felled. And then they're set aside to dry. And then, and you'll do that you'll make boards of various sizes, one inch boards, two inch boards, four inch bolts for tea table pedestals and the like, depending on what the demand is by the by the cabinet makers. And then that gets set aside to dry.”
Things were always coming and going from a shop like Trotter’s--he contracted with other artisans such as turners, carvers, painters, and upholsterers to complete components of the orders he was working on. It seems like he may never have owned a lathe, but could easily have relied on nearby turners for whatever turned parts his projects required.
He may have even acted purely as a middle man on some orders, so perhaps there are complete pieces waiting to be picked up which never touched one of the workbenches.
Let’s imagine, for instance, that there is a pair of windsor chairs. Windsor chairs required a distinct set of skills from the chairs Trotter made, and his accounts showed that he sold Windsor chairs made by David and William Moon. Several Elfreth’s Alley residents also made Windsor chairs, including John Ackley and Gilbert Gaw, though we don’t know if they worked with Trotter.
But let’s go back to those nine workbenches in Trotter’s shop. By Trotter’s death in 1800, he had been a master cabinetmaker for 27 years. He had been using apprentice and journeyman labor for the vast majority of that period, and near the end of his life must have had quite a few people working in his shop. Here’s Chris Storb again,
Storb: “Now, we shouldn't carry the notion the kind of romantic notion of one person working in a shop making all his objects from start to finish. And then you know, looking for a buyer or something, the work was too, too demanding. And there are too many processes, where you needed at least two people working on them at one time. So there was always there were always apprentices and you know sons who were working in the shop to help move things along and a lot of operations where boards had to be resawn and you need two people to do resaw board. But as shops got bigger, and producing more furniture, more demand, more complex objects. It might grow from two or three person shop to 10-15 person shop”
None of Trotter’s sons followed him into the trade--he got his son William an apprenticeship with a merchant and his son Nathan would follow that path too. But one of his apprentices did become part of the family. In 1798, Ephraim Haines, who had been apprenticed in Trotter’s shop became a partner in the business. Perhaps Haines was already courting Elizabeth Trotter, Daniel’s oldest daughter, and they married in 1799.
In addition to inheriting the business, Haines inherited Trotter’s most important customer, Stephen Girard. Haines would go one to create some of the showiest pieces in Girard’s collection including a suite of drawing room furniture using ebony which had traveled across three continents in Girard’s ships before reaching Haines’ shop.
I said at the beginning of the episode that woodworkers of various sorts lived in at least half of the homes on Elfreth’s Alley at some point, but now I want to dive into the history of 2 properties on the street--125 and 127 Elfreth’s Alley.
In 1793, Daniel Trotter bought the land that is now #125 through #131, which already had a couple houses on it. He quickly sold off two of the lots, and erected a workshop or other working structure on each of the two remaining properties. By the mid 1790s, these lots were listed in addition to Trotter’s Front Street workshop in city directories. After Trotter’s death in 1800, his son-in-law Ephraim Haines continued the business and his name appears attached to these two properties on the Alley. The entry for Haines in the 1805 Philadelphia Directory, for instance, lists a “mahogany yard” at 11 Elfreth’s Alley--now #127. Eventually, Haines shifted away from furniture making to operate as a lumber merchant, probably a more profitable trade. Haines himself would leave a physical mark on the Alley, having houses built at #113 and #115.
In 1810, the Trotter heirs sold both #125 and #127 to Barney Schumo, a turner. Schumo lived across the street at #130 and he probably adapted Trotter and Haines’ buildings to his own needs for a period of time. However soon he had demolished the building on the lot now numbered #127 and constructed the house that now stands there. The house is notable for several decorative elements such as bulls-eye motifs on the fireplaces, and for being the only home on the street with straight stairs rather than narrow box-winder stairs. These touches were perhaps Schumo’s own handiwork, showing his skill with wood, or may simply have reflected his taste and been executed by other craftspeople.
By the time the house was completed, Schumo was also quite ill, however, and when he wrote his will in 1816, he anticipated that his widow and their family would not be able to continue to live in it. Phoebe and the Schumo children did indeed move back into #130 upon Barney’s death.
Ownership of both the house at #127 and the lot next door at #125, which may have still held a workshop of some sort, passed into the hands of Susanna Sinn, a widow, who sold both properties to another turner, Harman Baugh, in 1836. Baugh would own the house for the next 60 years, living in it most of that time, and build the house that now stands at #125, the tallest and newest house on Elfreth’s Alley.
By the time Baugh was living and working on Elfreth’s Alley, the woodworking trades had undergone a sea change, shifting from a traditional model based on relationships and obligations to one based on wage labor. When we come back, we’ll delve into these changes and the industrialization of furniture making.
During the period in which Daniel Trotter and Barney Schumo were working, the craft trades in Philadelphia were experiencing tremendous upheaval, and the cabinetmakers provide one of the best-documented examples of this transition. Between the late 18th century and the mid 19th century, the trade went from one based primarily on the bonded labor of apprentices, indentured servants, and sometimes enslaved workers, to an economic system which relied on free labor and competitive wages.
We’ve talked a bit about the apprenticeship system in the past, but we haven’t delved too deep into the role of journeymen. Under the traditional apprenticeship system, journeymen further honed their skills by assisting master craftsmen. Under this system, the master’s relationship with their apprentices and journeymen was one primarily of unwritten obligation, providing them with food and lodging as well as sometimes tools, in return for essentially free labor. In the early parts of the 18th century, this pool of journeymen had been supplemented by indentured labor coming primarily from Britain. These bonded laborers, like journeymen, had some skill, and their terms of indenture stabilized the labor market.
Indentured labor had little in common with enslaved labor except for one point--either was a significant expenditure for a craftsman, and one which they could be taxed on. Over the second half of the eighteenth century, many Philadelphia craftsmen began to shift from these longer-term labor investments to more of a free labor model. Apprenticeship agreements became more specific in their written terms, shifting toward a more capitalist model of exchange of labor for compensation. And journeymen increasingly became contract workers, moving between shops as masters needed more help, sometimes receiving room and board as part of their compensation, sometimes renting and earning wages.
Benjamin Randolph, whose shop produced the desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence was in some ways an early innovator in the shift toward a more capitalistic furniture making. Randolph’s family owned lumber mills in New Jersey and while Benjamin certainly learned a lot about the wood trade, it is not clear that he ever made furniture himself. Instead, during his career in furniture, from 1767 to 1778, he employed carvers recently immigrated from Britain and hired journeymen who had apprenticed with other men in Philadelphia. His account book also documents Randolph enslaving at least one man and renting the labor of enslaved workers.
By the 1790s, the breakdown of the apprenticeship system was having serious consequences for the journeymen of many trades, as they became the gig workers of the 18th century. Their work had no job security and they had to take whatever wages were offered. Trade by trade they began to organize in various ways. Between 1794 and 1796, journeymen cabinetmakers engaged in a standoff with the masters, printing and distributing a uniform list of prices for the furniture they produced. When some journeymen faced retaliation from employers, they set up a collective warehouse and workspace in which they could continue to work and sell furniture outside of the master system. At the end of the two years, it seems the journeymen were successful, as the 1796 list of prices was signed off on by three masters as well as three journeymen. One of the organizers of the journeymen cabinetmakers was a man named Thomas Janvier who worked periodically in Trotter’s shop.
The victory for the journeymen only lasted so long. Increasingly, furniture was produced for sellers rather than directly to the customer. Cabinet makers expanded their scale and looked for the cheapest labor they could find. By 1820, the journeymen cabinetmakers of Philadelphia again opened a warehouse of their own to attempt to compete with the more established shops.
As the path from apprentice to master became less assured, the apprenticeship system broke down. In 1828, the Mechanics’ Free Press described this breakdown:
Donato, performing this passage from the Mechanics’ Free Press: “The practice of many master mechanics in this city in employing none but apprentices in their manufacturing establishments, is an evil severely felt by the journeymen of all denominations; for whenever there is a greater number of mechanics than the demand of labour requires, it is evident the surplus must be thrown out of employ. There are men in this city who have from 15 to 20 apprentices, who never or very seldom have a journeyman in their shops, but to supply the place of journeymen, and to monopolize to themselves trade and wealth, as one apprentice becomes free, another is taken to fill up the ranks.”
By the mid-19th century, increased immigration from Germany of woodworkers who had already been apprenticed meant that furniture shop owners no longer needed to invest in apprentices--they could simply hire from the surplus of trained woodworkers.
Storb: by the middle, and third quarter of the 19th century, more than half of all of the furniture making concerns were run by Germans who were primarily German immigrants who came here fully trained, and been probably working for a number of years in Germany before they came to Philadelphia. And Italians were coming into the country more and more also as wood workers during this time and moving both to Philadelphia and to and to Germantown and so as long as the high end handmade, very skilled furniture was being made, immigrants continue to come and work here. Because one of the main reasons as that you really couldn't get training, high end training if you're a native born American wherever, you know, when there weren't too many places you could you could go, you had to show that you could do what do the work of the shop before you could get in,”
It was this Philadelphia that Daniel Pabst entered in 1849. Pabst, who we heard from at the top of the episode, was still able to have a long and distinguished career as a master craftsman, but the seeds of industrialization were already sown when he immigrated.
Once the apprenticeship path was officially gone, furniture making headed toward mass production.
Storb: “The vast manufacturers and warehouses, there's too much competition, you just couldn't. We had John Wanamaker, you could walk into Wanamaker’s, and you buy your whole dining room suite living room suite.”
In the 1820s and 1830s, trains had enabled Philadelphia furniture makers to sell to midwestern markets; by a few decades later, midwestern furniture manufacturers, employing more industrial processes, were providing stiff competition:
Storb: There might have been 10% of businesses 1850, 1840. In Philadelphia, that had steam powered equipment. And it could be 60 or 70% in someplace like Cincinnati, or Milwaukee, which were great furniture-making centers in the United States. And as the trains went out there and the trains could move the stuff around, they would be shipping it back to Wanamakers. And you would you would; now you're not buying just furniture made in Philadelphia, I get from anywhere in the in America.”
By the 1920s, the geographic center of furniture production in the United States had shifted again, to the Piedmont region, with many of the factories in North Carolina.
There were still a few furniture-making businesses in Philadelphia, such as the National Upholstered Furniture Company, which was located just around the corner from Elfreth’s Alley at 125 North Second Street from 1913-1923, but they became rarer as the century progressed.
When Daniel Pabst bemoaned the end of an era, he was right, but woodworkers remained in Philadelphia. There might not be great ladies lining up in their carriages, but some woodworkers found the right scale and the right niche in order to stay in business. And a prime example of this is The John Grass Woodturning Company, which until 2003 operated very nearby Elfreth’s Alley.
Storb: “Yes, well, the John Grass Woodworking Company, as its formal name was on 146 North Second Street right around the corner from you, got started with an immigrant John Grass, who he had slightly different route than many of the others because he came here when he was 15 years old in 1838. So he would have had woodworking training in, in Germany, maybe a couple of years of it. But he didn't come here fully trained. And so it's a little bit of a mystery to me how he pursued the trade. At 18, 19, 20. I don't, he probably just went into a shop. He had some skill, and he was hired. “
After going into business with a more established partner, as Daniel Trotter had done nearly a century earlier, Grass was able to found his own company, a company that outlived him. By 1911 the company passed to one of his proteges and in 1916, it relocated to 146 North Second Street.
Storb: “And they were only a turning company. That's all they did, I think probably at the most the greatest amount of employees was maybe 10 or 11. And some of those were the business people, accountants and people doing the books. And but the company kept working. I used to go there when I came to Philadelphia in then 1970s I would walk down that street is where you get abrasives of the carpenter machinery was still in business, the triple A--double a abrasives company was still in business. And we would we would purchase supplies there and then go down and look in the windows of the john grass woodturning company and watch the work going on and and until the day they closed the doors and in 2003 align shafts and the belt drives were still going every day now with an electric motor in the in the basement”
The John Grass Woodturning Company was able to carve out a niche in the market, producing primarily flagpoles and policeman’s nightsticks, as well as architectural features such as balusters, but eventually that niche too was supplanted by larger-scale production and other materials.
But woodworking still hasn’t gone away. Storb himself came to Philadelphia to study art at what is now the University of the Arts, and at the time, UArts had one of the foremost studio woodworkers in the country teaching there, Daniel Jackson.
Storb: “Dan Jackson grew up in Milwaukee and in in the antiques business, and he was a furniture restorer from an early age so he was involved in furniture and woodworking as a young as a youngster, and began to make objects of his own. so sculptural and conceptual, but primarily making objects that were were functional. And he was looking around for for teachers and for a place to study and he wound up going to Denmark to study with a well known teacher there. And that's where he got the basis for his knowledge and as a kind of a studio furniture maker modern furniture maker.”
When Jackson came to Philadelphia to helm the UArts program, he found a city that had an emerging gallery sector, with gallerists such as Helen Drutt English putting craft at the center of the art world. And the work of artists such as George Nakashima and Wharton Esherick meant that wood was a central medium of this craft movement.
Jackson did not only build the UArts program into one of national reputation, but also had a successful, though brief, career as an artist in his own right. One of his pieces, “Leda, the Devil, and the Moon (Looking Glass)” was added to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collections in 1973, one of the first pieces of the so-called “second generation” of woodworkers which the Museum collected. Perhaps Jackson’s most well-known piece is his unicorn rocker, a whimsical but also gorgeous and technically accomplished piece that was likely inspired by the carved wooden horses produced by the Dentzel Carousel Company, which was located in Germantown near Jackson’s home.
In Newtown, Pennsylvania, around the same time that Jackson was making his mark, a young man named Albert LeCoff, along with a few collaborators, began holding symposia for wood turners from around the country. LeCoff had completed an apprenticeship with a wood turner in his early 20s and found a vocation spreading the word about wood turning, teaching public classes but also bringing the craft to the attention of the art world through traveling exhibitions. In 1986, LeCoff drew on the momentum he had built up and opened the Wood Turning Center, now called the Center for Art in Wood, and located on North 3rd street, very near both the former John Grass shop and Elfreth’s Alley. In exhibitions like 1988’s International Turned Objects Show, the Center for Art in Wood built public recognition of wood turning as a medium of gallery art, while flagpoles, nightsticks, and balusters were made just down the street at John Grass.
This blossoming tradition of studio woodworking has in Philadelphia gone hand in hand with a passion for the roots of the craft. After earning his art degree, Chris Storb began working with a furniture restorer and that became his career. Today he considers himself a woodworker and uses historical methods
Storb: “[But I work in that mode. For the most part,] I have a tiny little shop, I don't have any power equipment, I don't use any equipment, I gradually grew to that kind of stance, I guess, working with historic objects, I needed to learn how it was done. And it was part of my job to understand it. And to understand all the tool marks are that we see in historic furniture you know, they're filled with tool marks and I needed to understand that so you buy tools, you try to figure it out, you read everything you can, of course as well before YouTube and and eBay. And I would go to tool sales and tool auctions. It was something that was common in the region 30 years ago, and then examine hundreds and hundreds of tools too and trying to look at the ones that I thought might have come out of a real shop rather than been chisels opening paint cans or something guy and come out of somebody who had used them as as a skilled crafts person and see what they look like how did they sharpen things with it? And what the Where was the wear on the wood lid planes.”
And Storb has also worked to keep alive techniques which have been practiced for hundreds of years in this city.
Storb: “I've taught wood carving, I get it, there's a demand for wood carving, and I taught several classes at UArts in it. Because that's one of the skills of really hasn't been able to be replicated by machines. We have CNC machines that that do that and produce something but there's a lot that they can't do. And there's so there's still interested in that as a way to set yourself apart. And in this in this world where you can make something that really can't be replicated by machine.”
Wood may not make up our homes and all that is in them today in Philadelphia, but woodworking is still a craft which has left its mark on the city. This is a city that is keenly aware of its own history, and the work of cabinetmakers in the 18th century is on display in museums and in the finest homes and the woodworking renaissance continues at the region’s art schools, as well as in craft collectives, and personal studios, fostered by a still-thriving gallery scene.
In the homes on Elfreth’s Alley, today it’s not unusual to find antique furniture or furniture made in traditional ways by craftspeople who have displayed their skill at events the museum has put on over the years. The people who live in the homes now value this legacy and the history of this place.
I’ll leave it to Chris Storb to have the last word about woodworking’s lingering impact on Philadelphia.
Storb: “When we're in Philadelphia, I'm when I walked down the streets. Sometimes I'm thinking that is 2021. And sometimes I think I'm in the past somewhere. And then I'm feeling all of that. And I know I've talked to a lot of students over the years who there's a 10 20% of them, I've come here from somewhere else and say, Oh, I think I want to stay here. And because of that, that decades and decades and scores of years where people have been attuned to the craft, and it's it's flourished in different ways. But it's always been here.”
History is a group effort! This episode was researched and written by Ted Maust, with creative input from Margaret Sanford and Enya Xiang. Thanks to Chris Storb for offering his broad knowledge at several points in the research process. His blog, at cstorb.com, CSTORB.com, is a wonderful resource for furniture history--I heartily recommend it!
Thanks again to our sponsors Linode, the History Department of Temple University, and the Center for Art in Wood. Support is also provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Anne Castrodale Golovin, Sharon V. Salinger, and Jay Stiefel, as well as past volunteers and staff of the Elfreth’s Alley Association who have collected various records related to the street’s residents.
A transcript of this episode with sources is available on the episode page at ElfrethsAlley.org/podcast and the link in the show notes.
The music in this episode is the songs “Open Flames” and “An Oddly Formal Dance,” both by Blue Dot Sessions and both used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Thomas P. Laitinen for voicing Daniel Pabst’s interview, as well as Fran Donato for performing the announcement, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, of the dissolution of the partnership of Webb and Trotter as well as the account from the Mechanics’ Free Press.
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 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.
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Coming up in the next episode: Next week’s installment of The Alley Cast will look at the history of food service workers--18th-century tavern operators, 19th-century caterers, 20th-century sandwich shop entrepreneurs,--as well as the present and future of the industry.
Thank you and take care!