First City. Gary B. Nash
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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
FIGURE 23. Interior of Mercer Museum, Bucks County Historical Society. This photograph of the central court of the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, shows how Henry Chapman Mercer wanted to create what one historian has called “carefully classified confusion.” This “tight packing” of artifacts, reminiscent of an old-fashioned hardware store, gives a good sense of how objects were fashioned by craftsmen and used in daily work processes.
Deeply involved in collecting ordinary objects, Mercer explained in 1909 that he was sure that “the history of Pennsylvania was here profusely illustrated and from a new point of view.”16 In no other way could a more inclusive history be presented. Councillors of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions paid little attention to Mercer’s ideas that history resides with the common people and that people will flock to see what was part of their ancestors’ daily life. So the fabulous collection he assembled of some 60,000 ordinary household objects filled up the fantastic six-story concrete castle he completed in 1916 in Doylestown for the Bucks County Historical Society, which he had helped found in 1880.
Visitors came in small numbers to Mercer’s castle, but his ideas gained new currency during the Great Depression. Just seven years after Mercer died in 1930, the wealthy radio magnate Atwater Kent established a Museum of Philadelphia History that more or less adopted Mercer’s mission: to collect material culture that would bring to light the social and cultural importance of daily urban life. Exhibiting for the first time in 1939, the museum has collected about eighty thousand artifacts, though only a small fraction of them tell stories of Philadelphia life before 1850.
The works of luxury craftsmen so prized by collectors cannot give the full picture of artisan life, but they tell a great deal. For example, 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