Industrial City

Cities have been centers of production and manufacture for millennia. The city of manufacture gathered producers and material together. In crowded workshops and along docks and piers workers constructed chariots and wagons, boats and sails, tapestries and clothing, boots and soap, and, with the invention of the printing press, books, newspapers, and broadsides. A visit to a weaving shop in 14th-century Flanders, a shipyard in 17th-century Glasgow, or an 18th-century Philadelphia print shop would see industrious jours (skilled workers), harassed apprentices, and nervous masters. But the labor done would share one important feature—it would be for the most part hand-powered.

Cities of manufacture gathered people together and subjected them to the filth, smells, and disease of crowds. But there was something fundamentally [Page 373]different between these pre-industrial cities and their later progeny. The crowds of the pre-industrial city were more mixed and diverse. Mixing in with merchants and traders, bankers, and gentlemen farmers in the city, for shopping or business, would be haulers and builders, artisans and fabricators, sailors and ship captains. The wealthy to be sure found comfort in residential areas of their peers, but not far away were homes of the poor. Masters, jours, and apprentices lived amongst each other if not in the same homes. Shops that manufactured goods often were the shops where the goods were sold, and shops also were in the same buildings as homes and taverns. Within the shops, masters, jours, and apprentices mingled freely. Although orders were given, especially to apprentices, in general those engaging in the manufacture of goods did their own work, at accustomed speed and under their own direction, and they did varied activities. The goods they turned out were as varied as the men and women who produced them.

These urban workshops were complemented by rural home production. Entering a farm community of 200 years ago, one would confront multiple centers of production. Each home was a hive of manufacturing activity, in which spinning and weaving of various items was done for local use and sale to urban markets. In barns and work sheds, wagons, harnesses, rakes, tools, and furniture were fashioned. Enterprising manufacturers sent out into the countryside the cuttings and materials for the creation of gloves, hats, shoe-uppers, and brooms, and the finished products were gathered in the commercial centers for distribution.

To a great extent, urban workshop and home production met most of the needs of the new nation, but the model of large-scale production—of using armies of workers doing similar repetitive tasks and using animals in addition to people to supply the labor to produce standardized goods—had been developed in England and proved too hard to resist. In England, animal power had been utilized for centuries to power gristmills and fulling-mills, whereas in America, water power and wind power were tapped to grind grain, cut lumber, full wool, and hammer iron. What first Samuel Slater and later the Boston Associates did was to take control of waterpower to run multiple machines tended by operatives, and when they did so, they set in motion a revolution in production that not only created new ways to produce goods but also restructured urban life and gave rise to the industrial city. To find falling water significantly powerful enough to run machines on a regular basis, these entrepreneurs looked upstream to where rivers fell across major fault lines, then built dams, canals, and mill ponds and constructed buildings large enough and strong enough to house hundreds of machines. The building of dams large enough to capture significant waterpower, and factories whose foundations were strong enough to hold up under the strain of the workings of multiple machines, required extensive investment.

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