PhillyHistory Blog

The groundwork of the industrial revolution was laid in the early decades of the 19^th century with the advent of steam power, small machine shops, and advances in chemistry and physics. Philadelphia was among the cities in the forefront of the nascent industrial age. Technical schools were being founded at this time in European and some American cities.  Local businessman Samuel Vaughn Merrick and science professor William H. Keating hatched the idea for such a school in Philadelphia in late 1823. Other leaders of the city joined the effort and a series of lectures was soon launched the next year in rented space at Carpenters’ Hall and the original University of Pennsylvania at 4^th and Arch. The school was an immediate success with 600 paying members in the first year. Mostly these members were young craftsmen and apprentices interested in improving their knowledge of engineering, the science behind the new advances.

Naming the organization after Philadelphia’s most famous man of science, Ben Franklin, was a natural. After only one year, the Institute was planning it own building on a vacant lot on 7^th Street near Market, and a source of funding appeared when the federal government agreed to a long-term lease for federal courts in part of the proposed building. John Haviland was selected as architect. Perhaps his most famous work is Eastern State Penitentiary, which influenced the design of prisons around the world. The new building for the Institute was about 60 feet wide and 100 feet long in the neo-classical style.

Some of the most important names in Philadelphia science and industry taught or lectured there. Men such as architects William Strictland and Thomas U. Walter and industrialists Matthias Baldwin, Isaiah Lukens, William Sellers. A host of scholars and scientists were associated with the Institute including Alexander Dallas Bache and Frederick Graff.

 

Today the Franklin Institute on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is known as an outstanding science museum, but for decades it was much more. The Institute took on scores of research projects. It was also an early testing lab trying to determine if new inventions really worked. The first scientific study of water power drew international attention. The federal government helped finance a study there to determine how to make steam engines safe following disastrous explosions on steamboats. Later, it was the Franklin Institute that spearheaded a movement and devised ways to standardize threads and sizes for nuts and bolts.

The Institute also published a technical and science journal and sponsored contests for inventors. Evening lectures were a huge success. Those who paid their annual $3 dues could attend all lectures for free. From the start, women were admitted to all lectures. Drafting classes were particularly popular.

After 109 years of use, the building was abandoned when the Franklin Institute moved to the Parkway in 1933. It stood vacant and was scheduled for demolition when dynamic society woman Frances Ann Wistar launched a campaign to save it. She enlisted the aid of industrialist A. Atwater Kent, who had already provided the funding to preserve the Betsy Ross House.

Kent had been a pioneer in manufacturing auto parts and electrical appliances. He jumped into the new radio business in 1921 with much success. His Atwater Kent radio factory employed 12,000 workers at its peak. He purchased the building that now bears his name, which was dedicated in 1941 as a museum of Philadelphia history. The facade of the building hasn’t changed since the day it opened.

References:

• Sinclair, Bruce. Philadelphia‘s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824–1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

• Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia. http://www.philadelphiahistory.org/

The Sparks Shot Tower has been a South Philadelphia landmark since 1808. Located at Front and Carpenter Streets, it’s easily seen by passing motorists on I-95. Most people probably assume it’s a tall smoke stack from some long-defunct factory. It is, indeed, a 200-year-old industrial artifact. When the brick tower was first built, it represented a revolutionary new technology in the manufacture of lead ammunition. The technology was born in Great Britain where it was discovered that dropping molten lead from a high place caused it to form perfectly round balls as it fell. The lead was poured through a mesh that gave the balls the proper sizes. The hot balls fell into a large vat of water.

Until this discovery, musket balls were fashioned by pouring the lead into wooden molds. The new technique made it many times quicker and cheaper to make ammunition. Tons of shot was imported to America until President Thomas Jefferson imposed the Embargo Act in 1807. During the Napoleonic Wars, both France and Great Britain began seizing ships from neutral nations headed toward enemy ports. Jefferson’s answer was to ban trading with both nations.

According to a long-told story, Thomas Sparks and John Bishop were out hunting water fowl in the swamps in South Philly when they began discussing the high price of lead shot caused by the embargo and hit on the idea of building their own shot tower. Another partner in the project was James Clement.  All three were experienced in working with lead. The partners found someone who had worked in a British shot tower to advise them. The tower is said to be a sterling example of Philadelphia brickwork. Topped by a cone-shaped roof, the tower is 30 feet in diameter at the base and tapers to 15 feet. “Members of the United States Lighthouse Board have frequently repaired to its site to copy the model and afterward re-embody it in a lighthouse,” according to an 1875 book on Philadelphia industry.

 

There is some debate over the claim that the Queen Village landmark was the first American shot tower. A stone shot tower in Wythe County, Va., along the New River, was built about the same time. It still stands along with Sparks and three other American shot towers. Within a year of the opening of the Sparks Shot Tower, Philadelphian Paul Beck built an even larger tower along the Schuylkill River, but it is long gone.

During the War of 1812, the Sparks Shot Tower was in full operation selling ammunition to the federal government. Bishop left the enterprise because he was devout Quaker who felt he could not support war in any form. The third partner also eventually left. At some point machinery was installed in a nearby building to make the conical bullets that replaced most lead shot. Four generations of the Sparks family continued operations until 1903 when the business was sold.

In 1913, the city purchased the shot tower and surrounding grounds to create a playground for a neighborhood teeming with immigrants and the poor. The entrance to the tower is sealed off and few have entered it in decades.

Avery, Ron. Beyond the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia: Broad Street Books, 1991.

There is also a large amount of research on shot towers available on various websites.   

By advocating English Gothic as the only acceptable style for Anglican churches, the Philadelphia followers of the Cambridge Camden Society wanted to take a stand against trends they felt were very unattractive in the boisterous new nation: a dangerous secularism built upon the unfettered worship of commerce, technology and the power of reason. Even so, the young nation as described by observers like Alexis de Tocqueville was largely indifferent or even hostile to such diversions as liturgical ceremony, spiritual mysticism, and antiquarianism. Tocqueville noted the result of the lack of government-sanctioned aristocratic and clerical prerogatives on the American psyche: “When ranks are confused and privileges are destroyed, when patrimonies are divided and enlightenment and freedom are spread, the longing to acquire well-being presents itself to the imagination of the poor man, and the fear of losing it, to the mind of the rich. A multitude of mediocre fortunes is established … They therefore apply themselves constantly to pursuing or keeping these enjoyments that are so precious, so incomplete, and so fleeting.”¹ Of course, Robert Ralston and his fellow Philadelphia sponsors of St. James-the-Less had fortunes largely based in banking and manufacturing, not in inherited rank and feudal landownership.

In keeping with the Cambridge Camden Society’s mission for authenticity, no architect per se was hired to design St. James-the-Less. John E. Carver, the general contractor, worked from measured drawings of St. Michael’s, Long Station in Cambridgeshire, which had been built c. 1230.² The project’s sponsors saw this model as the purest example of a modestly-sized but exquisitely crafted British parish church, one that was designed and built by local craftsmen out of local materials. Rather than being delicate, lofty, and grandiose, St. James-the-Less is compact, rugged, and muscular. The nave windows are small, creating a very dark, mysterious nave compared to the open, light-filled ones of neoclassical Philadelphia churches.

The chancel, where the priest performs the sacrifice of the mass, is recessed and partially screened from the congregation, a liturgical statement meant to convey the mystery of the sacrament. The masonry walls are rough-hewn and composed of stones of irregular shapes. The gable peaks are capped by stone crosses, while the doors are painted a bright red and are ornamented with wrought iron hinges and handles. Unlike large Gothic cathedrals, which used flying buttresses to augment the load bearing capacity of their walls, St. James-the-Less relies only on its thick masonry piers and walls to support its roof.

The choice of setting for St. James-the-Less was as important to its architecture. Ralston and his colleagues wanted a site that would be appropriate to a country parish church. According to a 1983 history of the church, “The Ridge Road had long been a main avenue of travel, but many of the tracts that are now built up in rows of houses were then woodlands, or were occupied by country places of considerable size.”³ Since factories and dense residential development were slowly creeping northward, the vestry of St. James-the-Less hoped that their new church would be used not just by the wealthy, but also by the working class employed in the mills and factories. The church and its grounds would be a spiritual and physical oasis for families who lived in dense row house districts with little green space and few aesthetic charms. To borrow two images from William Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem,” St. James-the-Less was to be nestled in a land of “pleasant pastures green,” a world away from the “dark, satanic mills” of the smoke-belching metropolis.

Construction on the church began in 1846, with an initial budget of $6,000. The Bishop Alonzo Potter dedicated the structure in 1850, but the total cost for the church had risen to over $30,000–approximately $700,000 in today’s money–largely because of the expensive decorations that the patrons insisted on adding to the interior.⁴

The impact of tiny St. James-the-Less on American architecture was immense. Parishioners were stunned at the proportions and craftsmanship of the building while visitors left the church determined to build their own country Gothic churches to the same exacting standards. Within the next few decades, English Gothic churches sprung up throughout the Philadelphia region and beyond. According to architectural historian Phoebe Stanton: “Many of the Protestant Episcopal churches that followed in the United States were informed with its [St. James-the-Less] feeling for materials and for simple but delicate articulation of ornament and scale … Whether or not one approves the appropriation of a medieval plan for nineteenth century use and the introduction of a deep chancel as a part of church plans and liturgical practice, one must be grateful for the accident which brought to America a building that demonstrated the aesthetic truths medieval buildings had to offer the nineteenth century architect and patron.”⁵ The most notable architectural descendents of St. James-the-Less include architect John Notman’s St. Mark’s Church at 16th and Locust and the Hewitt brothers’ St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Chestnut Hill, both of which use the English country church plan.

Aside from some minor interior cosmetic changes, St. James-the-Less remained largely unchanged during the 19th century, even as the mills, foundries, and crowded row house blocks crept up the Schuylkill banks and encroached on its formerly sylvan setting. The church served as a place of worship both for the working class of East Falls and the wealthy Center City Philadelphians, many of whom are buried in the cemetery, which by the early 20th century had completely filled the grounds.

Although the church itself remained unaltered, the physical plant of St. James-the-Less expanded to serve the needs of an increasingly urban and working class neighborhood. In 1916, a new rectory and a large parish house/school building were constructed across Clearfield Street from the church. Perhaps the most striking new addition to the St. James-the-Less compound was the Wannamaker Memorial Tower, built to serve both as the church’s carillon and the Wannamaker family tomb. Eschewing the rustic language of the original church, these buildings take their cues from the liturgical architecture of architects such as Ralph Adams Cram, with their use of intricate stone tracery, gargoyles and other decoration.

Today, St. James-the-Less – a seminal piece of American architectural heritage, a pastoral respite from the blighted neighborhoods of Hunting Park Avenue, and a National Historic Landmark – sits shuttered and dark. Still wholly intact inside and out, St. James the Less sits perched on its hill above the Schuylkill River waiting for a new life.

References:

¹ Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Edited and translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

² Phoebe B. Stanton. The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 94.

³ Paul W. Kayser. A Brief History and Guide to the Church of St. James the Less. Philadelphia: St. James the Less, 1983. 2.

⁴ Paul W. Kayser. A Brief History and Guide to the Church of St. James the Less. Philadelphia: St. James the Less, 1983. 4.

⁵ Phoebe B. Stanton. The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 113.

In 1846, several prominent members of the Philadelphia Episcopal Church met at the country estate of Robert Ralston in the village of Falls of Schuylkill. They were merchants, manufacturers, and other men of property, but they had not gathered to raise capital to build another factory or lay more miles of railroad track. Instead the meeting at “Mount Peace” produced the following goal: “To build a church which should be a country house of worship, as similar as possible to the best type of such a church that England could furnish, a veritable home of retirement and meditation, a quiet house of prayer.”¹ All of the men were members of a small organization known as the Cambridge Camden Society, a tight-knit group of academics, architects and patrons of the arts who sought to radically transform British and American church design.

During the 1830s, the Cambridge Camden Society was formed in England to revive the authentic Gothic style in church architecture. Its corresponding spiritual equivalent, known Inflatable Caterpillar as the Oxford Movement, was led by a group of Oxford University professors, theologians and students. Anglican thinkers such as John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, and John Keble felt that the Church of England had become liturgically lax and hoped to revive many of its traditional, Roman Catholic practices.² The Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Camden Society wanted to reassert the centrality of the Mass over preaching in the Anglican service, as well as a reincorporation of pre-Reformation symbols and practices in the liturgy and design. St. James-the-Less was intended by its Philadelphia sponsors to be an authentic and perfect jewel of the emphatically medieval and British Gothic style.

As is common with cases of spiritual and aesthetic nostalgia, Ralston and his coterie planned St. James-the-Less in reaction to what was seen as a soulless, materialistic present. The Cambridge Camden Society became disenchanted with the classical revival that had been the dominant form of church architecture during the 18th century. Anglican churches built during the 18th and early 19th centuries in England and America based their floor plans and detailing on Greek and Roman models, most notably those adapted by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Examples of neoclassical Anglican churches in Philadelphia include Christ Church at 2nd and Market Street (1727) and St. Peter’s Church (1760). These churches are characterized by an open nave without side aisles, simple ornamentation, large windows letting in ample sunlight, and a lack of liturgical representative artwork. Firmly identifying with the Protestant rather than the Catholic traditions of the Church of England, these churches were meant to emphasize preaching and congregational hymn singing over communion and liturgical processions.

 

The Federal and Greek revival styles, steeped in the language of pagan classical antiquity, were wildly popular in Philadelphia during the first decades of the 19th century. To the sophisticated urban mercantile elite, the adaptation of the classical language for the young nation was a logical choice. The young republic, led by classically virtuous men such as George Washington, was the heir to Greek democracy and the Roman Republic. Nicholas Biddle, the erudite Philadelphia banker and man of letters, felt that the Greek revival style, with its associations with reason, restraint, and egalitarianism, should be the national style for the American Republic.³ The most perfect monument to Biddle’s idea is the Second Bank of the United States at 5th and Market Streets, designed by William Strickland and based on the Parthenon. As a practical matter, builders and architects could easily adapt the classical style to all manner of uses. By the 1830s, sober Greek porticos, entablatures and other decorative details adorned the row houses, banks, and schools throughout Philadelphia.

As the American Revolution and the hostility to all things British faded into distant memory, a number of prominent Philadelphians began to look to architects who were inspired by the English church’s medieval, pre-Reformation heritage. The Gothic style – almost exclusively used for church architecture since the Middle Ages – was not easy to adapt to a merchant’s row house block near Washington Square or a bank on Market Street. Gothic had inextricable associations with markedly “un-Republican” concepts, namely monarchy, feudal aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy. It also connoted mystery and complexity rather than reason and simplicity.

References:

• ¹Paul W. Kayser, A Brief History and Guide to the Church of St. James the Less. Philadelphia: St. James the Less, 1983. 2.
• ² “What is the Oxford Movement?” Pusey House Chapel and Library, 2006. http://www.parishes.oxford.anglican.org/puseyhouse/oxfdmove.htm.
• ³ Joseph Downs. “The Greek Revival in America.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Jan., 1944), 173.