Old Kensington — “Fishtown”
This article was written by Rich Remer for The Historical Society of Pennsylvania —
In 1730, when Anthony Palmer, a wealthy provincial councilor, purchased land on the northern outskirts of colonial Philadelphia and named it “Kensington,” he was most likely not considering its potential for urban growth. Palmer’s Kensington was to be a transatlantic echo of England’s Kensington Palace, regal and rustic, a retreat from urban life and its tumult. Palmer elaborated his regal conceit when he named the main streets of his lands. The lower boundary, now East Columbia Avenue, started life as “Hanover Street” after the reigning House of Hanover. Cross streets included King (Beach), Queen (Richmond), Prince (Girard), Duke (Thompson), Bishop (Berks) and Crown (Crease). Even England’s military darling, the Duke of Marlborough, was remembered with a street. To the north, Norris Street divided Palmer’s lands from the plantations of his neighbor, Isaac Norris. The Delaware River formed Palmer’s eastern boundary, and the Frankford Road bounded the west.
Palmer’s land was a portion of the old Shackamaxon Tract, surveyed almost a century earlier during the earliest period of European settlement in the Delaware Valley. Members of the Cox, Rambo and Nelson families of New Sweden had been granted these lands north of the Cohocksink Creek and marshlands, in the vicinity of the Great Elm near the Lenape settlement known as “Kachamensi.” The Unami clan of the Lenape considered these rich meadowlands their chief dwelling place and the traditional site for tribal conferences and congresses. From a European perspective at least, William Penn’s “treaty” with the Lenape was the most important conference that occurred there. It is immortalized in Benjamin West’s famous painting, complete with a panorama of newly arrived English Quakers, welcoming Lenapes, and resident Swedes, who are said to have acted as translators. Neither natives nor Swedes stayed long after Penn’s meeting in 1682, soon leaving Kachamensi for virgin lands to the north or west.
The British settlers of the new colony of Pennsylvania soon anglicized the tract’s name to “Shackamaxon,” which also became the name of one of its earliest streets. Penn’s assistant surveyor of the colony, Thomas Fairman, became the major landowner in the area and in 1702 built himself a fine brick and stone mansion on the bank of the Delaware, under what came to be called the “Treaty Elm.” Palmer moved into Fairman’s mansion when he purchased the grounds and soon residents of the area could see Councilor Palmer floating to the city and back on a regal river barge. Palmer surely chose the most comfortable and efficient mode of transport, since eighteenth-century roads were primitive at best and traveling them could be a physical ordeal. Moreover, Kensington was separated from the city and its northern “liberties” by both the Cohocksink Creek and its surrounding marshes. Despite the building of a mile-long causeway over creek and marsh, travel by boat remained the easiest mode of transport until the early nineteenth century.
To attract residents to this isolated area, Palmer subdivided his ground into smaller lots and leased them at very attractive rates. Two unique contingents took advantage of Palmer’s offer, and their descendants would shape Kensington for the next century. Shipwrights of mainly English and Welsh descent made up the larger group. Pennsylvania, which literally means Penn’s Woods, was abundantly blessed with timber, making shipbuilding one of the earliest profitable industries. William Penn himself was a silent partner in the shipyard of one James West. West’s son, Charles, jumped at the chance to move the family business from its cramped original quarters on Vine Street to Kensington’s more advantageous geography. Shipbuilders had found little or no shoreline suitable to build on in the original center of colonial Philadelphia; the land dropped off in cliffs at the riverfront. The port of Philadelphia was also booming by the mid-eighteenth century, demanding more and more dock, wharf and warehouse space along what little accessible shoreline existed. Kensington by contrast had long, sloping beaches (today’s Beach Street), ideal for hull construction and repair work, and extensive undeveloped space. A number of Quaker shipwrights moved south out of the city’s congested trading district into Southwark, but Charles West, along with the Boytes, Norrises, Lynns, Wrights and newcomers like the Eyre brothers from Burlington headed north of the Cohocksink, to Kensington.
Shipwrights were an inbred, clannish lot, intermarrying and keeping business and craft secrets within the family. The physical remoteness of Kensington reinforced this insularity and soon the overlay of family/business/community began to develop that would characterize the neighborhood for generations.
The “Palatines,” German-speaking immigrants to colonial America, made up the second component of Palmer’s community. Part of the largest non–English-speaking migration to British North America before the Revolution, Palatine immigrants have been less visible than their sectarian countrymen, the Amish and Mennonites. But most German-speaking immigrants were in fact Lutheran or Reformed in religion and blended into the British population within two or three generations. The language barrier they confronted, and a subtle sense of identity that set them apart even after their language and customs faded, added to the distinctness and insularity of the Kensington area.
By the time of the American Revolution, German immigrants represented nearly one-third of the colony of Pennsylvania, and were colonial America’s largest ethnic minority. Benjamin Franklin even considered making provisions for official recognition of German as America’s second language. The importance of German immigration to Kensington is less well known than the stories of Germantown or Frankford, but evidence of a German presence is everywhere. In Anthony Palmer’s will of 1749, he made provision for a community school to provide teaching “in English and German.” Henry Muhlenberg’s records of the local German Lutheran community list numerous baptisms, marriages and funeral services performed “in Kensington,” while the parish registers of First Reformed Church of Philadelphia and St. Michael’s and Zion Lutheran Church identify hundreds of German parishioners “of Kensington.” The surnames of early Kensington residents, found in deeds, wills and administrations, are a regular litany of German “Palatinate” surnames in various stages of anglicization: Baker/Boeckker, Bakeoven/Bachofen, Beideman/Beitelmann, Binder, Clever, Cramp/Krampf, Crosscup/Grosskopf, Faunce/Fonz, Fow, Gosser, Phister/Fister, Remer/Roemer, Rice/Reiss, Shibe/Sipe, Pote/Poeth, Tees/Dietz, Zorg/Sork. Some were anglicized upon arrival or in daily intercourse, others would be altered during patriotic upwellings like the Revolution and the War of 1812.
Kensington’s German ethnic families concentrated in location and occupation, as fishermen along the mud flats by Gunner’s Run (now Aramingo Avenue). For what could have been simpler for newcomers with few skills and little money than to take up fishing in a place where every spring a miraculous flood of tasty Delaware River shad stormed upriver? So many shad filled the Delaware that early observers claimed it was possible to walk to New Jersey on their squirming, jostling backs. There were so many that anything not eaten or sold at once could be salted or smoked for consumption throughout the year. Then, too, the river offered eel, snapping turtles, catfish and other river fish and fowl there for the taking, not reserved for the aristocracy as in the old country. For many, Pennsylvania must have seemed too good to be true, a veritable land of plenty with wealth lying in the streets (or river). A family could rent a house and land after a few good fishing seasons, then supplement their income with seasonal work in the shipyards further down Beach Street, when the need for unskilled labor arose.
Gradually, the two communities began to blend, first through labor, then after a few generations, through love and marriage. But world events intervened in this quiet little river village of shipwrights and fishermen. When the American Revolution broke out and British troops occupied Philadelphia in September of 1777, Kensington acquired some strategic importance, since major routes to the northwest (Germantown Pike), north (Old York Road) and northeast (Frankford Road) all converged nearby. The British dammed the Cohocksink Creek and flooded the marshlands, creating a water barrier between the city and the northern approaches. The outlying plantations, orchards, woods and estates were torched to clear the vista for observation. In the fall and winter of 1777–78 Major John Simcoe and a regiment of loyalists called the Queen’s Rangers occupied Kensington. Using the village as their camp, they made forays and raids in the area. They set guards around the Treaty Elm lest it be damaged during their stay, but stripped the Eyre mansion of its fine paneling, tore down all the local fencing for kindling, shot one local resident, Michael Crist, on his way to his well, and generally left wanton damage and destruction in their wake. The war dragged on for five more years after the departure of the Rangers; no boats were built until after hostilities ended in 1783.
In those few difficult and costly years, however, important changes had already begun to occur in the neighborhood, beyond what outside political and military affairs could inflict. John Hewson, an English textile printer, had arrived in Philadelphia on the eve of war, been chased out by the British, and returned to start Kensington’s textile industry with America’s first batch of calico, printed at Kensington’s Governor’s Mill. On the brink of the Revolution, a glass factory had opened briefly on Gunner’s Run that would signal the birth of Kensington’s glass industry. Glass and textile production were old crafts, but new means of production were being tried. Inventors were looking at the world in a different way, talking of mastering nature, making machines and machinery do their bidding. The energy of Britain’s new Industrial Revolution, imported to North America, would find one of the epicenters of its development in Anthony Palmer’s old rural retreat.
These changes had hardly begun to take effect, however, when European political and military affairs once more intervened in the everyday lives of Kensingtonians. The Napoleonic Wars, a twenty-five-year global power struggle between England and France, made the United States a leading neutral power and international carrier of goods. Orders for American ships burgeoned during this period and new shipyards, ropewalks and smithies opened in Kensington to meet the demand. Point Pleasant, the southernmost portion of the Kensington waterfront (where modern Canal Street now funnels out the remains of the creek into the Delaware River) was drained, filled-in and developed. Turner Camac arrived at Point Pleasant from England, determined to manage profitably the surrounding Masters estate owned by his wife, Sarah Masters, and her sister Mary, the wife of Richard Penn, grandson of the Proprietor. Camac quickly overcame years of local mismanagement and within a few years had restored profitability and created a boom in Point Pleasant. The Grice and Bower shipwrights opened shipyards at Point Pleasant, followed by Isaac Eyre (no relation to the Eyre clan at Hanover Street) and George Landell. In 1803, the creation of the Frankford and Bristol Turnpike, starting from Point Pleasant’s public square, further stimulated business and settlement. Charles B. Parke opened a brass foundry in the neighborhood in 1809. Inns and taverns sprang up at major intersections approaching the terminus, while at the first toll gate, at what is now Frankford and Columbia, John Harrison established a manufactory and his residence, Priestley Lodge. A former student of Joseph Priestley, Harrison became America’s first industrial chemist, discovering the formula for oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) and beginning its production. The dangerously corrosive liquid, essential to finishing textiles, glass and metal products, could only be transported in fragile glass containers, so manufacturers tended to locate as close as possible to their sources (remember those bone-crunching roads!). Harrison’s new facility in Kensington therefore became a magnet for new industrial growth and development.
By 1820, growth supported by the prosperous years of the Napoleonic Wars had stimulated the development of the waterfront, the beginnings of an industrial infrastructure, local churches, a market, the turnpike and hose and engine companies. Pennsylvania belatedly recognized that Kensington was no longer an isolated village but rapidly becoming the most enterprising part of the county. On March 6, 1820, the state legislature redefined Kensington and created a new corporation for it, called the “Commissioners and Inhabitants of the Kensington District of the Northern Liberties.” Kensington’s western boundaries now stretched as far west as Germantown Pike and Sixth Street and as far to the north as Lehigh Avenue, with the northern bank of the mouth of Gunner’s Run (the future Dyottville and later Cramp’s Norris Street shipyards) included as well.
Guide maps and city directories of the 1820s reveal an unofficial but critical feature of the newly created entity. Front Street has become the dividing line between old, original Kensington, now labeled “East Kensington,” and the additional territory, now called “West Kensington.” East Kensington, combining Kensington, Point Pleasant and the little fishermen’s hamlet known locally as “Fishtown,” was a maturing community, already divided into small land parcels, with residents of mostly British or German ancestry, overwhelmingly Protestant in faith and intricately interconnected by marriage. Sparsely-settled West Kensington, on the other hand, had large tracts of undeveloped land, rapidly filling in with rural migrants and the new immigrants of the 1830s and 1840s, many of whom were Catholic, Irish, or both. Front Street promised to be, and soon became, an ethnic fault line that would prove unstable under the pressures of nativism, rapid population growth and explosive industrialization.
Front Street turned into an actual battleground of sorts in the 1830s, though this first battle actually brought Kensingtonians together. When organizers of the new Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad decided, with the approval of the distant state legislature, to run their tracks down the center of Front Street to their depot at Third and Willow, East and West Kensingtonians buried their differences to preserve their communities from cinder-throwing machines. They united in a drawn-out series of disturbances and altercations known as the “Railroad Riots.” After workmen had finished laying track and ties during the day, local residents would rip out the work overnight, burning the ties to melt and warp the rails. After months of turmoil, the railroad directors decided to concede defeat and the Kensington Depot was finally constructed at Front and Berks Streets.
The divide at Front Street would also help to create two Kensingtons, different in their social and industrial development. East Kensington flourished through the antebellum years, but then faced relative decay with the decline of the old craft-based shipwrights and the disappearance of the once-magnificent shad runs, while after the war the new factory-based system of production brought growth to the perimeters and to West Kensington. Open lands that became available in the 1840s and 1850s with the breakup of the Ball, Norris and Masters estates encouraged the growth of increasingly larger mills and factories to the north and west.
But in the 1830s, Old Kensington was in the “springtime” of its industrial development, a time when an astounding array of manufactured products, most requiring and rewarding a highly-skilled workforce, sustained families for generations. Textile and carpet manufacturing had a long and varied history on the east side of Front Street dating to John Hewson’s arrival in the 1770s. The textile industry operated on every conceivable scale, from individual outworkers and weavers in garrets or backyard sheds (some still standing today) to smaller versions of the enormous mills and factories that would appear in West Kensington in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. East Kensington had the Landenberger complex at Frankford Avenue and Wildey Street (founded in 1851) and John Bromley’s first carpet mill (1860) at Front and York Streets. Though West Kensington became the heart of the textile mill and factory district, especially after the break-up of the Norris Estate beginning in 1844, East Kensington hosted smaller, specialized operations like the Henry H. Becker Knitting Mill (1857) on Moyer Street, or William Hunter and Sons Carpet Works (1857) on Columbia Avenue, or Ridpath Carpets (1844) on Day Street, small or mid-sized plants tucked mid-block among the houses of their workers and laborers.
The inflated demand for ships and shipyards created by the Napoleonic Wars continued for a few years after peace was declared in 1815, since the American merchant marine had been heavily damaged and New England’s whaling and fishery fleets destroyed, but once these damages and losses were made up, the shipyards entered a long, slow decline. Some closed outright in the 1820s, becoming lumberyards or bulk commodity piers. Few of the traditional family-based business organizations of the past could compete for long with the newly emerging business structures of modern capitalism. The Cramp Shipyard, founded in 1830 with backing from the Cramp family’s shad fishery, was one of the few that did make a successful transition from craft to industry. William Cramp’s original Susquehanna Street yard constructed the only clipper ships built in Philadelphia. He added additional space at Palmer Street and Pettys Island and, after the Civil War, the great shipyard at Norris Street. From Norris Street, William’s son, Charles Cramp, guided the enterprise in its glory years. Charles was the technical and business genius who managed the revolutionary transition from wooden shipbuilding to iron and steel hull construction, and adopted modern corporate practices. To meet the changing needs of the new ship technologies, the Kensington Screw Dock and its marine railway were established in 1830 at Penn Street above Laurel. The firm of Reany and Neafie, later Neafie and Levy, began constructing marine engines and machinery at Beach and Palmer in 1844. Their screw-propeller design signaled the beginning of the end of steam-driven paddlewheels. The Hillman and Streaker, Hammitt, and Birely shipyards opened in these years as well, and prospered, but their success marked the end of most of the older, traditional, family-owned and operated shipyards that had settled on Kensington’s shoreline a century before.
Risking their luck in new business ventures after a century of shipbuilding, the Eyre family turned to operating a leadworks on Girard Avenue, but it failed within a few years. The Sutton family had more luck with their Franklin Iron Works, founded in 1841 at Front Street and Girard Avenue. Indeed, a regular “iron rush” exploded on Kensington, with iron works and rolling mills opening at former shipyards. With foundries now firing their blast furnaces with coal instead of wood and charcoal, Kensington ironmasters took advantage of coal terminals that the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company opened in nearby Port Richmond in 1842. Verree and Mitchell’s Philadelphia Iron and Steel Works opened at Beach and Poplar Streets in 1844, followed by Rowland’s Kensington Iron and Steel Works on an adjoining lot in 1845. The People’s Iron and Machine Works of Jacob Naylor opened at Girard and Leopard Streets in 1846. After a relative lull, the Marshall Brothers opened their Penn Treaty Rolling Mill at Beach and Marlborough Streets in 1856, followed by Stephen Robbins’s Philadelphia Furnace and Rolling Mill of 1857, at Beach and Montgomery Streets. Even Charles B. Parke’s former brass works succumbed to the trend and was transformed into the Point Pleasant Iron Foundry by 1869. Eventually, Kensington’s waterfront sported as many smokestacks as it once had ship masts.
The glass industry flourished in this period as well. The Union Glass or Kensington Flint Glass Company was established at Beach and Warren Streets in 1826 by former glassworkers from the New England Glass Company. Until the tragic and untimely death in 1840 of founder Charles B. Austin, Union Glass produced the highest quality cut and molded flint glass, using the latest techniques and fashions of European craftsmen. Dr. Thomas Dyott, an ambitious and enterprising druggist, re-opened the old colonial glassworks on Gunner’s Run around 1824 and specialized in pharmaceutical vials and bottles. Dyott was a unique businessman, creating around his factory a quasi-utopian community known as “Dyottsville,” with dormitories, a bank, school, infirmary and chapel for his workers. He fell victim to the financial panic of 1837, but his works were reorganized and successfully operated by the Benners family until the early 1900s. Sheets and Duffy ran an adjacent glassworks in the 1850s and 1860s, but it failed by 1869. A more successful operation, specializing in green glass and druggists’ wares, was Burgin and Pearsall, established in 1844. Their plant, at Girard and Montgomery Avenues, later known as Burgin and Sons, operated as late as 1910.
A number of carriage works also operated out of East Kensington in the antebellum years. The Beckhaus Carriage Works at Frankford Road above Girard Avenue (1853) was perhaps the finest, operated by Josef Beckhaus, former superintendent of the Royal Bavarian Coach Factory, who immigrated to America in the wake of the political upheavals of 1848. Other thriving firms included the Kessler Wagon Works (1852) at Girard Avenue and Norris Street, the Union Spoke, Hub and Rim Works (1848) at the Hanover Street Wharf and J. Hallowell’s Sons Carriage Works (1846) at Frankford Road and Richmond Street.
Besides luxury goods like carriages, East Kensington industrialists made tools and machinery. Henry Disston, an enterprising artisan like many Kensingtonians before him, opened a saw works in 1846 at Front and Laurel Streets. When rapid growth exceeded available local space (always a neighborhood problem), Disston established his better-known factory in Tacony. William Sellers, who as a prominent engineer would later design innovative building techniques for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, began his precision toolworks at Beach Street and Columbia Avenue in 1848. He, like Disston, left the neighborhood after only a few years, having outgrown his original facility. Several years later, H. W. Butterworth began manufacturing textile machinery at Front and Haydock Streets. Though Butterworth stayed on, expanding his firm on East York Street, East Kensington was clearly running into limitations to its growth and development well before the Civil War.
Like other prosperous communities, Kensington also began in these years to create institutions and services for its residents. The Panic of 1837 created many jobless and desperate people, and the Kensington Soup Society was organized in 1844 to provide help; it continues to provide food to the neighborhood needy today, the only institution of its kind still in existence in the city. St. Mary’s Hospital, organized in 1860, still serves the community at Frankford Avenue and Palmer Streets as the Neumann Medical Center. The Penn Widow’s Asylum (now Penn Retirement Home) at Belgrade and Susquehanna, the most deeply-rooted community organization, was founded in 1848 by a group of shipwrights’ wives, always a plucky lot. The founders, after renting quarters for the first few years of operation, were finally able to purchase “West Hill,” the former estate of the West family of shipbuilders, as their permanent facility. The home recently celebrated its 150th anniversary and the original building still stands, encased in modern additions, but still resting on foundations laid by nautical carpenters in the eighteenth century.
Growth and change began to consume the remnants of earlier Kensington stories. In 1825, Fairman’s Mansion was demolished so that Beach Street could be straightened and widened. Even the Point Pleasant Market was closed down after years of poor attendance and shrinking profits, to be replaced in 1847 by the new “uptown” Franklin Market, extending east and west from Front Street along Franklin (now Girard) Avenue. Residential development continued at a slower pace up and away from the community’s beginnings along the river’s edge. The early wood and occasional brick dwellings, built one or two at a time, were now supplemented by clusters of tidy brick row-houses and the occasional free-standing town house. After a sudden windstorm had shattered the venerable Treaty Elm in 1810, the tree was lovingly dismembered and a plethora of benches, chairs, mallets and knickknacks manufactured from its shards. Shoots of the fallen elm were propagated and distributed to the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College, among other places.
The explosive growth and development in and around Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s had magnified the weaknesses of the region’s fragmented local governance. The 1844 Know-Nothing Riots in Kensington highlighted the problems and brought an end to Kensington’s history as an independent community. Rooted in a complex brew of religious, economic, racial, and ethnic tensions, the riots culminated in the burning of St. Michael’s church, built in 1831 by Irish Catholics in West Kensington. The Kensington district was outside city jurisdiction and its small local police forces were overwhelmed. State troops eventually had to be called in to reestablish control. With local conditions increasingly beyond local control, independent communities like Kensington that lay within the county, but not the city, of Philadelphia agreed to merge and create an expanded city. City and county boundaries were ultimately consolidated in 1854, and the multitude of districts, borough and villages surrounding the old city were formally abolished. East Kensington became simply the Eighteenth Ward and the old, splendid isolation of Kensington disappeared. The Cohocksink Creek and its marshlands were filled in at this time, the causeway removed and the “old district” became physically integrated into the rapidly expanding metropolis, becoming another neighborhood in “the city of neighborhoods.”
Later in the nineteenth century, Delaware Avenue was extended north and widened, destroying large sections of the earliest part of the old Kensington waterfront. In the 1960s, the construction of Interstate 95 took another block-wide, mile-long swath. What the highways left, the eventual deterioration of Philadelphia’s industrial infrastructure began to remove. Textile manufacturers began leaving for non-union locations in the South, while heavy industries merged and moved out or succumbed to overseas competition. Today, most of the landmark industries and factories are gone. Even the gargantuan bulk of Cramp’s Shipyard is reduced to the shell of a single machine shop. But the neighborhood and some of its landmarks are still there to witness to the history that took place around them. The Palmer Burial Ground remains, and the old churches and the former Bank of Kensington are still in use. Tiny “trinity” houses built for John Hewson’s textile workers still stand on Hewson Street, shad runs have staged something of a comeback in recent years, after their near demise from pollution and overfishing, and there are still people named Gosser and Pote living in the neighborhood. Nearly twelve generations have made their homes in Kensington and in spite of wars, revolutions and upheavals, a community with a continuing proud heritage lives on. Anthony Palmer would be proud.
Source: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=496.
posted by Jim McAdoo @ 8:52 AM
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