Episode 2.08: Laboring Philadelphians
Aug 18, 2021
Employment office of the Armstrong Association, circa 1912. Image from the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries. Accessed via the Goin’ North project .
In our Season 2 finale, we look at the people who have been there throughout all of the other episodes—the laborers! We also try to consider what types of labor today share the physical toll and the meager wages with laborers of the past.
Some resources for more information on the topics in this episode:
Thanks again to our season sponsors Linode and Temple University’s History Department as well as the companies and organizations which sponsored episodes along the way, the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, Beyond the Bell Tours, The Center for Art in Wood. Thanks also to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for their support of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia which awarded us a micro grant which directly supported this second season of The Alley Cast.
Kelleher, Deirdre, “Immigration, Experience, and Memory : Urban Archaeology at Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia” (Dissertation) Temple University, 2015.
Laurie, Bruce, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, “Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 2 (Winter 1975)
Licht, Walter, Getting Work : Philadelphia, 1840-1950
Newman, Simon P., Embodied History, Chapter 1: Almshouse Bodies.
Smith, Billy G. “The Vicissitudes of Fortune: The Careers of Laboring Men in Philadelphia, 1750–1800” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes.
Theodore, Nik, “Regulating Informality: Worker Centers and Collective Action in Day-Labor Markets,” Growth and Change 51, no. 1 (2020)
TRANSCRIPT
Imagine a meandering walk from the piers of Philadelphia toward Elfreth’s Alley in 1790. Sailors scurry up the rigging of brigantines as stevedores carry off the ship’s cargo, and load it onto hand carts, with which carters will whisk that cargo away to its final destination. Heading inland, we’re passed by a young woman carrying two full buckets of water fetched from a well; she will use it to wash the clothes of her employer’s entire household, soaking, scrubbing, and wringing out each piece with the same strength she displays in carrying the water. There is a building under construction, and men hauling lumber to the site.
Were we to complete the same walk in 2021, we might pass landscapers tidying up the park at Race Street Pier, street cleaners sweeping the sidewalk, a trash collecting crew driving down Elfreth’s Alley, and myriad other working Philadelphians. These jobs, both in the 18th century and the 21st, are neither well-compensated nor prestigious. Yet they are essential to the life of the city.
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered 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.
This season is all about work, and in this season finale we will be discussing laborers in Philadelphia, past and present.
Episode 8: Laboring Philadelphians
But what do we mean when we talk about “laborers”? The census records for Elfreth’s Alley list people working as laborers from the 18th century through the mid-20th century and many laborers have already popped up in this season of the Alley Cast: In the boarding house episode, the boarding house thief required the assistance of a laborer to bring in their luggage--a laborer almost certainly not in on the ruse. Isaac Zane, the master carpenter, employed at least a couple laborers throughout his career. Before wood became cabinets, trees had to be felled and transported to Philadelphia, whether down the Delaware River or all the way from the Caribbean and this certainly relied on laborers, both enslaved and free.
But what did that term mean at various times and what does it mean today?
The term “laborer” seems like a broad one, in many ways--it can simply mean someone who works. But historically it has been applied to much narrower groups of people, in ways that have a lot to do with class, race, and gender.
In this episode, we’re going to try to unpack some of the limits that have been applied to the label and try to look beyond the label.
We do need a working definition of the word, and a quick look at a few dictionaries suggests that a laborer is someone doing manual labor for wages. They often use that other word that we’ve been talking about this season “unskilled.” Yet all work deserves dignity and we are going to continue to interrogate the usefulness of formal training as the only facet of work worth rewarding.
Let’s look at laborers in early Philadelphia--looking at the first United States Census we find four Alley residents listed as laborers: Philip Hartnot, Henry Sharp, Jacob Snyder, and Peter Bicknell. It’s a small sample size but it tracks with trends over at least the next century: they are male and they are white. Yet clearly, there were people who were neither male nor white doing manual labor, and many of them were doing so for wages. Historian Seth Rockman, in his fascinating work on 19th century Baltimore, showed how it was useful to look at the whole class of laboring people at the bottom of the economy, looking not just at those who were labeled as laborers but to include enslaved and indentured workers as well. Rockman successfully used accounting ledgers to track some of these workers, and we hope to eventually do the same here in Philadelphia, but we have not completed that time-intensive work yet.
Instead, looking at our favorite sources--the city directories and the census--can give us an idea of where those who were called laborers lived in early Philadelphia. A map by Paul Sivitz and Billy G. Smith shows that the majority of laborers in the 1790s lived at the North, South, and Western extremes of Philadelphia--basically at the edge of town. But the map also shows that laborers crowded into the narrow alleyways that cut through blocks between the more prominent streets, places such as Elfreth’s Alley, where housing was relatively affordable and there was still access to the port and other places to find work in the city.
But we want to try to understand more about laborers than where they lived. How can we learn about the lives of a whole class of people who, by virtue of their poverty, their transience, and often their lack of education didn’t leave much of a trace in the historic record? I talked to historian Billy G. Smith, one of the scholars who has managed to do just that.
Billy G. Smith: Because nobody writes their own life story, or if they did, it doesn't still exist. So we've got lots and lots of things like on the famous founding fathers, where you get all of their writings, but you can get virtually nothing written by these people. So you've got to go in different ways. Look at official records, like tax lists are used on house directories quite a bit to our criminal directory. So wherever sort of people encounter government agency, and that government agencies recorded something taxes, and censuses to, then you can track a lot of these people.
These kinds of official documents give a narrow view of each person’s story, but taken as a whole, can offer insights about a whole class of people. As one example, Smith used these records to reconstruct the diet of Philadelphia’s poor, or as they were often called, “the lower sort.”
Smith :Well, the records that I stumbled across, once again, were official records, and they were official records of the ALMS house. And also, I think I use some from Pennsylvania hospital for the sick poor. And the ALMS house recorded every day, what they bought in terms of foodstuffs, so I could track those foodstuffs over a 50 year period, the cost, and also with the diet itself was everything from peas to flower to tea. And what I did was take that as sort of a minimal diet, that more than likely, would be familiar to a laboring class person who was not in the ALMS house, something of that sort. So that was just a great cache of records. But it took a long time to process things like that. On a day by day basis, I must say, I wouldn't have the energy or patience anymore, it was good. I did all that when I was young. But it's a, it's a pretty minimal diet, I'm, it's, they do have probably more meat, for example, just to pick one item than you would have if you were in Britain. But there's actually more variety perhaps, than we might commonly think, in the 18th century for a lower class person or vegetables in the summertime in the springtime,
Scholar Simon P. Newman looked at some of those same sources--the collections of the Almshouse and the Pennsylvania Hospital--and used the admission records to learn about the ways in which the people coming to these institutions for help were judged to be deserving or undeserving of that help. These judgments were made purely on the appearance and behavior of the person asking for help, and so the records often include some descriptions of them, colored by the biases of the administrators who examined them. To Newman, these descriptions are a valuable insight into the belief systems of the time, but also bear witness to the lives of Philadelphia’s poor. Their scars gained from work or disease or misfortune, their clothes indicating something about their place in society.
I want to note that though there were some people who arrived at the Almshouse who couldn’t work, the vast majority were put to work there as a way to defray the cost of their food and shelter and as an attempt to reform them and get them working once they left the almshouse. These were laborers, whether they were considered that at the time or not.
I asked Smith for some context for some of the laborers working in early Philadelphia; where did they come from? What kind of work did they do?
Smith: So a lot of these labors to go back to those common people are born to, you know, impoverished families, either in America, or there's a great deal of emigration at this point to from Europe, and from Britain. And they're born poor, and they don't learn really any occupational skills, which means you're going to be a laborer, who the kinds of things they do in Philadelphia, is construction work. And there's a lot of that that city is growing incredibly rapidly at the time. So there's building going on everywhere. So you know, you'd be carrying lumber around helping carpenters, things of that sort, loading and unloading ships, the ships that come from Britain, and also the ones that are sent out to the Caribbean and things, you've got to get goods on and off of that. And that's one of the that kind of trade is one of the center parts of Philadelphia, it's one of the reasons it's on the Delaware River there because you can get the ships coming and going. So that's another big occupational job for common everyday workers.
In his book “The Lower Sort,” Smith writes that despite the examples of socioeconomic climbers such as Ben Franklin, many laborers remained laborers all of their lives. I asked him about the opportunities and limitations laborers faced when attempting to better their lot in life.
Smith: So I think there's two different ways to look at that, that question as to social mobility, economic mobility, and whether you can move up or not up the ladder. And one is sort of individual initiative is what Americans tend to emphasize. But I think the second is societal forces. And you know, what's happening in the society, what's happening in the larger economy and things of that sort, which are beyond your control. So in terms of just individuals themselves, I'm guessing that working hard probably does make a difference. But it's not it's not going to make the you know, the be the item that's going to ensure success by any means. A lot of what might make you successful, if you're starting as a labor over something well known before that is, how do you get trained, what kind of occupational skills do you have, and that's often mostly dependent on your father's position. How wealthy as your father, and whether or not when you get to the age of 12, or 13, whether or not your father is wealthy enough to buy you an apprenticeship in, let's say, a merchant house, in which case you're on the fast track, kind of like maybe going to Harvard or Yale, but that you're on the fast track to, you know, being able to be a merchant, which are the wealthiest people here, or your father doesn't have that money doesn't make you an apprentice to anything, you don't learn any skills. Or maybe your father has a little bit of money and can apprentice you to become a shoemaker, while shoe makers are gonna make a modest living at the house for their entire lives. So that's one of the things is just training. And, you know, that's the luck of the draw,
Once the die was cast and someone entered the world of work as a laborer, however, there were occasionally opportunities that presented themselves. Economic booms and getting the right job at the right time could mean that a laborer moved themselves up the tax brackets. At the same time, economic depressions and the cruel anarchy of epidemics lurked on the other side of that coin.
Smith: So it's things like that there's business cycles to economic depressions, and also, you know, economic boom times. And for example, to go back to this, you know, when can you move up? Well, if there's any time, it would probably be the 1750s and early 1760s, when the economy booms, and then again, in the 1790s, the first decade of the new nation, when Philadelphia is the capital of the United States at that point. And there, that's your best chance, if you know, if you could control when you were going to be there to be able to move up.”
Indeed, Smith’s research shows that during the 1790s, about 20 percent of laborers in Philadelphia acquired marketable occupational skills and became mast makers, coopers, and carpenters. This statistic doesn’t take into account enslaved labor or include a wide variety of women’s work, but is still a remarkable statistic.
Having missed out on a plum apprenticeship, these laborers still managed to join the ranks of craftspeople, gaining economic power and prestige. At first glance, early Philadelphia seems to offer an example of that dichotomy we are trying to complicate between skilled and so-called “unskilled” labor. I asked Dr. Smith what he thought of those terms and their usefulness in this era:
Smith: And I do think it's really important to consider this skilled versus unskilled kind of labels and who puts it on and women to come and you know, how accurate is it? Now, if you're, you know, if you were a laborer in Philadelphia in maintenance, and treating, you're carrying wood around for carpenters or shipbuilders or something like that? Well, that's pretty unskilled. It takes a lot of muscles, but it's pretty unskilled. On the other hand, I think what happens to a lot of these people, is you become sort of a worker, if you're working hard, and the carpenter likes you and things like that, and you're working suddenly for him. And, you know, he might start to trust you by teaching, also beneficial themselves, teaching you some skills of carpentry, let's say, or shipbuilding or things of that sort. So that might be one way that you do become skilled, and you know how to do their stuff. And you at least learn a little bit about carpentry, things like that. I would say in a similar way, for a lot of these laborers, they will go off to sea for a while they'll go on a ship Delta comm Mariners, it's called at the time. But you know, working on a ship with all these sails, and you're responsible with the crew, that's very skilled, you're gonna learn a lot in terms of doing that. And even though there may be a lot of physical labor involved, but getting, you know, all this stuff together of sales and things and that's what it is definitely skilled labor, even if it's classified subsequently as unskilled.
One example of how skill acquisition could radically change the course of a person’s life is a man named Cuff Douglas. Douglas was born enslaved and grew up in a forced labor camp. When the man who enslaved Douglas died, his will included a manumission clause, which allowed Douglas to purchase his freedom from the enslaver’s heirs. Douglas did so, earning money by working in his few hours to himself. It seems that he had trained as a tailor, though whether he received formal training or not is unclear. Having purchased his own freedom, Douglas set about purchasing the liberty of his wife and three children. He then led a career as a tailor. In 1779, we know that Douglas rented house #117 Elfreth’s Alley because he is listed on the tax rolls. We know all of these facts about Douglas’ life because he recounted a brief version of his life story as a testimonial to an abolitionist, who delivered the account to abolitionists in London likely as evidence that formerly enslaved people were able to make lives for themselves. Despite the condescension of even having to argue that formerly enslaved people could succeed, Douglas’ story does show that some skills could be parlayed into significant social and economic gains.
In addition to the cycles of the economy, the seasons of each year presented new challenges for laborers as the available work fluctuated with the weather:
Smith: The seasonality of work is very important in the 18th century. And it really affects people detrimentally, who were toward the lower classes, what happens and things like okay, so Philadelphia is this big trading center with ships coming and going through the Delaware River. Well, in the 18th century, though, when it gets to be about November, ice starts to come into the Delaware River and continues through February. Now, I don't know what global warming exactly how it is today. But this is what's happening anyway, in the 18th century. Once you get ice in the Delaware River, that means that ships that are wooden ships, can't come into it anymore. Because they're afraid they're going to be sunk you know, there's going to hit some ice and make big holes, essentially, in the hull. So things seem to shut down in terms of employment, if your job as a laborer is to load goods on and off ships, well, for three months a year, you're not going to be able to do that, because there aren't any ships. And so even if you have maybe making decent money for eight or nine months a year, when you come to this kind of crunch time, in November, December, it gets really difficult for working class people, because you just can't find labor at that point. And that you had mentioned, one of the things I was able to track and in the ALMS house, there was how people sometimes, not always, sometimes could use it as a strategy to keep themselves alive. That is, you know, in November, December, things slow down. And you try and get into the alms house, just so you can eat basically just, you know, you can put our they'll put food on the table for you. And you'll have to work by the way when you're in your own house, too. So it is kind of a weapon, we say, a strategy to keep yourself alive through that cold winter months when you can't find much work.
The demand for laborers ebbed and flowed with the port conditions, but the supply of laborers was also changeable as events across the ocean brought people to Philadelphia.
Smith: They're restrained by the forces above them. And I mentioned before, one is this migration that's coming over from Britain in Europe creates at various times a labor surplus. In Philadelphia, you know, the migration mostly is pushed out of Britain or Scotland or Ireland, poor people moving over, throughout the entire 18th century. And landing in Philadelphia, a lot of them. But you know that that's dependent on what's happening in Europe. And it's, it's often a push factor as much as a pull factor to get here. But what it means in in a place like Philadelphia, or New York, or Boston or something, is that it's sometimes you have mass migration, lots of unskilled people coming in, and therefore you have this huge labor surplus, which means that employers in a capitalist system can minimize the wages that they pay to their workers. It's a little bit like we see today, it seems like you know, parallels in some ways that you can, if you have a huge labor surplus, you don't have to pay your workers very much.
While we often talk about Elfreth’s Alley as a neighborhood of artisans in its early history, early records list several men working as laborers on the Alley like the four men I mentioned earlier who appear on the 1790 census. The only one of these men who appears to have lived on the street for a length of time was Peter Bicknell. After several records where he’s listed as a laborer or a porter, in the 1796 directory and subsequent mentions, Bicknell is listed as a bottler, suggesting that he found steady employment, perhaps with slightly more prestige.
Other laborers listed in the census and directories do not reappear, perhaps a sign that they moved to find steady work or didn’t stay in one place for long.
When we come back, we’ll shift ahead to changes in the labor system in the 19th century.
Welcome back! In other episodes here, we’ve talked about the shift from traditional working relationships to capitalism that occurred around the turn of the 19th century sort of in advance of, or alongside, industrialization. For laborers, this meant more competition and less job security. That era also brought changes to Elfreth’s Alley, as the occupations of residents shifted.
Deirdre Kelleher, who we heard from in Episode 3: Building Houses, Part II, wrote about this shift in her dissertation about Elfreth’s Alley. While this street was home to some laborers in the 18th century, their numbers increased in the 19th century. By 1867 and 1868, the city directories show 32 Alley residents working in what Kelleher called “labor-intensive” occupations: “16 laborers, two draymen, two porters, and two stevedores.”
The people working in these labor-intensive occupations often clustered together on the Alley. The 1860 census, for instance, shows that many of the laborers lived in the houses which had been built in Bladen’s Court. This little byway, about five feet wide, ran between #115 and #117 Elfreth’s Alley, and had been created to give access to the backs of several lots along Front Street. By the mid-19th century, there were five houses built in an area that included the rear of those lots as well as the rear of #117 and #119 Elfreth’s Alley. In these five small houses lived possibly as many as 12 laborers in 1860, along with their families and a handful of folks who listed other occupations on the census. The surnames of the Bladen’s Court residents--Morissy, O’Neill, Mack, Bohen, McCarty, Moran, Grandfield, Downing, McCann--suggest that many of these families were of Irish descent, and the census confirms that indeed most of them were direct immigrants from Ireland.
A study of immigrants’ roles in industry between 1850 and 1880 found that 30.3% of Irish immigrants were primarily employed at day labor, with another 3.3% working as carters in 1850, while only 11.6% of German immigrants were working in similar roles. These scholars attribute this difference to the higher percentage of German immigrants arriving in Philadelphia with training at various craft trades. Both immigrant groups, which made up the majority of immigrants to Philadelphia—and Elfreth’s Alley—in the mid-19th century, were much more likely to work in these labor-intensive and precarious jobs than native-born white Americans.
By the end of the 19th century, despite the early edge provided by their skill as artisans, German immigrants as a whole were not better off than Irish immigrants, as the trades at which many German immigrants worked withered in the face of mechanization. Some so-called “unskilled” laborers were able to join trades, such as printing, construction, and the metal industries, which were experiencing growth.
These industries, like seafaring and house building a century earlier, actually provided informal on-the-job training and a path to upward mobility.
Remember, as we said in the first episode of this season, the industrial era was the context in which the terms “skilled” and “unskilled labor” arose. Often these labels were applied to workers within one factory, with the expectation that unskilled workers could move into skilled positions.
While these European immigrant groups often found themselves entering the American workforce at the ground floor, Black Philadelphians found themselves relegated to a separate workforce entirely. In W.E.B. DuBois’ study of the Black population in the 7th Ward in the 1890s, he found that 90 percent of all working Black women and 60 percent of all working Black men worked in domestic service. At the same time, only about 30 percent of European immigrant populations and a meager 10 percent of American-born Philadelphians were working in service. The majority of Black men not employed in service work were employed as day laborers, primarily in hauling and carting.
Before we move on to the 20th century, I want to highlight one particular event which stands out in the 19th-century story of labor in Philadelphia. In 1833, labor organizers in the city created the General Trades’ Union, one of the first labor unions to accept workers in so-called “unskilled” positions into its ranks. Near the end of May in 1835, coal heavers on the docks along the Schuylkill River initiated a strike, demanding a ten-hour workday.
On June 3rd, as the coal heavers paraded through the city publicizing their demand, workers at various other trades, including carpenters and shoemakers joined them, reportedly chanting “We are all day laborers!” as they went. The General Trades’ Union went into overdrive, distributing materials and orchestrating parades and other pageantry around the city to invite other workers to the cause.
By June 10th, nearly 20 thousand workers in over forty trades--and including some city workers--had joined the now city-wide and general strike, all asking for a ten-hour day. To put this in perspective, the entire population of Philadelphia at this time was under 100,000, so about 1 in 5 of all Philadelphians was striking.
Philadelphia’s Common Council agreed to the city workers’ demands and the majority of workplaces followed suit by the end of June.
Over the next seven months, other strikes supported by the General Trades’ Union were all successful and in 1836 the union came to the aid of striking dock workers facing criminal charges, but the string of victories was followed by an exodus from many workers having achieved their goals. Management also got more organized to counteract union tactics, and the financial panic of 1837 spelled the end of the General Trades’ Union.
Day laborers would have few options for union participation for the next century, but for a brief moment, the workers of Philadelphia had come together and won a tremendous victory!
By the early 20th century, Philadelphia was densely industrialized. In 1915, a nameless young man was interviewed by researchers investigating employment in the city. He gave an account of a day he spent looking for work:
“I got up at 5:30 and went to Baldwin's and was told no help was required. From there, I went to Hale & Kilburn at 18th and Lehigh Avenue and met with the same answer. I then walked to 2nd and Erie Avenue to Potter's Oil Cloth Works, and they needed no help.
Then to the Hess Bright Company, at Front and Erie Avenue, and again met with the same result. Next I came back home at 2nd and Lehigh A venue for a meal. In the afternoon, I went to Edward Bromley's; no help needed; from there to a firm at American and Girard Streets, with the same result. Then I recalled at the Barnett File Works, again with the same result. I tried two other places in the neighborhood, whose names I have forgotten, and none had any work. Often I would go out and after meeting with bad luck day after day, would say to myself at night, "the job has got to find me," but the next morning I would feel differently about it.”
This young man walked a total of about eight miles, and was nearly constantly passing factories. In fact, experts estimate that within a one mile radius of the average person living in industrial Philadelphia were sixteen thousand industrial jobs. Though this man did not find a job on this day, there has rarely been such a density of jobs in this city’s history.
Yet many of those jobs were not open to everyone. At least several of the companies this man visited--with an exception of Baldwin Locomotive Works--would have turned away Black workers even if they had positions vacant. And around the time of this man’s odyssey, many Black Americans were making odysseys of their own to industrial cities including Philadelphia.
We’ve discussed the Great Migration before—in episodes 6 and 7 of season 1--but it’s worth exploring again. From 1916 to 1930, something like 1.6 million Black Americans moved from the American South northward and westward. Well over a hundred thousand of these migrants arrived in Philadelphia during that period, some directly recruited by industries such as the railroads and foundries--Midvale Steel alone hired 4,000 Black Southerners--and many more following family members and friends. This influx was welcomed by heavy industry, which needed staff willing to work in dangerous settings for meager wages, but Black Philadelphians, both newcomers and more established residents, were shut out of a wide variety of jobs.
While previous populations of newcomers had found some degree of opportunity in laboring for low wages and learning skills on the job, African Americans, those who had been in Philadelphia for generations and those new to the city, found those opportunities hard to come by throughout much of the first half of the 20th century.
Black young people in Philadelphia were shut out of apprenticeship programs and vocational schools and surveys showed that the majority of Black craftspeople in the city had received their training in the American South.
Yet even with training, finding employment was no guarantee, and many Black craftspeople found it impossible to work in white-owned businesses. For instance, in 1910, all seventeen African-Americans trained in printing were working in Black-owned print shops or for Black newspapers.
The prejudice that kept African Americans out of the city’s main workforce took several forms. A 1940 survey of 60 Philadelphia firms showed that 18 would not consider hiring Black workers, whether out of quote “personal disapproval,” or fear of backlash from employees or customers. Another twelve firms said they had just never considered hiring Black employees. Twenty-one employers were noncommittal and one wouldn’t participate in the survey. Five companies offered to interview select Black applicants, and only three said they already employed Black workers--those three firms collectively employed five Black clerks.
Some white workers also contributed to the exclusion of Black workers in organized and unorganized ways. The trade unions of the city almost exclusively prohibited Black membership; in 1910, the cigar-makers union was the only white-led union to admit Black workers. And exclusion from unions led to exclusion from work opportunities.
Walter Licht, in his book, Getting work : Philadelphia, 1840-1950, sums it up:
“The marker in general did not function on behalf of blacks in the city. African-Americans, young and old, should have been employed in greater numbers in Philadelphia industry; their labor, after all, could have been purchased cheaply, so favoring whites unnecessarily boosted the wage bill of employers. Employer prejudice and white worker resistance-that is, racism-combined to undo the not always benevolent but nonetheless normal workings of the marketplace.
For blacks, relief would have to come through extra-market forces, first through concerted pressure by black church leaders and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League co increase the hiring of blacks in Philadelphia, and second and most important, through the ultimate intervention of the federal government.”
And indeed, in response to the segregation and discrimination they faced, Black Philadelphians built networks to facilitate employment and built political force through organizations such as the NAACP to combat these prejudiced practices. The Armstrong Association, which we talked about briefly last year in our episode on housing conditions, was one organization that took action to address the segregation of Philadelphia’s workforce. The Association invested in vocational training and also worked to directly place Black workers in positions through employment offices, which had some degree of success.
If we zoom in on Elfreth’s Alley, the 1930 census offers us a glimpse into the lives of laborers on the street during this time period and how they might have fit into these larger trends. Last season we introduced you to three Black families who lived at #135 Elfreth’s Alley in 1930, the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes. Robert Morton and Charles Wilson were able to find work in a shovel factory and Nettie McCrae gained employment at a garment factory. While the census that year doesn’t give us any sense of the wages the residents of #135 earned in their respective factory jobs, it does tell us that they collectively paid $50 per month for the home they shared.
Meanwhile, down the street lived Harry Hurst, his wife Florence, and their four daughters. Harry Hurst had been born in Germany and immigrated to Philadelphia as a young person with his parents. His father worked as a laborer in the factories of Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood and Harry followed his father’s line of work-- by 1930 was working in a machine shop as a laborer. The Hursts paid monthly rent of $8 for the rental unit behind #126 Elfreth’s Alley. Remember Deirdre Kelleher’s excavations we talked about in episode 3?
Deirdre Kelleher: So the walls that we found were comprised of brick and some dressed stone, and the brick, we could see where is reused. So there were some reused brick that had remnants of like mortar on it from a previous wall. So we could see that some of it was being reused. One wall had some brick as well as dressed stone. So it looked like it was kind of expedient construction in the sense that they were taking materials that were available in the area, and building up to create these structures in the back. So they were improvising and using the resources that were there.
That was the home, probably in very rough condition, that the Hursts lived in. The rear quarter of the first floor was a privy, which the second and third floors extended over. The entire rental unit was under 600 square feet of living space.
It seems very possible that the Hursts were the last residents of this back tenement; in 1937, the back tenement was torn down and the back wall of #126 rebuilt.
By 1940, the Hursts had moved to more comfortable quarters at #137, for which they paid $14 per month. That year’s census shows Harry working for the Works Progress Administration, likely still doing manual labor at the age of 46. The census also shows that in the previous year, Hurst had only been able to find work for 24 weeks of the year, earning a total of $315 in 1939.
From the few records we have of these families living on the Alley, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about their experiences as laborers. We don’t know how Robert Morton, Charles Wilson, Nettie McCrae, and Harry Hurst found work, or how many doors were closed to them. But from the little we know, it seems that they lived difficult lives, full of uncertainty and physically-taxing work.
World War II provided a huge uptick in demand for workers, both as soldiers left the working ranks and as wartime industrial production ramped up. This increase in demand would allow Black Philadelphians to enter industrial fields in ways not seen before as employers rolled back discriminatory policies, but industries had already begun to leave cities such as Philadelphia, seeking lower wages and cheaper land. While some manufacturing remained, Philadelphia’s economy experienced a shift toward the service industry especially among the populations which had previously done manual or day labor.
Over the 20th century, America as a whole became more racially diverse as immigration increased from non-white countries and newcomers have often been put into informal economies.. Immigration especially from Mexico and Central and South America was encouraged by the agriculture industry through programs such as the Braceros. After these temporary immigration programs ended, agricultural businesses continued to use immigrant labor whether it was legal or not.
In addition to agricultural work, day laborers today often work as cleaners, construction workers, landscapers, and movers. Day laborers have developed organizations with which to self-regulate what is a very unregulated and volatile market. One way they have done this is by developing brick and mortar centers where would-be employers can come to recruit laborers with set wage minimums.
If we zoom out a little bit, however, we can see that there are many other jobs which could fall under a similar category, from Uber Driver to part-time cashier. Today there are a wide variety of jobs which take a toll on workers’ bodies and expose them to potential harm without providing a living wage or job security.
While some laboring jobs are well compensated and come with benefits and job security which allow workers to make their job into a career, many of these jobs continue to offer minimum wage, which has not kept pace with inflation. Employers often offer limited hours and seasonal employment as ways to limit their costs. The rise of the “gig economy“ in which workers are paid, often through apps, as contract workers has made more of these workers’ employment precarious and cut down on the employer’s responsibility to the worker.
The pandemic has shown many of these workers to be “essential” though they do not receive corresponding compensation. Think of the grocery store workers and Instacart shoppers and delivery people who kept us fed during city and state lockdowns and the lingering peril. Think of the sanitation and transit workers who have put their bodies on the line to keep the systems of the city operating.
While the neighborhood surrounding Elfreth’s Alley has priced out most current-day laborers as residents as it has become a prosperous area known for its art galleries and theater spaces, it is still a place where those earning at or below a living wage continue to work. It is not a rare sight to see cleaners toting their tools through these narrow streets. Domestic work is often informal and precarious and lacks workplace protections of other professions, having been officially excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 along with agricultural workers and independent contractors. Fewer than one in five domestic workers have written agreements with their employers, nearly a quarter report feeling unsafe at work and a third do not receive breaks for meals or rest.
Many forces have combined to limit the ability of today’s laborers to unionize. These jobs span a wide variety of settings and tasks. Anti-union legislation has weakened the ability of workers to take collective action. But there are some groups working to change that, to give those working under these precarious conditions a safety net and a political voice. Across the country, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, quote “improves the lives of day laborers, migrants and low-wage workers” and “build[s] leadership and power among those facing injustice so they can challenge inequality and expand labor, civil and political rights for all.”
Another union, Unite HERE, represents workers in a variety of hospitality settings. As the website of the Philly chapter puts it: “UNITE HERE is the union that welcomes you to Philadelphia. We serve the food, hold the door, carry the bags, clean the rooms, and wash the laundry. We are among the largest unions in Philadelphia, representing 7000 hotel, gaming, and food service workers.”
A “laborer,” as we have defined it for this episode, is a broad term, but I have used it to try to capture a wide variety of working environments that share similar vulnerability. We left this episode until the end because laborers were there in every episode at some point. The work of people in these precarious positions is integral to all of the types of work we have discussed, and the exploitation and denigration of laborers has been a recurring theme of this season of the Alley Cast.
The shift from an apprenticeship system based on unwritten codes of obligation to wage labor systems allowed employers to profit when immigration and migration caused labor surpluses and thrust journeymen and day laborers into precarity. Collective action and the labor movement shifted the balance of power back toward laborers within certain settings, but the global migration of manufacturing away from cities such as Philadelphia and the reorientation of the economy to service jobs have again placed laborers in precarious positions. The past year and a half has offered a reality check about the place of work in many people’s lives. As workplaces seek out a new rhythm, it will be interesting to see if laborers who have historically had very little power can leverage their essential status in the face of ongoing financial precarity and the continuing threat of a pandemic.
A programming note: I am calling this a finale because we planned out these eight episodes, but there may be more to come. For our Patreon, I edited down some highlights from the interviews we did for this season that didn’t make the episodes. That episode will likely eventually drop into this feed at some point and more may follow. Finally, there are topics we talked about doing whole episodes on which just didn’t fit into this season’s plan. It’s possible that some of those ideas might come to fruition at some point but I don’t know when. Watch this space!
History is a group effort and I want to take this end of season moment to thank a bunch of people. First, thank you for listening along with us— this show wouldn’t exist without an audience. Thanks to Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc who worked on Season 1 and who set the bar for this show way higher than I intended and I’ve been playing catch up ever since! Thanks to Enya Xiang and Margaret Sanford who put a ton of work into this season— none of these episodes would have happened without them and they were all made better by the conversations the three of us had. The same can be said for the Managing History class at Temple University in the fall of 2020; thanks to Dr. Hilary Iris Lowe for putting this podcast at the center of that course and to the students who grabbed that baton and ran with it: Jeannette Bendolph, Margaret Sanford, Lauren Kennedy, Gwen Franklin, Paige Bartello, and Brian Wallace.
Thanks to all of the experts who chatted with us for this episode and to those for whom the timing didn’t quite work out. Huge thanks to Dr. Billy Smith who was so generous with his time—I think he was the first interview I did and he ends up in this last episode.
Thanks again to our season sponsors Linode and Temple University’s History Department as well as the companies and organizations which sponsored episodes along the way, the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, Beyond the Bell Tours, The Center for Art in Wood. Thanks also to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for their support of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia which awarded us a micro grant which directly supported this second season of The Alley Cast.
Some credits specifically for this episode:
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Walter Licht, the team of Bruce Laurie, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, Sharece Blakney, and Patrick Grubbs. We also drew on some resources from the Goin’ North Archive, an online collection of oral history interviews and primary documents of the Great Migration in Philadelphia.
The songs used in this episode are “Open Flames” and “An Oddly Formal Dance,” both by Blue Dot Sessions, both used under Creative Commons license.
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 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 apps such as Apple Podcasts.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
Thank you and take care!
Episode 2.07: The Servers
Aug 11, 2021
Mary R. “Dollie” Wyle Ottey (right) poses in costume with her “helpers.” Image from the Elfreth’s Alley Association Archives.
The ongoing pandemic has wreaked chaos on the restaurant industry, closing popular spots and leaving huge numbers of restaurant workers out of work. In this episode of The Alley Cast, we explore the long history of the transience of restaurant work in order to try to gain some perspective on the challenges of today.
Lunch menu from the Coach House Restaurant in the Elfreth’s Alley Scrapbook.
Special thanks to Paige Bartello and Gwen Franklin, who wrote the first version of this script and did much of the research for this episode.
Thanks again to our sponsors Linode and the History Department and Center for Public History at Temple University. Support is also provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
SOURCES
Carp, Benjamin. Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, 173.
Pilgrim, Danya. “Masters of a Craft: Philadelphia’s Black Public Waiters, 1820 - 50,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 142, 2018.
Thompson, Peter/ Rum Punch and Revolution: Tavern-going and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
Yamin, Rebecca, and R. Scott Stephenson. 2019. Archaeology at the site of the Museum of the American Revolution: a tale of two taverns and the growth of Philadelphia.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction:
Ask anyone working in the restaurant industry today whether they imagine doing this work for the rest of their lives and you’ll find that the majority will tell you no.
Whether it is a part-time position to pay the bills while in school, or a necessary means to an end before a better opportunity for work arises, restaurant workers are a highly transient group. Turnover rates are high amongst staff, and restaurants themselves open and close in no time at all. The COVID 19 crisis is exacerbating the instability of service industry work. This trend is not exclusive to our present moment however, throughout the history of Philadelphia the food service industry was a volatile realm for restaurant laborers and proprietors. Service industry workers are largely absent from historical records, and those that do appear are difficult to track beyond a single entry. Although the restaurant industry in Philadelphia looks vastly different from its inception in the eighteenth century, we can find threads of continuity between the food industry’s distant past and its current moment. Taverns and restaurants on Elfreth’s Alley likely faced similar challenges and labor turnover rates as the contemporary bars and restaurants that now fill the surrounding neighborhood of Old City. Join us as we explore the transient history of Philadelphia’s culinary labor industry past and present.
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered 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.
The story we are about to tell you is one of constant change. While working on the initial draft of this episode, the City Tavern in Philadelphia, one of the places we hoped to anchor our story on, permanently closed its doors in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a way, this illustrates how the *difficulty* of working and running restaurants in Philadelphia has been one of the few constants in the industry. In this episode we will explore the historic precedents for the dramatic disruptions over the last year The Covid 19 pandemic has impacted our society at every level, especially those who work in food service and the closure of City Tavern hits deeply at our greatest fears and insecurities about the service industry and public history sites more generally.. People who depend on service industry work to live in a city like Philadelphia are experiencing the shortcomings of our economic system to the greatest degree. While this project is about transience, and inevitable change, it is also about crisis.
One of our greatest barriers to making this podcast was the lack of good source material regarding those who worked in Philadelphia’s restaurants surrounding Elfreth’s Alley. While the Alley itself was home to restaurants and food service workers, we simply don’t know much about them. In an effort to make sense of all that we don’t know, we are going to focus on food service industries in the surrounding area before zeroing in on two restaurants which operated on Elfreth’s Alley during the 20th century. We hope to tell the story of food workers on the Alley by illuminating the experience of other restaurants and individuals in the nearby neighborhoods of Old City and Philadelphia writ large. We start this journey during the days of the Revolution, work our way through the emerging Black catering industry of the early 19th century and land squarely on the Alley during the Great Depression through the mid-century period. Get a bite to eat and sit back with us to learn a bit more about Philadelphia’s food service industry.
This is Episode 7: The Servers
Act I:
In Philadelphia’s early days, taverns were humble affairs. While William Penn did not want his new city associated with liquor and vice, he begrudgingly accepted that alcohol would make its way into Philadelphia whether he banned it or not, and granted licenses to sell alcoholic beverages. Tavern operation was seen as one route out of poverty, and many of the city’s poorest residents sold homemade potables out of their houses. Penn stipulated that taverns were to serve quality drink at standard quantities at set prices and decreed that these establishments were not to harbor sedition, gambling or drunkenness. In order to sell alcohol in the new city you would need a license, and to get a license you would need to be an upstanding community member.
Alice Guest was widowed shortly after arriving in Philadelphia in 1683, and left with little but a waterfront cave dwelling like those we discussed earlier in this season. Guest opened a tavern in her cave, and would eventually convert it into a more conventional building, giving it the name of the Crooked Billet. Guest expanded her compound to include warehouses and a separate house, all along a little street called Crooked Billet Alley. She had also managed to acquire another house across Front Street.
Throughout her two-decade career as a tavern operator, Alice Guest crossed every “t” and dotted every “i” of the city’s regulations, but not all tavernkeepers were so conscientious and Philadelphia’s taverns grew their own reputation for public drunkenness. As the city expanded, more taverns were opened, many of them without licenses. The city exploded in size, and as the population increased, so did its taverns, but at a disproportionate rate. In 1693, Philadelphia was home to 2100 people and had 12 taverns. By 1769, less than 100 years afterwards, Philadelphia was home to 28,000 people and had 178 taverns. And by this time, food became a major component of tavern fare--Philadelphia was becoming a city of restaurants.
Just four blocks from Elfreth’s Alley, located at 138 S 2nd Street is the historic City Tavern. In 1772, 53 members of Philadelphia’s elite social class commissioned the construction of a tavern in the heart of Philadelphia. By 1773, City Tavern was open for business. The financial sponsors of City Tavern wanted to build a restaurant that served both alcohol and food to host important men in the nation's biggest city. City Tavern was a big building even in the late 18th century. With five floors and a large porch for outdoor dining, the newly built Tavern was inviting, warm, and bustling. Inside there is a bar room, two tea rooms, three dining rooms and, at the time, the second largest ballroom in America.
There had long been the prevailing notion that taverns exerted influence beyond their doors. By opening City Tavern, Its founders hoped to command the narrative.
City Tavern was a crucial meeting place on the eve of the Revolution. It was frequented by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
In May 1774, Paul Revere arrived at the Tavern with news of the Parliament's actions in Boston. The following day over two hundred of Philadelphia’s elite met at the Tavern to discuss the decision and to write to Boston officials. The Tavern became for Philadelphia an extension of its political meeting house.
What escapes us as historians is not Philadelphia’s elite and their political expression over drinks, but the political ideas and expressions of those serving drinks. We know so little about those who lived in the servants quarters in the City Tavern. We know next to nothing about those who served George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and what it must have felt like to be on the margins of their conversation on the eve of the Revolution. What kind of emotions did the impending crisis evoke for those who worked in the service industry?
Act II:
We may not know much about the servants that lived in and worked at the City Tavern, but we can trace the further development of restaurant industry professions through Black caterers in the early nineteenth century. Like the servants of City Tavern before them, Black waiters and cooks existed on the margins of the food service realm and continually had to seek legitimacy as skilled workers.
Dr. Danya Pilgrim, Assistant Professor of History at Temple University, has done significant work on the rise of the Black catering industry in Philadelphia. Here she describes how she conducted her research:
Dr. Danya Pilgrim:
And I was digging through the material. And I found a folder about dinners. I was like, Okay, well, let me just check this out. It wasn't what I went there for. And then I opened it up, and I found 100 years worth of receipts for meals that PSFS had contracted with public waders for and that was really the beginning for me, because then I realized that what I was really going to be able to find was to start with financial records. Right? So psfs, the Mutual Insurance Company. Some of the organizations like the St. Andrew Society of Philadelphia, and look in their financial records, and if they had records for dinners or meals often then there was some other connection in in the archive are in the collection that would lead to what I affectionately call my people in the archival record. So really, I kind of fell down a hole And followed my mind as far as that goes on, and then also to not restrict myself in terms of material. So to not come to the project, thinking, this is the source space that I will use, because I never would have found them in literature. I mean, I found poems, I found books, you know, they're mentioned, my subjects are mentioned in a lot of different places and having to reimagine the archive, right? To think about wills that can tell me about what a home looked like to be able to use insurance surveys, which was also again, right, it was digitized. And that's how I found the first insurance survey. And so those being able to pull all those little scraps of things together, is what enabled me to be able to tell this history.
Early nineteenth century Philadelphia saw an influx of free Blacks in the city. In the 1790s, the Haitian Revolution had driven many French plantation owners to flee to cities including Philadelphia, and they brought the people they had enslaved with them. Under Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law, many of those people were freed by law within six months of their arrival. Freedom seekers from the south added to their numbers. By 1820, the city’s free Black population reached 12,000. These newcomers hoped to build lives in Philadelphia, but they encountered discriminatory practices that proved difficult to navigate. Many free Black men found that working as wait staff was one of the few careers open to them as racial barriers hardened in the mid-19th century. In a 1838 census of Black Philadelphia, “waiter” was the second most common profession for men, with 11.5% of surveyed Black men identifying themselves as such. Dr. Pilgrim’s work explores the way both Black men and women participated in the service economy; men primarily served as waiters and women as cooks. They worked in both a public and private capacity, as the city’s elites increasingly held formal private dinners in their homes and hired outside help. These private parties served as measures of elite status for wealthy Philadelphians, and Black caterers were the direct source for lavish dinners. By providing the finest silverware, cuisine, and service, Black caterers established their position as skilled and valuable members of the workforce. Caterers, like event managers today, brought with them a trained staff and were highly sought out by those wanting the best in service at their parties. As they honed their craft Black service industry laborers subverted their marginal position within society and gained prestige within the dining rooms of white elites.
In 1827, Robert Roberts, wrote a manual called THE HOUSE SERVANT'S DIRECTORY, which instructed servants on the art of waiting. Many of his instructions were no doubt useful to public waiters working special events:
Keshler Thibert, reading the words of Robert Roberts: “You must not seem to be in the least confusion, for there is nothing that looks so bad as to see a man in a bustle, or confused state, when he has the management of a party. He should always take hold of his work as if he understood it, and never seem to be agitated in the least.”
“The beauty of a servant is to go quietly about the room when changing plates or dishes ; he never should seem to be in the least hurry or confusion, for this plainly shows that he is deficient of his duty. A man that knows his business well, should take hold of things as a first rate mechanic, and never seem to be agitated in the least. You should always have a quick, but light and smooth step, around the room while waiting; practice will soon bring you to this.”
The craft of Black caterers also extended to performance. Parties in lavishly decorated homes full of paintings and mahogany furnishings were made even more upscale if they were staffed by Black men and women. The ability of the waitstaff to put on a show of elegance was crucial to the level of sophistication attributed to the host’s party. Waiters were also in positions to listen and observe, gaining important insights, such as current trends in menus, decor, and other elements of entertaining, which could be leveraged for future clients.
Some of these men, such as Robert Bogle, Randol Shepherd, and Scipio Sewell built catering empires out of their reputations as waiters, and were considered among the upper-crust of Philadelphia’s Black community, serving in leadership roles in organizations such as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the Black Freemasons, and the first national convention of free Black Americans, held in 1830. Even as these men built prosperous lives, Philadelphia disenfranchised Black men in 1837, and racist rhetoric and violence in Philadelphia built in the middle of the century. Yet working within the catering field would continue to be a viable career for Black men in Philadelphia at least up through the Civil War.
When we come back, we’ll jump ahead again to the early 20th century, and discuss a sandwich shop on Elfreth’s Alley.
Sponsor Break
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 is always looking for new team members. Learn more about job opportunities at linode.com/careers.
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/
Act III:
In the mid 20th century the restaurant industry had changed only a little from the centuries before. Philadelphia’s food service still depended on the labor of marginalized Americans, still served similar food, and often catered to the elites. Dollie Ottey, the owner of the Hearthstone, a restaurant located at 115 Elfreth’s Alley from 1933 - 1942, offers us another way to look at the service industry in Philadelphia. Remember this from Season 1?
“In 1933, Dolly opened a cafe—called The Hearthstone—in the house at 115 Elfreth’s Alley, commuting over the shiny new Ben Franklin Bridge. Among the sandwich offerings at The Hearthstone were: Creamed Chicken on Toast, pineapple and cream cheese with chopped nuts, creamed beef on toast, chopped olive and nut, veal loaf, tomato and lettuce, green pepper and bacon, and peanut butter and chopped celery. The creamed chicken and creamed beef cost 15 cents; all of the other sandwiches were 10 cents.”
It’s difficult to know what the day to day experience of Ottey and her employees was, but we can try to extrapolate from what we do know about her.
Ottey’s restaurant opened in the middle of the Great Depression and suffered for it. Her story is one where the crisis is palpable. The neighborhood that the Hearthstone resided in looked much different than the Old City we think of today. Factories and warehouses, including the Wetherill Paint Factory, were the prominent features of the landscape in a time before the reimagining of Old City as a cultural asset. Dolley Ottey opened the Hearthstone with the intention of serving both the local and tourist populations with her home cooked meals. She also offered candlelit dinners serviced by staff dressed in eighteenth century garb with a menu that featured the colonial fare like one would find at the original City Tavern. Although we know these dinners took place, there is an incredibly paltry record of who worked with Ottey. One photograph survives in the Elfreth’s Alley scrapbook, of Ottey and her “helpers” all wearing colonial style dresses. The caption refers to the girls as “helpers,” but tells us little else about the role that they would have served. The silence of the archive and marginalization of those in the service industry continued with the Hearthstone and into the 20th century.
Ottey and her “helpers” served home cooked lunches from 11-3 daily, and on Thursdays they served dinner as well. The Hearthstone was also available for reservations for dinners or parties outside of their Thursday schedule. Ottey stressed not only her spatial connection to Colonial Philadelphia, but also the authenticity of that experience through “real home cooked foods, in a quiet friendly atmosphere.” Her emphasis on the aesthetics of the colonial experience represents a trend in historical interpretation that was occurring across the nation.
Ottey was an important figure in the preservation and celebration of Elfreth’s Alley colonial past. The Elfreth’s Alley Association was formed in 1934 inside of the Hearthstone by Ottey and her neighbor, Mrs. Greer. Ottey served multiple roles on the Alley, not only as a business owner but as a community leader. Her restaurant was part of a larger push towards historical reenactment in Old City. The Hearthstone not only served dinner in costume every Thursday, but also became a central meeting place during events like the pageant for the Windows of Old Philadelphia. Photos survive of women lining up outside of the Hearthstone to attend a June luncheon hosted by Ottey and her “helpers,” proving again the centrality of the restaurant to the historical celebrations during the 1930s.
Dolley Ottey was on the cutting edge of the commodification of history in Old City. Despite the long lines for luncheons, pageants and other holidays calling for historical authenticity, Ottey struggled. Minutes recorded from the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks show that in 1936 Ottey struggled to pay her gas bill and asked for assistance. The reliance of her business on holidays such as Elfreth’s Alley’s Fete Day shows a dependence on the tourism industry, which during the Great Depression struggled along with the rest of the country. In 1935 when Ottey was renovating her tea room, minutes from the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks indicated that they hoped the expansion would help her make money, making it clear that even in the early days of the restaurant, money was an issue. By 1941, Ottey was having trouble making ends meet. In November 1942, she closed The Hearthstone for good and refashioned 115 into the headquarters of the Elfreth’s Alley Association. Running a restaurant that relied on tourism proved to be a volatile venture at best, and Ottey’s business did not survive those slow periods.
We can only imagine the difficulties faced by Ottey’s staff as they attempted to navigate their employment in an ever changing industry. Then, as today, restaurant work was often temporary and vulnerable.
As Gwen Franklin, who we’ll hear from later, puts it:
Gwen Franklin: Most people do not enter a service industry for life, like it’s just kind of a way to make money in the moment.
Working for tips makes for an unstable financial situation, and servers likely had to engage in other occupations to make a living. On top of their unstable position working in the service industry during the Great Depression, we wonder about the “helpers” experience in historical reenactment. We know that Ottey offered the traditional dinners served by women in colonial garb every Thursday, and presumably for reserved parties. We imagine these women were also asked to perform emotional labor as they played historical roles and offered smiling service..
Dr. Pilgrim noted that following these “helpers” is made especially difficult by these women’s place in society and in the written record:
Pilgrim: I think the other thing too, you're also dealing with women who are again, people, and this may not be their particular transient, but they're transient as subjects in the archive. Right, that that if they get married, they disappear because nobody is tracing women unless they are householders. Right, like unless they are single, property owning people, right. It's also a job that, as you've already discovered, right, people are always are moving in and out of it all the time.
In 1947, another restaurant opened on the Alley at #135. Called the Coach House Restaurant, it followed the model of the Hearthstone in that it coupled lunchtime, lighter fare, and evening dining with historical ambience. This restaurant also relied heavily on the Elfreth’s Alley Association’s Fete Day, and it’s proprietor, John Duross, was heavily involved in the Association’s activities, even serving as President of the Association for a period. Duross operated the Coach House with a skeleton crew, doing the cooking himself, once an army buddy had shown him the ropes, and employing one waitress. By the mid 1950s, one waitress had been there for seven years and Duross left the restaurant in her hands while he took a two-month vacation. While this small scale allowed for some continuity, Duross’ laissez-faire attitude about making a profit--he admitted to a reporter that he had no idea if he was making or losing money--ultimately spelled the end of the Coach House in 1957. It had lasted for about the same lifespan as the Hearthstone.
Perhaps the Hearthstone and the Coach House Restaurant were too far ahead of their time. By the early 1960s, Elfreth’s Alley was a National Historical Landmark, and excitement for the American Bicentennial was in full swing. As the National Park Service reshaped the land around Independence Hall into a park, it also built replicas of select buildings. Among those structures was City Tavern, which had been demolished in 1854 after being damaged by fire. The rebuilt Tavern opened for business just in time for the Bicentennial, offering visitors to Philadelphia’s historic sites a menu of 18th century foods and beverages. In 1994, chef Walter Staib (Sh-IGH-b), took over the contract with the Park Service from the previous concessionaire and reinvigorated the site, earning plaudits for the food as well as for his television show, A Taste of History, which debuted in 2009. In many ways, Staib and his team at City Tavern continued the vision of Ottey and Duross, its greater success due to a robust tourist economy built by city government funding as well as the work of preservationists at sites such as Elfreth’s Alley.
Conclusion
Franklin: i did lose my job when covid happened so they had closed down completely, they reopened recently at a few places, I think they’re starting to do indoor now. but I opted not to go back just because the way philadelphia’s been handling the pandemic and the food service industry is subpar in my opinion.
That was Gwen Franklin, who we heard from briefly earlier in the episode. Along with Paige Bartello, Franklin not only conducted the initial research for this episode of the Alley Cast, and both of them have intimate experience working in the food service industry here in Philadelphia. They are two of the countless workers and families experiencing financial distress due to restaurant closures. They reflected on their experience researching fellow workers hundreds of years in the past. Bartello said it brought up a lot of emotions--the difficulties in finding evidence of food service workers’ lives echoed her frustrations working in restaurants where she didn’t feel valued.
Franklin: But other than that, like you are just working day to day and the covid pandemic emphasize that for me and its not an industry that you can receive security in and that is what also what we saw in the past too that people weren’t staying in the service industry for very long which is part of the reason why they were really hard to like archivally trace down because they would work there for a year or two and then move on and they would have a longer life as a millworker, they would move to jersey and like these kind of more industrial things that had better records because of tighter regulations. And i think that’s still the reality. I think that’s one of the things that will never change.
From the service industry’s inception in Philadelphia we can trace common threads to our current moment. Food service requires emotional labor, resilience, and uncertainty. With the rise of Covid-19 this past year businesses have experienced familiar hardships tenfold. People stopped going out to eat in the numbers they did pre-pandemic but rent is still due for business owners. Restaurants in Old City rely heavily on tourism to make their money, and while Dollie Ottey experienced hardship going into the slow season, in 2020 the slow season consisted of nearly the entire year. Just as the original City Tavern closed its doors, the modern day iteration was forced to close due to lack of business during the pandemic. As restaurants reopened, workers faced the prospect of exposing themselves to a deadly disease at work, and uncertain schedules as managers struggled to scale back up toward something like normal while being restricted in how many diners could eat indoors.
The restaurant industry has always been rife with uncertainty. Through ups and downs the food service industry has remained a staple of Philadelphia’s economy and a major source of jobs for its citizens. From owners to servers, those affected by the tides of the food industry remain an essential component of our society today.
Centering workers in the history of food service brought up reflections from the historians who worked on this episode and who have experience in the service industry. Hoping that this episode and research can be a starting point for further research into service workers, Franklin and Bartello reflected on the ways restaurant patrons (and listeners of this podcast!) can be empathetic participants in this history.
Franklin: tip your servers. Like if you’re not paying them, no one is. And like unfortunately that’s kind of been the reality in the service industry for its entire existence. If you’re not going to pay the person who is serving you food like neither is their employer. The industry has always been exploitative and volatile. And the only way to really fundamentally change that is to be a decent individual and advocate for a higher minimum wage.
In our interview with Paige Bartello, she also emphasized the diner’s role. In her words, when you are dining out, you “hold someone’s livelihood in the balance like that, when you have that kind of power,” and she encourages listeners to tip generously.
This episode is dedicated in honor of those who worked in City Tavern in 1773 through 2020. Please support local restaurants and, most importantly, restaurant workers. We hope that the next time you eat out, you tip your server well.
History is a group effort! This episode was written by Gwen Franklin, Paige Bartello, Margaret Sanford, and Ted Maust. Thanks to Dr. Danya Pilgrim for chatting with us—her article “Masters of a Craft: Philadelphia's Black Public Waiters, 1820–50” informed much of the section of this episode about Black caterers in Philadelphia. Thanks to Gwen Franklin and Paige Bartello for chatting with Margaret Sanford for this episode--unfortunately, due to a technical issue we were only able to include Franklin’s audio.
Thanks to Keshler Thibert for performing selections from Rober Roberts’ HOUSE SERVANT'S DIRECTORY.
In addition to the scholars cited by name, this episode drew on the work of Mary Rizzo, Peter Thompson, Rebecca Yamin and R. Scott Stephenson. This episode also relied heavily on the Elfreth’s Alley Scrapbook, which contains clippings and ephemera about both the Hearthstone and the Coach House restaurants.
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.
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.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
See you next week for the final installment of this run of episodes when we talk to Dr. Billy Smith about laborers in Philadelphia.
Thank you and take care!
Bonus Episode: Behind-the-Scenes Roundtable
Aug 04, 2021
Taking a week off from our regular schedule and having a conversation with some of the folks who make this podcast about how this season came about.
Episode 2.06: Cabinetmakers
Jul 28, 2021
Find a full transcript and sources at elfrethsalley.org/podcast/2021/7/14/episode-206-cabinetmakers
Episode 2.05: Boarding Houses
Jul 21, 2021
This week we are talking about boarding houses, and we got to interview Dr. Wendy Gamber, who is one of the leading scholars on the history of the American boarding house. We trace Elfreth’s Alley’s history of boarding houses through the 18th and 19th centuries to the era when, nationally, the institution came under fire. Yet even when the boarding house seemed to fade into the sands of time, we see emerging echoes of it in the 21st century.
Find a full transcript and sources at elfrethsalley.org/podcast/2021/7/12/episode-205-boarding-houses
Episode 2.03: Building Houses, Part II
Jul 07, 2021
Find a full transcript and sources at elfrethsalley.org/podcast/buildinghousespartii.
Episode 2.02: Building Houses, Part I
Jun 30, 2021
Find a full transcript and list of sources at elfrethsalley.org/podcast/2021/6/29/episode-202-building-houses-part-i
Episode 2:01: The Mechanics' Lecture
Jun 23, 2021
Find a transcript, sources, and links at the episode page: www.elfrethsalley.org/podcast/2021/6/23/episode-201-the-mechanics-lecture
Season 2 is Coming!
Jun 16, 2021
Check back on June 23rd, 2021 for the first episode of the new season!
Holiday Episode
Dec 22, 2020
Over the last few decades it seems lots of people have been concerned about how Christmas is changing. On one hand, there is the so-called “War on Christmas,” and people taking issue with Starbucks cups and the greeting “Happy Holidays.” On the other hand, there are those who complain about the way in which the Christmas season seems to creep earlier and earlier in the year. Both of these complaints bemoan changing traditions. But that “classic” tradition of Christmas--Christmas trees, cookies, and toys toys toys--where did that come from?
Bonus Episode: Fire
Nov 09, 2020
Hello! We're back with a quick episode about the history of fire (and fire insurance, fire fighting, and historically-clad fire safety demonstrations) on Elfreth's Alley and with some news about upcoming events!
Episode 8: Renewal
Aug 20, 2020
This season we have worked our way from dressmakers in 1762 through to 20th-century preservationists, with many other topics in between. We have explored how the neighborhood around Elfreth’s Alley was built and rebuilt, how economic and demographic changes in the city as a whole affected this little street, and how commemoration and preservation began to remake the street even as these efforts remained, in effect, racially segregated.
Today we continue with the story of 20th century commemoration efforts on the Alley as well as at Independence Hall, and we will wrap up this first season of The Alley Cast.
Episode 7: When Elfreth's Alley Became Historic
Aug 13, 2020
Over the last few episodes, we have shown how Elfreth’s Alley went from a neighborhood of artisans in early Philadelphia to a rundown street in the shadow of factories and warehouses, with unsanitary conditions and rampant overcrowding by the 1930s.
Today, Elfreth’s Alley is in nearly every guidebook to Philadelphia as a must-see attraction. During a typical summer Saturday, some thousand visitors walk down the length of the block, duck into Bladen’s Court, a small offshoot of the Alley, and retrace their steps back up the street, posing for photos in front of the Instagram-worthy houses and the historical flags waving above.
How did this transformation happen? Why did it happen? Who made it happen?
In this episode, we will examine the beginning of Elfreth’s Alley metamorphosis into a tourist spot.
Episode 6: Urban "Decay" and The City of Homes
Aug 06, 2020
In Episode 6 of The Alley Cast, we discuss housing in Philadelphia--how it changed in around the turn of the 20th century and how some parts of the city were neglected into such disrepair that a multitude of organizations were created to try to fix them. But we will also be exploring an idea that we touched on a little in episode 5 and which we will continue to engage with through the end of this season. That the ways in which city neighborhoods are labeled--as factory districts, or quote unquote “slums,” or even historic--are tied up in the priorities of those with power, privilege, and speculative financial investment in those neighborhoods. These labels often determine the options available to those without power and without privilege who live and work in these spaces. And sometimes the labels applied by city planners, reformers, investors, and preservationists can determine the future of a neighborhood--for good or bad, or simply for different--despite the wishes and actions of the people who live and work there.
Bonus Episode: Meet the Team
Jul 30, 2020
We're taking a week off from our usual format to introduce our team, talk through the origins of the podcast, and chat about some things that haven't made it into the podcast, at least not yet.
Episode 5: An Industrial Neighborhood
Jul 23, 2020
We often focus on the years when Elfreth's Alley was a center of artisan production, but this week we turn to the industrial age, which did just as much to shape the street. We learn about a few Alley residents who were part of the Great Migration, Black Southerners who came to Philadelphia and other Northern cities for work.
Episode 4: The Racial Politics of Domestic Labor
Jul 16, 2020
In previous episodes, we have primarily focused on women who were the heads of households on Elfreth's Alley. In this week's episode, Joe Makuc looks to the literal margins of the census records to learn about the experiences of free Black women working as domestic servants.
Episode 3: The Public Universal Friend in Philadelphia
Jul 09, 2020
This week we begin with one of the widows on Elfreth's Alley, who housed a nonbinary Quaker minister titled the Public Universal Friend and the Friend's group of followers. Along the way we will talk about Quakerism, gender norms and gender variance in Philadelphia, explore how the Public Universal Friend's gender ambiguity and religious ideas unsettled societal norms and learn how the Friend navigated a city whose inhabitants who felt threatened by this queer gender expression.
Episode 2: Spinsters, Runaway Wives, and Widows
Jul 02, 2020
Above is a page from the 1790 First Federal Census that lists the heads of house for residents on Elfreth's Alley beginning with house #28 - #26. Other census data included profession or occupation, whether the house was a dwelling or shop, and the number of free white men and women, and the number of enslaved people living in the house.
Last week, we talked about three dressmakers who lived on Elfreth’s Alley from the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century. We learned that Mary Smith, Sarah Melton, and Elizabeth Carr were all examples of women who spent some or all of their adult lives in couples with other women, rather than with men, and we explored the possibilities of their professional and personal lives together. Today on the Alley Cast, we are going to explore the economic and social circumstances of the other female-headed households on Elfreth’s Alley from 1785 to 1820 and consider what brought these women here and how the Alley shaped their lives.
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS SOURCES BELOW
In this cropped version of image above, you can see that Elizabeth Chandler, Sarah "Mertoon" and Barbary Dominick, are three of the single women who lived on the Alley in 1790. Their occupations are all listed as 'spinster', a term for an unmarried woman, but they would have had to work to sustain themselves. Note that Sarah's name is spelled Mertoon here, as opposed to Milton or Melton, which we see in other records. Variant spellings were common at the time, but her continued residence at #24 makes it easier to determine that Mertoon and Melton were the same woman.
Full Bibliography
PrimarySources
Constable Returns, 1775, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, PA.
Mary Smith and Sarah Melton Deed, Deed Book I, 1, 429, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, PA.
Mary Smith Will, 1766, 286, (Book N, 525), Philadelphia Register of Wills, Philadelphia City Archives, City Hall Annex, Philadelphia, PA.
"Pennsylvania Births and Christenings, 1709-1950." Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.
"Pennsylvania Cemetery Records, ca. 1700-ca. 1950." Database. FamilySearch. https://FamilySearch.org. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Family History Department.
"Pennsylvania Deaths and Burials, 1720-1999." Database. FamilySearch. https://FamilySearch.org. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.
"Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Death Certificates, 1803-1915." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Philadelphia City Archives and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
"Pennsylvania Marriages, 1709-1940." Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Philadelphia Contributionship, “Philadelphia Contributionship Survey #736: A House and Kitchen Belonging to Mary Smith,” 1762, Elfreth’s Alley Association Records Collection, Philadelphia, PA.
Sarah Melton Will, 1974, 104, (Book X, 152), Philadelphia Register of Wills, Philadelphia City Archives, City Hall Annex, Philadelphia, PA.
The Philadelphia Directory, 1785, 1791, 1793-1795, 1797-1810, 1813-1814, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, PA.
"United States Census, 1790. "Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Citing NARA microfilm publication M637. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
"United States Census, 1800." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Citing NARA microfilm publication M32. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
"United States Census, 1810." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Citing NARA microfilm publication M252. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
"United States Census, 1820." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org. Citing NARA microfilm publication M33. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
Secondary Sources
Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Kann, Mark. Taming Passion for the Public Good: Policing Sex in the Early Republic. New York: New York University, 2013.
Klepp, Susan. Philadelphia in Transition: A Demographic History of the City and Its Occupational Groups, 1720-1830. A Garland Series. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989.
Lyons, Clare. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Shammas, Carole. “The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 1 (1983): 69–83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20091740.
Smith, Billy. The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750-1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Smith, Merril. Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania: 1730-1830. New York: New York University Press, 1991.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172964.
Stabile, Susan. Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Wulf, Karin. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
TRANSCRIPT
Isabel Steven:
Mary Smith, spinster, mantua maker, 1762-1766. Sarah Melton, widow, spinster, mantua maker, 1762-1798. Hannah Hodgson, 1785. Jane Hill, 1785. Anne Ireland, 1785. Elizabeth Collins, widow, 1785-1791. Elizabeth Chandler, spinster, 1790. Barbary. Dominick, spinster, 1790. Christian Tweed, widow, 1790. Ann Anderson, widow, 1790-1804. Mary Gray, widow, schoolmistress, 1790-1805. Mary Hunter, Spinster, 1790-1791. Sara Bradnax, Schoolmistress, 1790-1791. Catherine McLeod, widow, boarding house, 1793-1797. Ann Bliss, widow, 1793. Mary Cowain, 1793. Elizabeth W. Brunston, widow, gentlewoman, 1794-1795. Rebecca Jones, 1794. Mary Wilson, widow, boarding house, 1795-1797. Rebecca King, widow, tailoress, 1796. Rachel Elfreth, widow, gentlewoman, 1795-1803. Elizabeth Carr, mantua maker, widow, 1790-1813. Marianne Faure, gentlewoman, French lady, 1795-1796 .Christian Peachin, widow, 1785-1831. Susannah Hill, mantua maker, 1790-1809 .Sarah Taylor, seamstress, 1800-1801. Ann Taylor, widow, boarding house, 1795-1810. Hannah Gillaspie, mantua maker, 1802. Madam Baeu, gentlewoman, widow, 1801-1804. Madam Vaughan, 1802-1806. Rebecca Price, teacheress, 1802-1807. Ann Hoffner, widow, 1807. Catherine Catherall, widow, 1807. Mary Thomas, gentlewoman, 1807. Mary McKinney, boarding house, 1807. Mrs. Vockason, nurse, 1809. Margaret Fry, huckster, 1810. Magdeline Orell, shoemaker, 1810. Elizabeth Levy, fuel clarifier, 1810. Rebecca Wells, lady, 1810. Amy Stackhouse, seamstress, 1810. Ann Lemaire, lady, 1810. Mary Hillman, boarding house, 1809-1810. Mary Tatum, gentlewoman. Hannah Catherall, widow, lady, 1810-1813. Mary Clampffer, widow, 1810-1813. Rebecca Ferguson, widow, shopkeeper, 1813-1841. Eliza McCollum, mantua maker, 1813. Margaret Maag, tailoress, 1813. Ann James, widow, 1813. Hannah Newton, mantua maker, seamstress, 1810-1813. Margaret Peddle, widow, lady, 1810-1813.
These are the names of the 60 women who appear in City Directories and United States Censuses as the legal heads of households on Elfreth’s Alley between roughly 1790 to 1813. Representing 20-30% of the street's residents, some only lived here for a year or two, others decades. Yet collectively, these women illustrate the opportunities and challenges of life for single women in Early Republic Philadelphia.
Ted Maust:
Welcome to The Alley Cast, a new podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia. We tell the stories of people who lived or worked on this street which has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries. And while we start in this neighborhood, we will explore connections that will take us across the city and around the globe.
Last week, we talked about three dressmakers who lived on Elfreth’s Alley from the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century. We learned that Mary Smith, Sarah Melton, and Elizabeth Carr were all examples of women who spent some or all of their adult lives in couples with other women, rather than with men, and explored the possibilities of their professional and personal lives together.
Today on the Alley Cast, we are going to explore the economic and social circumstances of the other female-headed households on Elfreth’s Alley from 1785 to 1820 and consider what brought these women here and how the Alley shaped their lives.
Isabel Steven:
For at least the year of 1790, Sarah Melton and Elizabeth Carr had neighbors to either side of them who were spinsters, too. Elizabeth Chandler lived at No. 23 and at No. 25, Barbary Dominick. Further down the street another spinster, Mary Hunter, made her home at No. 17. We don’t know much about these women, except for the information contained in the 1790 United States Census, which was the first time it was taken. Chandler and Hunter each had a boy younger than sixteen years old living with them, presumably their sons. The census also listed how many “free white females, including head” were living at the home, and so while we don’t know the specific ages, all three women had multiple girls or other women living there, too. It may be that Chandler, Hunter, and Dominick all had children by men to whom they were not married. That they only appeared to stay on the Alley for the one year indicates that work and financial circumstances prompted them to move again looking for more affordable accommodations. Or perhaps they married, and thus disappeared as heads of households, now included in their husbands’ households instead. What is clear, however, is that the difficulty in tracing these women’s lives is due to the economic, legal, and social realities that dictated their lives.
Of all the social and legal roles available to women during this time, only a minority of adult women were ever able to become the legal head of their own household. This could only happen if she were a feme sole. This term was a legal definition that designated a woman who had either never married, was widowed, or legally divorced. Roughly 20-30% of households were headed by women at any one point in time in late 18th century Philadelphia. The residential patterns of Elfreth’s Alley match those percentages almost exactly decade to decade. In 1790, out of the 31 heads of house on the street, 32% were women. At the turn of the century, it was 21% of the 28 residents, and a decade later, women accounted for 33% of the 45 residents.
In certain ways, a feme sole had more opportunities: she could inherit, buy and sell property, conduct business in her own name, and appear in court. But in many other ways, her life was more limited and more difficult. As we talked about in the previous episode, only a small set of occupations were available to women and all of them paid low wages, typically half the amount a man would make for the same work, which made her economic circumstances often precarious. Moreover, a woman was not expected to be conducting business and acting in the public on her own. Instead, society expected a woman to have a husband to do these things for her, to protect her from the burdens of business and public life. How Mary Hunter, Elizabeth Chandler and Barbary Dominick may have actually felt about being single women we can unfortunately leave only to speculation. Perhaps they wished for a husband to offer financial security and protection from public activity, or perhaps they had no desire at all for one, and preferred the greater legal freedom her feme sole status granted her.
But if a woman was not the head of a household (or married), what role did she fill? Most commonly, adult daughters lived with one or both of their parents, or she moved into her sibling’s household. Women might also be lodgers, renting a room from individuals like Catherine McLeod, Mary Wilson, Ann Taylor and Mary McKinney who ran boarding houses on the Alley. Women who were of lower economic standing might join a household working as a servant, maid, or cook. And many more enslaved African American women had no choice at all, forced to work and were counted as part of their enslaver's household.
The confluence of economic, social, and cultural factors enabled the diversity of women’s roles, and the relatively high numbers of single women living in Philadelphia during this time. First, female self-reliance was economically tenable within an urban environment, due to the abundance of work, flexibility of living arrangements, and size of the population. Second, it was somewhat socially tolerated due to the ethnic and religious diversity of Philadelphia. Third, the changing demographic landscape of Philadelphia created a much less coherent or rigid culture of gender norms than might commonly be assumed, enabling women to navigate around their prescribed roles in various ways. Finally, the cultural scene within Philadelphia saw a burgeoning literary world whose writers included women, and growing educational opportunities for women meant an increase in conversation and debate around the roles of women, singleness, and the realities and challenges of courting and marriage.
Act II: Marriage and Separation
Despite a limited tolerance for female singlehood, most women married. Not only was marriage the most reliable form of economic stability for women, and socially and culturally expected, it defined her legal and relational status. Marriage in early America retained a legal principle from English Common Law, called coverture, which essentially forged the married couple into one legal entity under which a woman no longer retained any legal identity separate from her husband. Although she could run the household, she was not its legal head. All her property was conferred to her husband, and only he could inherit, buy or sell property, conduct business, make contracts, and appear in court to represent her.
However, women were rarely married their entire adult life. The death of her husband may have been the most common circumstance by which women returned to single life, but it was not the only one. Self divorce and after 1785, legal divorce were not uncommon in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The 1785 Divorce Act established certain policies for the separating couple, including distinctions between absolute divorce and divorce from bed and board (in other words, a legal separation). Absolute divorce provided a clean economic break and the ability for both men and women to remarry legally. For women, an absolute divorce was even more significant, because she became a feme sole. A divorce from bed and board, on the other hand, meant that the woman could not remarry, but could apply for alimony. Some women probably enjoyed the greater freedom from her husband and feme sole status that an absolute divorce granted her, while others probably found the alimony a necessity for surviving on her own and supporting any children she had.
Despite divorce being legal by 1785, most couples separated informally, rather than going through a lengthy and difficult court process that might deny them the divorce they wanted. Such informal separation was somewhat accepted socially and acknowledged economically, particularly among the laboring and lower middling classes. Elizabeth Carr, one of the mantua makers we discussed last week, was one such woman who was separated from her husband. Elizabeth Swobes and Alexander Carr married in 1778 in Philadelphia, but had separated by the time of the First Federal Census in 1790. Elizabeth was living with Sarah Melton on the Alley, and Alexander lived alone in Chester Country. It is unclear why Elizabeth and her husband separated, but they did not do it legally, since she was still officially married when her partner Sarah bequeathed her the house in 1794. An informal separation meant that Elizabeth was still a feme covert, and anything she inherited would have legally belonged to her husband. Sarah had to explicitly write Alexander out of the will in order to ensure that the property Elizabeth inherited would not be seized by Alexander, as was his legal right: “So nevertheless that her present husband Alexander Carr shall not have any right or Interest whatever therein neither shall the Same be liable for his Debts…”
There were a number of reasons why a married couple like Elizabeth and Alexander might separate. The most common were economic disagreements, sexual misbehavior, and physical abuse. Or else the two of them may have dissolved their marriage together because they no longer felt they were compatible. They may have come from an ethnic or religious background in which self-divorce was much more accepted not only when strife wrecked the marriage, but when the union was no longer suitable for or desired by one or both partners. Carr was a common surname in both Scotland and Ireland, both of which had strong common-law traditions that supported self-marriage, self-divorce, and re-marriage.
Marriage desertion by either partner happened frequently as well, but there were a great deal of distinctions and consequences between men who deserted and women who did. For example, if Alexander decided to leave the marriage, his greater ability to find new employment, independent legal status, and ease of travel would have made relocating much easier. While he would have been judged for not acting like a proper husband, he was still obligated to support her financially. If he didn't, as often happened, the Overseers of the Poor would have compelled him to do so.
However, if Elizabeth deserted the marriage, she gave up her legal rights to financial support from her husband. And yet, since married women were designated feme coverts, they could not do business in their own name and any money or property they had legally belonged to their husbands. Any transactions she made were technically with her husband's money, and any debts she incurred were on her husband's credit. For a woman to abandon a marriage was to risk economic destitution, which probably forced many wives to stay in difficult or abusive marriages. Moreover, the societal judgment on leaving a marriage was much harsher for women than for men. If a wife had problems with her husband, she was supposed to either gently change him or either submit to his will since he was the household head. For a wife to desert her husband was to challenge his authority, and thus, her reasons for leaving were scrutinized much more harshly.
Despite such steep consequences, many women, perhaps Elizabeth included, abandoned their marriages. Between 1726 and 1786, 841 men advertised the desertion of their wives. Although such a practice might sound unusual, runaway wife advertisements were a common and recognized means of dissolving a marriage in 18th-century Philadelphia. The text of the ads was formulaic, and then edited to fit specific circumstances. A typical ad announced that the "wife of the subscriber, hath eloped from him, and run him considerably in Debt, besides pilfering from him a valuable Sum of Money, and sundry effects of Value." They were also an effective means to break economic ties. A deserted husband warned "all Persons not to give her Credit on my Account; for I will not pay any Debts she may contract."
But what was to stop a husband from abandoning his wife and then falsely claiming that she had left him in order to absolve himself of financial responsibility? First, many newspapers would not place runaway wife ads without official proof. For example, in 1748 Benjamin Franklin informed his readers in the Pennsylvania Gazette that "No Advertisements of elopements will hereafter be inserted in this paper, but such as shall come to the press accompanied with a certificate from some Magistrate." Second, a deserted wife could appeal to the Overseers of the Poor for financial support from a derelict husband. Third, the very women who had been accused of eloping from their husbands published their own responses to the ads their husbands placed. Although most did not deny that they had left their husband, they did dispute how their husbands described the elopement. They argued instead that they were justified in leaving because of the behavior of their husbands or their mutual decision to separate.
Alexander does not appear to have ever published a "Runaway Wife" ad for Elizabeth, which may indicate that their separation was amicable, or that Elizabeth never incurred debts in her husband's name the way other women were forced to. Living with Sarah Melton, who was a feme sole, meant that Elizabeth could rely on her partner to conduct business, and to manage their credit and debt in her own name. With Sarah as her partner, Elizabeth did not have to rely on a male figure for economic support and stability, and may have saved her from a much more precarious existence as a self-divorced woman living alone in 18th-century Philadelphia. She may have had a few difficult years after her female partner's death and before her husband's, but once Alexander died, which was probably in the last couple of years of the 18th century, Elizabeth would have become a widow and regained her feme sole status.
Act III: Widows
Far and away the largest group of female household heads were widows; Of the 60 female heads on Elfreth's Alley, 23 were named as widows. It’s possible that number may have been even higher if we include some of the 26 women who had no indication of their marital status listed on their record. Widows made up nearly two-thirds of female household heads, and most of these women lived in poverty. Their lives were marked by insecurity, having to take care of a family, without a husband’s income, and unable to make very much money from an occupation. Although her husband may have left money to her in his will, much of it would have gone to funeral expenses; perhaps she would have been saddled with his debts, losing the rest of an inheritance in paying them off. By and large, widows would have made such little money that they were exempt from paying taxes, small comfort given all their other expenses, in particular rent. With this economic insecurity came transience; fourteen of the widows lived on the street for less than five years, six of them for only a year.
Even women who had lived in relative financial ease during marriage could be reduced to lower circumstances. Ten of the widows at Elfreth’s Alley were deemed ladies or gentlewomen due to their social standing, including Rachel Elfreth, the widow of Josiah Elfreth who had built, sold and rented many of the houses on the street. For a widow like Hannah Catherall, her Quaker social circles may have remained similar to when her husband had been alive, but her new financial situation may have forced her to move to more affordable accomodations in a less affluent neighborhood.
Elfreth's Alley's location may account for why so many widows lived on the street. Located in Mulberry Ward, a more dense and less affluent area of the city, the houses on the street tended to be cheaper to rent, and therefore more affordable to the lower and middling classes. Moreover, the Alley’s close location to High Street, now known as Market Street, made it convenient for its residents to get to shops, businesses, taverns, and other places of work. For domestic workers, the more affluent homes in Chestnut Ward were just a short walk away.
Whether these gentlewomen and ladies were still able to afford to live without working is unclear. If they did, it would have been an occupation deemed more suitable to their social position such as running a small shop out of their parlors that sold ready-made women’s items like shoes and shawls, or books and other items of comfort and leisure. Other widows found work as teachers and school mistresses, such as Mary Gray, Sara Bradnax and Rebecca Price, each of whom found differing levels of success in their work. Gray lived at Elfreth's Alley for 15 years, whereas Bradnax only managed to stay a year.
Not all of these widows lived on the edge of poverty. Some were able to take the inheritance left by their husband that had been the fruits of both their labor and their capital, and turn a profit through investment or an occupation, rather than see it disappear to satisfy debts. Catherine McLeod, Mary Wilson and Ann Taylor all ran boarding houses, earning an income from their lodgers, and landladies like Margaret Peddle and Rachel Elfreth perhaps fared even better as they rented out homes and ground lots to individuals and families on the street.
Act IV: The Alley as Home for Single Women
However these women scraped together an existence, whether as a fuel clarifier or as a landlady, the most effective method of survival for single women in Philadelphia was by relying on the network of community interdependence that they built in their neighborhood and on their street. This network was not only a social one, but an economic one as well. The Alley served as a complex stage upon which social conversation, financial business, and domestic life all intermingled and coexisted. We saw a snapshot of this community last week with Mary Smith, Sarah Melton and Elizabeth Carr, whose business partnership and inheritance practices fostered economic and emotional stability. These three women also had friendly and business relationships with their neighbors. Susannah Hill, another mantua maker, moved to the street around the same time as Carr, and it seems likely that the two, and Melton as well, might have shared resources and even clientele from time to time.
The women who operated businesses, like the mantua makers and Rebecca Ferguson, a shopkeeper, would have exchanged credit and debit with each other, while Rachel Elfreth and Ann Taylor rented property to their neighbors. Kinship ties also strengthened this web of relationships, like probable sisters Ann and Sarah Taylor, and the Catherall family who moved to the street in the first years of the 19th century. The length of residence also built this network of interdependence. Indeed, the nine women who managed to live on the street for a decade or more did so because they had other women to rely on. In turn, they would have acted as pillars of support for residents on Elfreth's Alley. Women like widow Christian Peachin would have developed strong relationships with her neighbors over the 26 years she lived on the Alley, offering all manner of support, acting as nurse, midwife, credit lender, legal witness, and friend. Her length of residence made her a community anchor, and as she aged, her neighbors would have returned the favors she had generously bestowed. Eliza Culin who lived a few doors down might have had popped in to care for her when she was sick, cooked her a meal, acted as a witness when Peachin wrote her will, and attended to her when she died.
Conclusion
In many ways, Elfreth’s Alley encapsulated the living experiences of single women in Philadelphia during the Early Republic era. The 20-30% of female-headed households is reflected in the residential patterns of the Alley, and those 60 women represent a cross-section of the lives and experiences of single women; what freedoms they were able to seize, what limitations they faced, the opportunities they managed to create for themselves and the relationships and networks of reliance they created with one another. Next week, we will hear about one widow in particular, A Quaker who extended this network to help a visitor to the city, offering hospitality to a singular individual who had a specific method of practicing Quakerism and a unique way of expressing their gender identity.
Next week on the AlleyCast: The Public Universal Friend in Philadelphia.
Ted Maust:
History is a group effort!
Today’s episode was written, and narrated by Isabel Steven, with some research assistance from Joe Makuc and Ted Maust. We also drew on the work of scholars such as Karin Wulf, Clare Lyons, and Merril D. Smith: you can check out the episode page at elfrethsalley.org/podcast for a complete list of sources.
Our theme music is the song “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions from the album Aeronaut, used under Creative Commons license.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Be sure to join us next week for Episode 3.
Thank you for supporting the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by listening to this podcast! If you are able to make a financial gift, you can do so at elfrethsalley.org/donate
Thank you and take care!
Episode 1: The Dressmakers
Jun 25, 2020
In Episode 1 of The Alley Cast, Isabel Steven tells the story of three women who lived on Elfreth's Alley in the eighteenth century who worked as dressmakers. Steven explores us how these women made their living sewing clothes and invites us to imagine what their working and personal relationships might have been like.
See the episode page at elfrethsalley.org/podcast for a full list of sources.
Introducing The Alley Cast
Jun 18, 2020
We are so excited to be launching a new podcast! The Alley Cast tells the stories of everyday Philadelphians and the historical forces which shaped their lives. Season 1 focuses on women who lived or worked on Elfreth’s Alley and includes stories from 1762 - 1967. Episode 1 will be released on June 25, 2020!
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