Of workshops and warerooms: the economic and geographic transformation of furniture making in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1780-1850
Date
1986
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Between 1780 and 1850, the furniture industry of Chester County, Pennsylvania, underwent a profound transformation. The number of furniture craftsmen working in Chester County fluctuated dramatically, falling into two peak periods, around 1800 and around 1835, each at a crucial stage in the spatial and social development of the furniture economy. In the early peak, small farm-based workshops sprang up, almost randomly dotting the county landscape. After 1813, the introduction and spread of the urban industrial system of the wareroom and the enlarged manufactory fundamentally restructured the social, economic, and geographic organization of furniture making in Chester County, resulting in the second peak. ☐ As larger, urban-style shops servicing county-wide markets dominated the furniture industry, manufacturing focused at central points instead of blanketing the county in a fine net. For example, Uwchlan Township’s small furniture industry – consisting of only a single shop – changed from a farm-based, part-time enterprise to flourish at the local crossroads as a specialized, full-time operation, replicating in miniature the transformation of the industry throughout Chester County. The many workshops and warerooms of the county as a whole clustered in a few central locations, townships and villages selected by various advantages. Many lay in a band across the map of the county, marking the location of the Lancaster Turnpike. Elsewhere, however, furniture production declined and disappeared. ☐ The striking difference between the relative unimportance of place in the first peak and the critical specificity of location in the second peak reflects a basic change in American rural life in the early nineteenth century. Thanks to improved transportation and communication, the generation that came of age in the 1820s to the 1840s shopped in central places where a variety of ready-made goods could be purchased, rather than confining most of their purchasing to a highly restricted area near their homes and to suppliers of goods who were neighbors, as did their parents.