In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

in various categories at the Centennial.
William Sellers & Company received twentyone
awards, the judges declaring that its
“collection of machine tools was without
parallel in the history of exhibitions.” Other
local awardees included the Bergner & Engel
brewery, which won medals for its draft and
bottled beer; Lenning Chemical Company for
“products exhibited coming from the distillation
of wood, for metallic salts and…manufacture
of sulphate of alumina and alum”; Wyeth
Laboratories, for its compressed tablet machine
for mass producing medicines; and Rowland
Shovel Works for one of its shovels. Rowland
had been making shovels on the Pennypack
Creek near Holmesburg since the 1830s
and was one of several manufacturing enterprises
of the Rowland family, whose members
had been operating factories in various
locations in Northeast Philadelphia and
adjacent Montgomery County since the late
eighteenth century.
@
Above: William Sellers & Company plant
at Sixteenth and Hamilton Streets in Spring
Garden, as it appeared c. 1875. Sellers was
a mechanical engineer and inventor whose
machine works was one of the largest in
Philadelphia. He also played a major role
in the Centennial.
SOCIETY PRINT COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Below: Cornelius & Baker lamp and gas
fixture factory at Fifth and Columbia
Streets in North Philadelphia, 1856.
A successor company, Cornelius & Sons,
provided much of the illumination for the
1876 Centennial.
PRINT DEPARTMENT, LIBRARY COMPANY
OF PHILADELPHIA.
CHAPTER FOUR
61