Historic Philadelphia

of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf at
Broad and Pine Streets. Frank Furness, who,
associates complained, continually swore
furiously while working at his drawing board,
created one of his typically fussy brick designs
behind the handsome John Haviland Greek
front on Broad Street. When the Pennsylvania
Museum of Art was later created from the
art collection at the 1876 Centennial
Exhibition, the Museum School of Industrial
Art came into being; in 1893, the school for the
deaf would move to a Mount Airy campus and
sell the Broad and Pine building to the art
school. It was to evolve into the University of
the Arts.
A perusal of a directory of industries in the
mid-1870s finds Philadelphia producing
cotton, iron, stoves, hollow ware, buttonhole
sewing machines, pickles, watches, fire
bricks, vinegar, nails, safes, perfume,
locomotives, saws, carriages, beer, sugar,
corks, carpets, springs, flour, glass, files, soap,
shovels, shoes, paint, hosiery, dye, guns,
plows, pottery, pumps, printing type, Bibles,
✧
It was in the 1870s that John B. Stetson
(top, left) began building a giant hat factory
at Fifth Street and Montgomery Avenue. By
the time John B. died in 1906, the Stetson
operation included twenty-five buildings
(below), employing some three thousand
people. Saws were another Philadelphia
product; Henry Disston (top, right) had set
up shop on eight acres in the far northeast
of Philadelphia County, at the old settlement
called Tacony. The name came from an
Indian word; Swedish tax records in 1677
had shown fifty-one taxable persons living
at Taokanink, and in Disston’s time it was a
town of mostly fishermen and farmers. By
the 1870s, Disston had some two thousand
employees shipping five tons of saws a week
all over the world.
PORTRAITS COURTESY OF THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN
PORTRAITS. PLANT PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER IV
81