During the month of February, research associate Emma Hartman will be sharing information that she has uncovered here at the Historical Society of Montgomery County as well as other Montgomery County repositories while looking into the lives of African Americans living in the Perkiomen Valley in the 1700s and early 1800s.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Perkiomen Valley was a hub of the iron industry in America. Thomas Rutter built the first forge in Pennsylvania in 1716 on the Manatawny Creek and a number of other forges and furnaces quickly followed in the area. Other ironworks in the greater Perkiomen Valley included Colebrookdale Forge, Hereford Furnace, Dale Ironworks, Mt. Pleasant Forges, Salford Forge, and Green Lane Forge. Many of these sites also had sawmills and gristmills attached to them.
Iron production was a labor-intensive industry, and ironmasters often relied on a combination of free white workers, white indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and free black workers. Prominent ironmasters such as Thomas Mayburry and Thomas Potts owned enslaved people themselves but would occasionally supplement this labor by renting the time of enslaved people owned by other members of the community. A combination of rising anti-slavery sentiments and the passage of the Gradual Abolition Act in 1780 led most ironworks to rely only on free workers by the end of the eighteenth century.
Work in the iron forges and furnaces was physically demanding and often dangerous. Ironmaking involved both highly skilled and unskilled labor; tasks included cutting wood for charcoal, driving wagons to deliver raw pig iron from a furnace to a forge for refinement, and the dangerous process of repeatedly heating large pieces of iron to remove impurities. While most iron workers were men, women appear in the record books as performing housework or other labor, such as haymaking.
Records from the various ironworks include daybooks, ledgers, journals, and timebooks, all of which are various ways of keeping track of labor and transactions at the ironworks daily or divided into accounts based on the individual involved in the transaction. Ironworks also often included a company store at which workers could purchase items such as cloth, food, and alcohol and these transactions would have been included alongside labor records. Because of the company stores, many ironmasters would rely on a system of credits and debits to keep track of wages and expenses for an individual, often not settling up for years. Both free and enslaved laborers appear in these records; enslaved workers may have earned credit for working on holidays or producing more than what was expected of them. While records do not survive for all the forges and furnaces in the Perkiomen Valley, many do and can be found at historical organizations throughout the region including Pottsgrove Manor, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Berks History Center, and The Historical Society of Montgomery County PA.
The image below shows an example of a forge journal. Of particular interest are the entries for a man known as Negro Thomas being paid in cash for his work and then later on the same page, purchasing dried beef. The date of 1797 and the fact that he was paid in cash at the same or similar wages as his white coworkers indicate that Thomas was a free worker.
Research Associate Emma Hartman shares information from her work uncovering the lives of African Americans living in the Perkiomen Valley in the 1700s and early 1800s. This project of the Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in partnership with the Historical Society of Montgomery County is funded by the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.
My mother Patsy Propst Geick was from Green Lane