Countryside, Shops, and Ships

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, Americans began setting up shops to manufacture items such as soda ash, gunpowder, glass, charcoal, iron, casks, and wagons on a larger scale than they could manage in their homes. In some establishments, the proprietor was a practicing artisan (usually designated a “craftsman” today), while in others, such as glasshouses and ironworks, a manager coordinated the efforts of a dozen or more people. By the early nineteenth century, many Americans were participating in these industries, either full time or as an adjunct to farming. When we look at surviving artifacts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find evidence that American artisans were steadily increasing the range and depth of their industrial skills. There were few socially constructed barriers to the range of skills that an individual could practice at work, and imaginative artisans could cross the conventional boundaries between trades, enriching the different technologies of each. The diversity of their work experiences contributed to a growing technological sophistication that helped Americans gain industrial maturity in the nineteenth century. Many people, including children, learned about artisans’ capabilities as they visited workplaces. The mechanization of work in America is sometimes associated with the advent of factories, but it was already under way in tasks such as sawing timber, grinding grain, and forging iron by the mid-seventeenth century. Americans gradually adopted machinery to ease the labor of producing goods, and learning about mechanical technology became part of everyday life in agricultural and frontier communities as well as in towns. Machinery became increasingly important in the work of craftsmen such as silversmiths, gunsmiths, and furniture makers, hut work in other industries was never extensively mechanized. Archaeological evidence tells us about work processes in some of these types of enterprises. American Indians possessed higher levels of technological skill than many of us realize. The physical evidence of their craftsmanship and well-organized efforts to extract natural resources stand in sharp contrast to the assertions of Indian primitiveness that fill many historical studies.