Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [527]
To the south, the agricultural and sea-based economy of Staten Island also began to draw large manufacturing operations to its wide open spaces. By 1860 the pioneer New-York Dyeing and Printing Establishment was employing 160 men, forty women, and eight steam engines to process nearly five million yards of cotton muslin annually, and rival firms had emerged-—like Crabtree and Wilkinson, whose 183 workers turned out 1,520,000 silk handkerchiefs annually. New manufactories made wallpaper, furniture, carriages, and Charles Goodyear’s India rubber cloth. The village of Factoryville boomed. Nearby Tompkinsville benefited from the arrival of the Dejonge brothers’ paper plant, which produced gift, art, commercial, and (a U.S. first) white-coated lithograph paper. Three Staten Island manufacturers devoted themselves to producing and bottling artificially carbonated or “soda” water for dispensation at “soda fountains.”2 On the southwest shore, along the Arthur Kill, discovery of clay and kaolin deposits led to the emergence of a major brick-manufacturing industry. The earliest, largest, and most influential company was founded near Rossville in 1854 by Balthazar Kreischer; by 1860 his sixty employees, housed in the company village of Kreischer ville, were producing a million firebricks annually.
Even Staten Island’s most traditional occupation, oyster gathering, changed scale and structure. Most of the natural shellfish beds in Kill van Kull, Arthur Kill, and Prince’s and Raritan bays had been exhausted as early as the 1810s. To preserve their livelihood and meet increasing demand, watermen imported and transplanted small “seed” or tiny, larval “set” oysters from fertile Virginia beds. By the 1840s oystering had become an extensive business. By the 1850s it was one of the region’s foremost industries, dominated by large commercial firms that, collectively, employed perhaps a thousand men raking and longing the sea bottom with long wooden-handled iron tools, then culling, hauling, shucking, preparing, and cleaning the planting grounds.
Manufacturing also blossomed to the west, across the Hudson River, in a string of New Jersey towns easily accessible to the emerging national rail grid: Elizabeth, Jersey City, Newark, Orange, Passaic, and Paterson. Many manufactories had been transplanted from Manhattan and were still owned and operated by New Yorkers. The Colgate Soap Company moved to Jersey City in 1847. The Hendricks copper factory at Belleville had become one of the largest of its kind. Even so ardent a New York booster as Peter Cooper moved his ironworks to the banks of the Delaware at Trenton, where it would be closer to Pennsylvania anthracite, Jersey ore, and his biggest buyer, the Camden and Amboy Railroad. Cooper’s son, Edward, and Abram Hewitt then expanded the business by combining the whole process of iron manufacture from ore to finished product in one enormous complex, employing over two thousand workers, in the hills of northern New Jersey.
By the mid-fifties, then, considerable numbers of larger companies had situated or resituated themselves in an industrial belt girdling Manhattan, a regional economy that included such powerhouse cities as Brooklyn (fifth in manufacturing) and Newark (ranked sixth). Yet New York City remained number one—with one of every fifteen people employed in U.S. manufactures working on the island of Manhattan—because king-size iron