Ivy Mills in Concord Township about 1860
Ivy Mills in Concord
These mills, situated on a branch of the Chester Creek,
about perhaps eighteen miles from Philadelphia, and long known as the “Ivy
Mills,” were abandoned more than a generation ago, after an industrial
existence for considerably more than a century.
Next to the Rittenhouse Mill and the Dewees Mill in and about
Germantown, the original structure is believed to have been the first paper
mill in Pennsylvania, and probably outside of those, no other or certainly no
other of equal importance, precede it in what is now the United States.
The name “Ivy Mills”
is suggestive at once of the relation which Benjamin Franklin bore to it and to
its founder. The walls of the first
structure appear to have been covered with ivy vines in its early days by
Thomas Wilcox, who had come from England, and who built it a little before the
time when Franklin, as a young printer, branched out in business in this city
as the publisher of the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”
An ivy leaf, which at a later time in his life he designed for a daughter
of Wilcox, is now preserved as a relic of her embroidery. The friendship which existed between him and
her family doubtless grew out of Franklin’s purchase at the mill of the paper
on which he printed the “Gazette,” and continued up to the time of the death of
the mill owner, nearly half a century afterward, when the statesman was in
France. Franklin is known to have been
often a visitor at the Ivy Mills, to have corresponded with Wilcox, and
apparently to have used his influence in procuring business for him. The probably included the furnishing of paper
on which the bills of the Pennsylvania provincial money were printed. The account books of Franklin, now in possession
of the American Philosophical Society, show conclusively that he made his first
paper purchase at the Ivy Mills and that he continued to make purchases there
until he retired from the active control of the “Gazette.”
In the course of
the Revolution Thomas Wilcox died, but some time before the war broke out, it
was supposed that he had withdrawn from the management of the mills, having
turned the business over to his son Mark.
It was by him that paper for the first issue of Continental currency
authorized by the Congress in Philadelphia, was made more than a year before
the adoption of the Declaration. At this
time, too, paper of all kinds began to be scarce; subsequently, most of the
people had to be severely economical in the use of it, and Nathan Sellers, who
made the molds for the process of paper manufacture at the Wilcox Mill, long
afterward narrated to one of his descendants how fly leaves were torn from
printed books and bank leaves from account books in order to obtain material
for writing letters. While the British
were in occupation of Philadelphia the scarcity was so much felt by the
fugitive government of Pennsylvania, then at Lancaster, that a secret order was
issued to one of the officers of the army to seize the stock in the mill on
Chester Creek. The officer was directed,
too, to make particular inquiry as to the conduct of those who were carrying on
the manufacture inasmuch as it had been “hinted’ that they were unfriendly to
the American cause. The subsequent
career of the proprietor, of course, does not justify this suspicion, and the
fact that the officer was instructed to certify the quantity of the seized
paper because of the intention that he should have a reasonable price,
indicates that strong credence could not have been given to the “hint.” Indeed, it seems that while the British were
in Philadelphia, Wilcox was arrested by them on the charge of obstructing
their officers in obtaining supplies in the country, that he was carried to
this city as a prisoner, and that he was afterwards released by General Howe at
the solicitation of some of his neighbors who were members of the Society of
Friends. He held at various times not a
few public offices, including a seat as Associate or lay Judge of Delaware
County.
Throughout the
Revolution, Wilcox furnished large quantities of paper for the Continental
money, and when Robert Morris and his associates, of whom the papermaker was
one, in the establishment of the Bank of North America, wanted paper for the
printing of their notes, they placed their order with him. The reputation which the mill thus gained,
led in the course of time, to its development as a special source of supply of
the various paper used by not only banks in Philadelphia, and all over the country,
but by governments. During the entire
period of the old State bank system, it turned out vast quantities of paper for
bank notes. The Bank of the United
State, too, was its customer, and Nicholas Biddle, when he was president of
that institution, took particular pains that the paper for it should be difficult
for counterfeiters to imitate. Several
of the South American governments were patrons of the mill, and on one occasion
its proprietor entered into a contract with the financial authorities of
Greece. Indeed, Mr. Ashmead, the
historian of Delaware County, is authority for the statement that for “a long
period not only were the banks of the United States supplied with their paper
from this mil, but its lofts were, at times, piled with peculiar-looking papers
of various tints, bearing the ingrained watermarks of most of the governments of
South America. Nearly the whole of the
western continent drew its supply of bank paper from the mill.”
It was not only in
the Revolution that the mil was a dependency to the Treasury of the national
authorities, but also in the War of 1812.
At that time, it is stated, a distinctive paper with colored silk woven
through it, was made for the government’s use, and that the mill was guarded by
the government to prevent the paper from falling into unlawful hands. Again, under Tyler’s administration and it was then that the making of bank paper had come, for some
time previous, to be almost exclusively the chief operation of the mill, it
supplied the Federal government with the sheets for the printing of its bond
issues and also during the Mexican War.
When the Civil War broke out it was once more in requisition; Secretary
Chase repeatedly made contracts with its owners for the paper on which demand
notes, bonds, legal tender notes, certificates and other monetary issues were
printed; and it was difficult to produce the material as fast as it was wanted
at Washington on some occasions. The
late Jay Cooke, when the war was at an end, bore testimony to the value of
these services and Chase’s appreciation of them. He stated, moreover, that when peace came, the
government concluded that it would itself make the paper for its notes, its
bonds and the notes of the national banks, but that the experiment was then
unsuccessful and that the authorities were obliged to renew their contract with
the men who had through generations of experience in the manufacture of that
class of paper.
This is also where the paper for the first postage stamps of the Province of Canada was manufactured in 1851
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