Benjamin Rickenbach ended his enterprise of catering to the railroad workers, following the completion of the Pennsylvania and Reading railroad line through Tuckerton in 1835.

In 1836, Benjamin and his wife Christiana moved to Philadelphia. They left their young son James behind with Benjamin's two sisters Eva and Barbara who lived near the stone homestead by the canal. Why they left James behind is one of the most intriguing mysteries of this memoir. Perhaps Benjamin planned to send for his son James after establishing himself in Philadelphia.

Benjamin did indeed find work, as a machinist at the Baldwin Locomotive Company. The company, which helped define the Industrial Revolution in the United States, was founded in 1824 by Mathias Baldwin and David Mason as a tool and small machine shop. In 1832 the company built a standard guage locomotive which came to be known as "Old Ironsides". By 1834, Baldwin had a contract to build engines for the newly completed Philadelphia and Columbia rail company. In 1835-36, around the time Benjamin moved to Philadelphia, Baldwin built a substantial brick factory, surmounted by a cupola, fronting on Broad and Hamilton Streets in Philadelphia. This was one of the first assembly plants in the United States. They made boilers and engines, and began to manufacture locomotives. A drawing of this factory, shown below, depicts the building as it appeared in 1860, a view Benjamin must have been very familiar with.

Caption of photograph of the Baldwin Locomotive Works factory from 1860:
"Although large factory structures were rare in America before the Civil War, their design quickly settled along certain conventional lines. This 1860 view of Baldwin's 1835-36 plant at Broad and Hamilton Streets includes most of the common elements: a multistory long and narrow brick building - ell shaped, in this case - pierced with many windows to maximize natural light. The long interior spaces suited power transmission by overhead shafting while giving foremen easy oversight of workers. The white wooden cupola contained a bell to call workers to their jobs. Blacksmiths occupied a single-story wing to the left, and machinists filled the rest of the building."

 

It seems quite likely that Benjamin Rickenbach's exposure to the railroad industry during the construction of the P & R railroad along the Schuylkill River led him to the Baldwin Locomotive Company. Benjamin developed one of the first boilers adopted by the company, which by the late 1840s employed some 400 men at the Broad Street factory. By 1854, they stopped building boilers and stationary engines, and built only locomotives. At some point, Benjamin was asked to go to Paris to supervise the manufacture of the boiler, presumably at a French subsidiary of the company. A model of a locomotive using this boiler apparently is on display in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

 

It is not known with certainty exactly where Benjamin and Christiana lived in Philadelphia. However, McElroy’s 1864 city directory of Philadelphia lists Benjamin Rickenbach, machinist, as living on Carroll St. south of Moore St. Modern-day Carroll St. south of Moore seems to be the Kingsessing Township part of the city, west of the Schuylkill River, not far from Gray’s Ferry Junction.

The map above is of the Kingsessing district of Philadelphia in 1887. The red arrow shows the approximate location of Carroll St., where Benjamin may have lived. The city center, where the Baldwin Locomotive Company factory was located, is about 4 miles to the northeast. Benjamin would have crossed the Schuylkill at Gray’s Ferry (see map) to get to work each day. His son Edwin later built canal boat cabins at Peter Hagan’s yard, at Gray’s Ferry Junction on the west side of the river.

Below is a full-sized version of this 1887 map, showing the entire city of Philadelphia. Downtown is situated between the Schuylkill River (west) and the Delaware River (east). The red arrow shows Benjamin’s neighborhood in Kingsessing, the blue arrow shows the location of Baldwin Locomotive Company in downtown Philadelphia. The green arrow shows the community of Cramer Hill, NJ, where the Rickenbach, Noecker and Ake Shipyard was founded around 1905.

 

 

Sources:

"The Baldwin Locomotive Works 1831-1915" by John K. Brown, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995

McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory, 1864

Jeanette Jones Pollard