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