There have been two major events shaping the current Baldwin Park neighborhood. The more recent was the Franklin Town Development as discussed in two prior articles starting here. The more distant was industrialization. This article will look at the history and physical structures of the most prominent industrialist in the neighborhood.

Matthias Baldwin (1795-1866) was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. When he was four, his father, a carriage maker, died. Matthias was educated by his mother and moved to Frankford when he was sixteen to serve a five-year jeweler's apprenticeship with the Woolworth Brothers. In 1817 he found work as a journeyman jeweler at the esteemed shops of Fletcher and Gardiner at 130 Chestnut Street. In 1819 he decided to start his own jewelry and engraving business at 1 College Avenue, near today's 10th and Market Streets, just in time for jewelry to fall out of fashion. He struggled in the jewelry business until, in 1825, saying that he was tired of making "gewgaws," he joined with friend David Mason and started a business making machines to print bookbindings and calico cloth, in a narrow alley above Walnut Street between 4th and 5th Streets. His inventiveness in the production meant that these machines no longer had to be imported, and business was good. In 1828, Mason dropped out of the business and Matthias moved from "Bank-Coffee House Alley" to 14 Minor Street a few blocks away. He built a stationary steam engine in 1829 to better serve the power needs of the factory, and in 1831 he built a small-scale passenger locomotive for Franklin Peale's museum. Engines became his business. In 1831 he moved again, to 1 Lodge Alley. He and Peale cajoled a security guard into letting them have a look at a recent locomotive imported from England, and Baldwin decided that he could build an engine of this size as well. In 1832 he reverse-engineered a full-scale locomotive, Old Ironsides, for the Philadelphia Germantown & Norristown Railroad. Other orders followed, and he outgrew his small shop in Lodge Alley. His new factory at Broad and Hamilton gradually expanded westward until it reached 19th Street, as the images below show.

In light of recent events concerning the vandalism of the Matthias Baldwin statue at City Hall in June, 2020 (see Inquirer article here), I would like to veer off on a brief aside. In 1835, while Baldwin was beginning a major business undertaking, he was living at 160 South 10th Street. He recognized the educational needs and limited opportunities for young blacks in the houses behind his own, and he paid for rent and teacher salaries for a school for them. He had a racially integrated factory, and helped start the Franklin Institute, which at that time was a technical training institute that provided workers further theoretical and practical education to advance on the job. He had long been an abolitionist, and this stance led to decreased locomotive sales to railroad owners in the South. In 1837, despite his business workload, he agreed to go to Harrisburg for the Pennsylvania State Constitutional Convention. The issue was qualifications for suffrage, then based solely on wealth, but increasingly becoming an issue of race. He spoke out and voted in favor of keeping blacks enfranchised, voting in the minority on multiple ballots. The convention on January 20, 1838, voted to amend the Pennsylvania State Constitution so that the vote was given only to "free whitemen." He had fought but lost. In 1853 he was elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature, on a ticket with Eli K. Price, with the mission of getting approval for the county to be consolidated as coterminus with the city, which happened in 1854. In the 1850's he began funding the building of churches, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, and six churches owe their existence to his financial support. He was a businessman, but not all business. For more see our brief website article here and a longer outside book from 1867 here.