Charles H. Cramp
1736 Spring Garden Street
1736 Spring Garden Street, on the southeast corner of 18th and Spring Garden Street, is now an empty lot. This article will discuss the inhabitants of the home that was there, with special emphasis on its most famous owner. I will place this house in the context of the current Baldwin Park neighborhood in three ways:
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as one owned by a man whose business employed 18,000 workers at one time, second only to the 20,000 employed by the Baldwin Locomotive Works;
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as one owned by a man who used the coal, iron and steel so common to this neighborhood, but at a larger scale, albeit in Port Richmond and not the Baldwin Park neighborhood;
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and as one of several on the 1700 block of Spring Garden Street that were owned by illustrious Philadelphians.
The southeast corner of 18th and Spring Garden Streets in 2026.
Philadelphia: A Port City
In 1750 Philadelphia overtook Boston as the largest port in North America. It held on to this designation until New York took the title around 1825, when the Erie Canal gave New York access for commerce to the interior of the country. It was around 1825 that Pennsylvania itself tried to gain access to the interior using canals and then railroads. As explained in our article on the Callowhill Cut, our neighborhood skipped the canal boom and became a leader in the railroad industry.
Our neighborhood was all about land transportation in the 19th century, with only a mention of Baldwin's contract to build a steam engine to propel City Ice Breaker #1 in 1837.
Birds Eye View of Philadelphia, 1850 lithograph by John Bachmann.
This view is looking west over the Delaware River. Ships of all types fill the docks. The single island between Philadelphia and Camden was split in two when a canal was cut through it in 1838 to allow faster ferry service from Spruce Street. The foreground half was purchased by our neighborhood's Jacob Ridgway in 1879 to build an amusement park. The long isthmus from the other half of the island trailing off to the south gives an indication of the reasons for the dredging away of both islands in the 1890s to allow better navigation. Image credit and high-resolution image here.
Baldwin took a contract with the City of Philadelphia in 1837 to provide the steam engine for City Ice Breaker #1, seen here. Its success led to several more steam-powered ice breakers. Photo credit here.
William Cramp & Sons
William Cramp (1806-1879) was born in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia and in 1830 started building ships in the Port Richmond neighborhood. His five sons would join the firm starting in 1855 to eventually incorporate as the William Cramp & Sons Iron Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in 1872. The Wikipedia entry about the company is here.
The oldest son, Charles H. Cramp (1828-1913), became president of the firm during its most productive years in the late 19th century. He supplies the personal neighborhood connection, since he lived at 1736 Spring Garden Street. His business was also intertwined with the other big machine builders in the neighborhood. Both William Sellers & Company and William Bement & Son were critical to two key transitions that Cramp had to make to keep current with shipbuilding demand. The first transition was from wooden hulls to iron cladding, which accelerated during the Civil War. Sellers and Bement supplied Cramp with the metal-cutting and shaping machinery like lathes, planers, borers, steam hammers and cranes, and Sellers Midvale Steel subsidiary later supplied much of the armor plating itself.
The second transition was from reciprocating steam engines to steam turbine engines. In the former, steam under pressure is forced into a cylinder which moves a piston first in one direction and then in the other. The British Royal Navy's HMS Deadnaught was launched in 1906, drawing a historical line between slow pre-Dreadnought ships and those coming after. It had two advantages: a uniform main battery of heavy-caliber guns allowing longer-range bombardment; and high-speed steam turbine engines instead of reciprocating engines. The turbines, like fans, would rotate at 1,500 times a minute and required gearing down to speeds appropriate for a ship's propeller using reduction gears. This allowed speeds of 21 knots, about 20% faster than ships of the time powered by reciprocating steam engines. Sellers and Bement produced the precision components of many of these engines, as well as armaments.
Another business connection between Cramp and our neighborhood was via the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (P&RR). The railroad had its tracks along Pennsylvania Avenue but in 1898 would drop the tracks below grade into the Callowhill Cut, bisecting the neighborhood. It also had a heavily-trafficked line extending from the Schuylkill River to Port Richmond. The company controlled the mines in upstate Pennsylvania, the rails that transported the coal, and the rail yards at Port Richmond. To achieve even more integrated services, it contracted with Cramp in 1873 to build iron colliers to ship the coal from Philadelphia to its point of sale, controlling all components of the network from mine to customer.
An early wooden-hulled ship from Cramp, the Morning Light, built in 1853
The Morning Light is very similar to this 1:48 scale model in the Social Science and History Department of the Parkway Central Library. The nearly six-foot-tall model is of the North Carolina, built in 1820 not by Cramp but by the Philadelphia Navy Yard. It was decommissioned in 1866 and sold the following year.
A ship of the line was a warship designed for the tactic of forming a line of battle, where opposing ships lined up in columns directly broadside to each other and simply blasted away at each other.
Cramp's Civil War era first broadside iron-clad warship, the USS New Ironsides, was launched in 1862 with a crew of 449. She had a 14-inch-thick wooden hull with four-inch iron cladding. The sketch shows rigging, which could be stripped down for battle, and a telescoping smokestack that could be collapsed for battle. The ship was slow despite the dual propulsion options of sail and steam, but the steam engines allowed maneuverability in tight battle quarters. Most of the other Civil War ironclads were turreted ships with limited firepower and built low to the water line. John Ericsson, who has a memorial fountain in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, had designed the turreted USS Monitor. He also has a room dedicated to his achievements in the Swedish Museum in FDR Park in South Philadelphia. Ericsson (1803-1889) had his start in Sweden in canals, railroads, and locomotives before moving to the United States in 1839.
The New Ironsides survived the war but was burnt to the water line in an accidental fire at League Island, Philadelphia, in 1865.
In 1873 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad signed a contract with Cramp for six iron colliers (coal carrying vessels). Each was to be 250 feet in length and 37 feet in the beam. The 1870s marked the slow transition from iron cladding of timber hulls to purely iron and then steel hulls. Image credit from 1875 book of illustrations here.
USS Indiana, built by Cramp in 1893. Photo credit here.
This first-class battleship, one of three ordered from Cramp by the government in 1890, had armor 18 inches thick in some areas. She was powered by steam reciprocating engines and propelled by twin screw propellers, each turning in different directions. This method was patented in 1836 by John Ericsson.
Baldwin and Cramp made big machines, using the same raw materials of coal and iron. At its peak in 1906 the Baldwin Locomotive Works was turning out six locomotives with tenders per day. The Baldwin 60000 in the Franklin Institute and portrayed on the mural at 417 North 20th Street weighs 207 tons, is 60 feet long and could produce 4,500 horsepower. Cramp brought a whole new definition of big machines. The USS Indiana pictured above weighed 11,000 tons, was 348 feet long, and could generate 9,000 horsepower. Between 1898 and 1907 Cramp launched twenty-five passenger ships, eight freighters, five battleships, and six cruisers, building for private companies and the federal government as well as for foreign entities. Those years were the era of Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet that established the United States as the naval superpower.
Photo from 1901 of the busy Cramp shipyard on the Delaware River. The new USS Maine was a replacement for the "Remember the Maine" battleship that exploded in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, and provided the trigger event for the Spanish-American War. The year of maximal employment at Cramp was 1942, when 18,000 were working there.
Photo credit here.
Aerial view of the Cramp site in 1941, six years before it closed.
The PECO generating station is on the left. The Cramp site is now occupied by close to 1,000 homes in the Northbank Project. Photo credit here.
We Used to Make Stuff
William Cramp and our neighborhood's Matthias Baldwin were contemporaries who founded companies that made 19th-century America the envy of the world. They became wealthy but avoided the extravagance that characterized the later gilded age capitalists. They also provided jobs that housed, fed, clothed and educated tens of thousands of families. In fact these two companies were the largest employers in Philadelphia. Let's do a comparison across two time periods.
In July 2026 the Philadelphia Business Journal listed the largest employers in Philadelphia:
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University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine 66,255 local employees
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Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health 42,000
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Children's Hospital of Philadelphia 32,724
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Temple University and Health System 20,770
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Comcast 12,987
Eds, meds, and the internet. Most people today would project continued growth in these service sectors, but the same was said 150 years ago in most manufacturing sectors.
In the century prior to the year 1950, the top five employers at peak capacity (meaning wartime) in Philadelphia were:
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Baldwin Locomotive Works 20,000
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Cramp Shipyards 18,000
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Disston Saw Works 8,000
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Stetson Hats 5,000
All but Disston had connections to our neighborhood, and the underlined links take you to individual articles on this website. Even Disston has minor connection: an exhibit of saws in the Carpenters Museum on Spring Garden Street. None of the jobs from these pre-1950s big five exist in Philadelphia today.
A juxtaposition of two neighborhood giants at the Washington DC Navy Yard.
A Baldwin Locomotive Works rail gun from 1917 is seen in the lower right of this Google Earth image from 2026. In the upper left is a conning tower from a Cramp-built submarine, the USS Roncador. The rail guns were manned by sailors and used mostly for coastal protection, as discussed in our article titled Baldwin at War.
1736 Spring Garden Street
Now about the former house at 1736 Spring Garden Street...
Portion of 1867 map showing Potter's factory in the former Bush Hill mansion at the southeast corner of 18th and Spring Garden Streets. 19th Street runs vertically on the far left. Besides the Norris Locomotive Works, Sellers (machine works not match works) and Whitney are discussed on our website pages as well.
Note the narrowing of Spring Garden Street between 18th and 16th Streets. This was rectified by the street widening project of the 1870s which required Thomas Potter's oil-cloth factory to move north as discussed in our article here.
After the demolition of the factories on the south side of the 1700 block of Spring Garden Street, homes were built. Charles H. Cramp bought the 20-foot-wide corner home at 18th and Spring Garden Street in 1879. He had married 16-year-old Hannah Cox (1833-1862) in 1850. The young wife had seven children in the next twelve years, and in 1862 she died at age 28 two months after giving birth to twins, one of whom died at birth. The cause of death was listed as a stroke, but it certainly may have been either an embolism or an eclamptic event associated with her recent childbirth.
In 1870 Charles married Amy Cox (1836-1991), the sister of his first wife. Amy and Charles had one son born in 1874. After Amy's death of "debility" in 1891 at age 55, Charles moved in 1893 to 507 South Broad Street, leasing the entire 12,000-square-foot annex house of the James Dundas Lippincott mansion at 509 South Broad. This magnificent home is still there, having served as part of Father Divine's empire for a few decades until 2008. Since then the whole house has been used by Vintage Instruments (beautiful photos at outside link here). When Charles retired from the presidency of the Cramp shipyard in 1903, he moved into the Aldine Hotel. He died at his son's house on Delancey Street in 1913 at age 85. The house at 1736 Spring Garden Street was in the Henry Ottens family from 1893 to 1934, after which it was apartments and a Legion Post headquarters.
Edwin and Henry were the oldest sons of Charles. William M., Jacob and Samuel H. Cramp were brothers of Charles. Henry lived at 1736 Spring Garden Street and William lived at 2008 Green Street.
Image from the title page of the 1902 book Cramp's Shipyard available at the Parkway Central Library.
1736 Spring Garden Street in 1958. This building housed the Mod-City American Legion Post #166, accounting for the sign on the front, and this may explain why this was the last house to be demolished on this block. Charles Cramp, the president of William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building, lived here in the last decades of the 19th century.
The tall building on the right is the 1916 munitions plant built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works and functioning as part of I-T-E in 1958. It occupied what is now the north half of Matthias Baldwin Park.
Photo from an article in the September 9, 1961 Philadelphia Daily News.
A high school sorority had rented the Legion Post for a party with paid admission, with of course a subsequent rush of non-paying males. The police were called when a gatling gun, later shown to be non-operational, was pointed out the window.
Portion of a 1962 land use map from here.
North is to the top with Spring Garden Street running horizontally. 17th Street runs vertically on the right. The Spring Garden Library, funded by Andrew Carnegie, is at the southwest corner of 17th and Spring Garden Street. PECO was one of the five partners in the Franklin Town Development Corporation.
The Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) campus in 1980. Mid-City Post of the American Legion sold their post at 1736 Spring Garden Street to CCP in 1975 for $70,000.
It would be demolished in the early 1980s. Photo credit here.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on the 1700 Block of Spring Garden Street
Old money lived south of Market Street in the 19th century. The nouveaux riche, many of whom were self-made industrialists, lived along Spring Garden Street and North Broad Street. We have discussed several of these on our web pages:
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Stephen Whitman at 1701 Spring Garden: Whitman lived there from the time the house was built in 1872 until his death there in 1888. He was the confectioner known for his boxes of chocolates. The site is now occupied by the IBEW union in a building constructed in 1939;
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John B. Stetson at 1717: the world's largest hat maker lived here from 1878 to 1888, at which time he moved to the Elkins Park neighborhood alongside the Elkins and Widener clans.
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Barton Hoopes at 1733: In 1872 Hoopes had purchased the whole block on the north side of the 1700s Spring Garden Street. He sold off parcels and in 1878 he built a 7,567-square-foot house on the northeast corner of 18th and Spring Garden Street. He sold the house in 1879. Hoopes was an owner of the Hoopes & Townsend Rivet Company that was so critical to the machine shops in the neighborhood. In 1900 Ludwig Filbert, owner of the Vulcanite Paving Company, bought the house and the family owned it until its sale to the Russian Brotherhood Organization (RBO) in 1922. The RBO sold the house in 2015 and the house is now apartments above and the Our House Montessori on the three lower floors of the main building.
The Future of the Corner?
From the Community College of Philadelphia's 2017 master plan. The Integrated Health Building would occupy the former site of Cramp's home.
Further Reading
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57081/pg57081-images.html 1906 Memoir of Charles Cramp, almost exclusively about the business and not personal