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New York - Industry Dutch New Netherland was primarily a fur-trading Colony. Frequently even the craftsmen sent over by the Dutch patroons deserted their trades for surreptitious but more lucrative barter with the Indians—exchanging cheap cloth and clothing, blankets, hatchets, kettles, and especially guns and liquor for the valuable beaver skin; and the service crafts were as a result maintained with difficulty. However, in the number and productivity of their sawmills the Dutch outdid their New England neighbors. Gristmills were plentiful, brick-making was common along the Hudson, and shipbuilding was carried on in New Amsterdam from the earliest years. Probably the first manufacturing plants in New Netherland were a distillery and a buckskin tannery, both established on Staten Island. The transition from Dutch to British rule brought little change in the routine of life. English New York was primarily an agricultural province; by 1700 the fur trade had lost much of its economic significance, though as a weapon in the conflict with the French for control of the interior it was important politically. As the manorial system became established in the Hudson Valley, large landholdings were cut into farms and rented to farmers, who paid their rent in kind and were subject to the lord of the manor in many ways; and the agricultural interest became predominant in what is now upstate New York. The application of Great Britain's mercantile policy restricted Colonial manufacture, except the production of naval stores. The Colonies were to be kept by the Crown as sources of raw materials and markets for finished products, with the balance of trade heavily favoring the Mother Country. But the proprietors of agricultural New York, by developing a triangular trade with Britain and the West Indies, managed to keep abreast of their indebtedness to English merchants. With the hard money derived from the favorable trade balance with the West Indies, the New York merchants canceled their debts in London; and the upstate land-owners, whose produce comprised the bulk of that trade, prospered. The development of this lucrative commerce minimized opposition to the British policy of discouraging industry, so that manufacture was limited mainly to the household production of some of the necessities of life. Craftsmen were employed by the lords of the manors, who frequently also served as middlemen in trade. In the country nearly every home had a spinning wheel and the womenfolk made the cloth for the family, principally linsey-woolsey, with warp of linen and woof of wool; the weaving was often done by itinerant weavers, and if the cloth was finished it was. done at a local mill. In 1708 Caleb Heathcote reported that 75 per cent of the linen and woolen cloth used in the Colony was homemade; but homespun was never sold in stores. Shoes were similarly made to order fromhome-tanned leather, and other necessities were supplied by itinerant or local craftsmen. Clay for brick was puddled by the tread of horses and cast in rough wood molds. Semi-agricultural industries like milling, cooperage, lumbering, and the. preparation of potash expanded. Farmers derived an important part of their income from their wood ashes, which were refined into pearlash in local asheries and exported. Brewing and milling created a demand for barrels, popular because they required few nails and were sturdy and easily handled; and the farmers supplied the staves. The principal iron mines were the Livingston works at Ancram and the Sterling Iron Works in Orange County, which produced pig and bar iron for domestic use and export. The'colonists purchased iron in rods, and members of the family pounded out nails in the kitchen. In 1751 a charcoal blast furnace was built at the Sterling Iron Works for the manufacture of anchors and anvils; the metal was reputed to be as good for edged tools as wedish iron. Peter Townshend, who took over the works in 1773, enlarged the plant, so that it was able to forge in six weeks the huge chain stretched across the Hudson between West Point and Constitution Island as a Revolutionary defense measure. The discovery in the 1760's of rich deposits of iron ore in Dutchess County stimulated iron production; and a furnace and foundry was erected at Amehia, which proved valuable to the Revolutionary government by supplying iron and steel for war purposes. After the French and Indian War, British tax policy acted as a spur to Colonial industry. In 1764 the Society for the Promotion of Arts, Agriculture, and Economy was organized in New York City to encourage domestic manufacture; premiums were offered for excellence and quantity of products, and fairs were instituted for the display and sale of scythes, shovels, hoes, and the like. After the passage of the Stamp Act the movement was intensified, becoming so effective that. from 1768 to 1769 the value of imports into New York fell from $490,674 to $75,931. At the same time, the increase in domestic industrial production was enormous; linseywoolsey became the universal wear, and the manufacture of hats was well established. For 50 years after the Revolution New York State remained dominantly agricultural, leading in the production of wheat. Capital was attracted to agriculture, trade, and internal improvements; labor was scarce and largely unskilled in the crafts. Britain forbade the export of machinery to the new Nation, discouraged the emigration of skilled labor, and dumped its own manufactured products upon the American market. But the Napoleonic wars, by shutting off imports from Europe, gave impetus to the increasing demand for domestic manufacture, and the incorporating act passed by the legislature in 1811, the first such State law in the country, served to facilitate industrial financing. When turnpike (toll) roads failed to pay attractive dividends, capital found its way into other fields, among them the industrial. Finally, after the War of 1812, Congress strengthened youthful American industry by erecting a protective tariff to prevent British dumping. The spread of settlement through central, western, and northern New York provided a constantly growing market for factory products. Reduced freight rates on the Erie Canal enabled the farmers of the Genesee and the Great Lakes plain to sell in the State's chief urban markets, and eastern capital was drawn from agriculture to industry by the western demand for manufactured goods. The canal added its own demand for industrial products, especially boats and rope. Another important industry was the production of salt on the shores of Onondaga Lake. Up to about 1830 manufactures increased in volume but did not change in kind. The thirties were years of marked change. Again the largest increase in production was in textiles, and the amount of cloth woven was remarkable. Although:'most of the Work was still done in the homes, mills embodying new inventions and specializing in one or another process of cloth-making were established in Washington, Columbia, Dutchess, and Oneida Counties, attracted by superior water-power facilities. In 1823 there were 206 incorporated companies in the State, 62 of them manufacturing woolen and cotton goods, 36 cotton only, 16 woolen only, 10 glass, and 5 hardware. But domestic hardware met with sales resistance, the buying public preferring the imported product. In 1826 Benjamin Marshall, a wealthy New York City merchant, established the Hudson River Print Works and the I da Mills, both in Troy; for the first time in the State, these two plants brought under unit control the complete process of manufacturing cotton prints from raw cotton to the finished product. Ten years later the Marshall plants were reported to be turning out the finest shirtings and prints in the country. The rapid decline in the number of fulling mills after 1835 indicated that home industry was being displaced by the factory system of production. By 1840 the Harmony Mills in Cohoes were the largest producers of cotton goods in the State. The Albany-Troy district was advantageously situated for trade and manufacture. It stood at the eastern portal to the Mohawk and Cherry Valley Turnpikes, on which the heavy stream of New England emigrants moved, and at the eastern terminus of the Erie Canal, which carried potash, Genesee flour, and Onondaga salt eastward and factory products westward. Albany was a flour-milling center, and the factories of the vicinity produced glass, potash, nails, starch, paper, tobacco, snuff, and chocolate. Excellent molding sand and plenty of limestone for flux turned the capital district to refining and manufacturing the iron ore discovered in the Adirondack and Lake Champlain areas. Castings of a relatively high grade were turned out, chiefly hollowware and agricultural equipment. The first foundry in the capital district was established in 1804; the Townsend Furnace and Machine Shops, erected in Albany in 1807, produced mill gears, agricultural implements, and chilled rolls weighing from 100 to 6,000 pounds. In 1809 John Brinckerhoff of Albany started a slitting mill and nail factory on the Wynantskill in Troy and thereby became the pioneer in Troy's iron and steel industry. Stoves were first assembled in the Albany district from New Jersey plate, but in the twenties and thirties Albany foundries began making their own stove castings. The first cupola in Albany expressly for stove castings was erected in 1838. At its peak, stove manufacture is said to have provided a living, directly or indirectly, for one of every six people in Troy and one of every eight in Albany. Henry Burden's improved process of iron manufacture and his invention of machines to turn out horseshoes and hook-headed railroad spikes fixed Troy's reputation as an iron center. Other Troy products of the period were bells and surveyors' instruments manufactured by Julius Hanks; coaches and carriages manufactured by Veazie & Barnard; and railroad passenger and freight cars made by Eaton & Gilbert. The tanning industry, attracted by the extensive hemlock forests, first centered in the Catskill area, which in 1840-50 produced about a third of all the leather made in the country; the largest tannery was Zadock Pratt's at Prattsville. As early as 1808 Tallmadge Edwards began the manufacture of buckskin mittens, gloves, shirts, and trousers at Johnstown; and Fulton County became the leather goods center of the State. The lumber industry was' concentrated in Albany, though there were mills everywhere, and the towns fringing the Adirondack area were important producers. Troy led in the manufacture of rag paper, but as pulpwood came into increased use that industry moved close to the forests and to the excellent water-power sites at Watertown, Ticonderoga, Glens Falls, and other North Country towns. In the thirties and forties the State led in the manufacture of wood products and furniture. In the same period, brick-making expanded in the Hudson Valley, especially after the introduction of machine production in the late twenties. Brewing and distilling spread across the State. In the milling. industry Rochester and Oswego succeeded Albany as centers, and Buffalo began coming to the fore in the fifties. Buffalo also became an important center for the slaughtering of livestock for the market. The shipbuilding industry spread from New York City up the Hudson and was established along Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. The forties were marked by the invention of the telegraph and the sewing machine and by the rapid expansion of railroads. The sewing machine made possible the growth of the clothing industry to its commanding position in the State, concentrating in New York City and Rochester; and its adaptation to shoe manufacture heralded the large-scale production of shoes in Rochester and in the Binghamton area. The demand of the railroads for rails and equipment stimulated an expansion of the AlbanyTroy iron industry; and in Schenectady, an early railroad center, a locomotive works was established in 1848. Characteristically, throughout this early industrial period, the manufacture of agricultural implements and household necessities expanded westward to keep up with the westward-moving market. In the late twenties, plow irons, small castings, and steam engines were produced in Buffalo, and scythes were manufactured in Amsterdam and Auburn. Utica had an engine-and-boiler works in the thirties, and in the forties was manufacturing stoves. By the middle of the century, Syracuse had foundries and machine shops and factories producing agricultural implements, boots and shoes, furniture, hardware, and silverware; Rochester had machine shops, cotton factories, breweries, boatyards, and coach and carriage, boot and shoe, and furniture factories; and Buffalo was producing stoves and hollowware, nails, furniture, bells, mirrors, millstones, soap, and candles. By 1850 New York State had achieved its rank as the Empire State in industry. According to the census of that year, its manufactured products amounted in value to 23 per cent of the goods produced by the Nation. One third of the patents granted were issued to New Yorkers, most of them representing improvements on existing machines, which had not yet become standardized. In this mid-century period the factory system superseded handcraft and domestic production. Corporate organization invited investment capital, resulting in the separation of ownership and management and a sharper division between employer and employee. Workers organized for bargaining purposes and employers counterorganized to advance their interests. The industrialists became a powerful social and political group. The Civil War stimulated improvement and expansion in every field of production. The exportation of foodstuffs increased sixfold; the textile industry expanded rapidly. Elmira turned out large quantities of cloth for uniforms; Rochester filled huge orders for military boots and shoes. The Remington plant in Ilion and the arsenal in Watervliet manufactured arms and ammunition; Troy iron mills produced the plates for the Monitor; the Union Cavalry rode to victory on Henry Burden's machine-made horseshoes. Out of the experience gained in the production of uniforms and equipment for soldiers came the adoption of a system of standard sizes, which made possible the large-scale production of ready-made clothes. Since the Civil War, industry in New York State has shown a steady decline in the production of capital goods and a rapid rise in the manufacture of consumers' goods. The function of New York State industry has come to be 'the addition of high value to raw material, rather than the development of mass production or the turning out of crude products.' The tanning and lumbering industries declined with the exhaustion of the natural resources on which they were based. In 1872, at the peak of the lumber industry, Albany alone shipped 660,000,000 board feet; today, instead of sending out cargoes of lumber to the ports of the seven seas, New York State imports for its own consumption 25 times as much as it produces. Lumbering survives in the Adirondack region, mainly to feed scrub timber to the paper and chemical industries. Iron mining, yielding to the less costly production of the Great Lakes. district, has all but ceased; today the only operating iron mines in the State are those in the Lyon Mountain and Port Henry areas. The low-cost Bessemer process of producing steel, together with the introduction of George Westinghouse's air brake, encouraged the rebuilding of railroads and the construction of larger cars and engines, in which the rail mills in Troy and the locomotive works in Schenectady and Dunkirk played a large part. But the center of iron and steel manufacture has since moved closer to the source of raw materials, leaving in the State only a few large plants, so that heavy products, especially agricultural implements, are now made elsewhere. In foundry and machine-shop products New York State dropped from first place in 1880 to fifth in 1933, and has turned to the manufacture of special equipment: valves, typewriters, bicycles, small forgings, cutlery, railroad signal apparatus, business machines, pumps, metal furniture, radiators, boilers, electrical fixtures, and the like. The oil fields of New York, an extension of the Pennsylvania Bradford field, lie in the southwestern part of the State along the Pennsylvania border, with Wellsville and Olean as refining centers. The pools produce a relatively small share of the total national petroleum product, but the oil is so superior in lubricant quality that it always brings top prices, and a well yielding one third of a barrel a day can be profitably operated. Production reached a maximum of more than 5,000,000 barrels a year in the early eighties, and then declined rapidly to a low of 750,000 barrels in 1913. In 1933 New York State produced about 14 per cent of the Nation's manufactured products, by value, had about 18 per cent of the country's manufacturing establishments, and employed about 12 per cent of the country's industrial workers. The largest industry in the State is the manufacture of clothing and accessories, concentrated in New York City; bodily comfort and adornment call for products exceeding by half a billion dollars the total of the six next highest types of manufacture. Upstate, Rochester is important in the men's clothing and auxiliary industries; and Rochester and the Binghamton area manufacture shoes on a large scale. The production of women's clothes is centered in New York City, though small shops have been established in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, where rent is lower and labor is not so well organized. Clothing, chiefly men's, and hats and caps are made in Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Kingston, and Newburgh. Printing and publishing, the second largest industry in the State, is also centered in New York City, though much of the printing of the city's vast output is done upstate and in neighboring States. The food industries bulk large because of the volume of the State's agricultural 'products and the number of mouths it has to feed. Canning and preserving plants are scattered throughout the rural areas. In milling, New York State ranks second to Minnesota largely by virtue of the progress of the industry in Buffalo. Brewing, like baking, has developed into a largescale, corporately owned industry concentrated in the large cities. Buffalo is the center of meat packing in the State. The textile industry has remained one of the largest in the State because of transportation facilities, the size of the local market, and a skilled labor supply. In the upstate area the manufacture of underwear is concentrated in the western Mohawk Valley, with Utica as a center; Troy leads in men's collars and shirts; and knit goods, woolens, and worsteds are made in the cities of Rensselaer, Hudson, and Catskill, and Washington, Saratoga, Chautauqua, and Wyoming Counties. Important silk and rayon factories are in the Elmira and Buffalo areas. With Yonkers and Amsterdam as outstanding centers of manufacture, the State produces more than one third of the national output of carpets and rugs. Rome leads the country in the manufacture of copper products, and the Hudson Valley is the largest producer of common brick in the world. Other clay products, ranging from common brick, through pottery, tile, and porcelain, to the finest table china, are manufactured in and around Syracuse; Buffalo leads in the heavier hotel tableware. Portland cement is produced in Columbia, Greene, Eric, Onondaga, Schoharie, Warren, and Tompkins Counties, with the largest plants in the city of Hudson. The State has been fortunate in the extent to which new industries developing from the scientific and technological advances of the past so years have settled and grown within its boundaries. Schenectady ranks high in the field of electrical equipment by virtue of the main plant and research laboratories of the General Electric Company, in which heavy electrical generating machinery, radio transmitting apparatus, refrigerators, and induction motors are manufactured. Other large plants producing electrical machinery and appliances are in Syracuse and Rochester. Buffalo and Niagara Falls produce chemicals, dyes, abrasives, metal alloys; and Buffalo manufactures military airplanes and parachutes. Massena has the largest aluminum wire-and-cable manufacturing plant in the country. The automobile industry is represented by large assembly plants, which also make small parts. Another interesting and important group of industries, many of them dominating the national and some even the world-wide market, owe their beginnings to local inventors and the availability of local capital or to the concentration of special local skill. Conspicuous examples are the glove and leather industry centering in Gloversville and Johnstown; the manufacture of special glass products in Corning; the production of billiard balls, checkers, and dominoes in Albany and of sandpaper in Troy, of photographic supplies in [ Binghamton, and of pneumatic tubes and conveyor systems in Syracuse; and in Rochester the manufacture of cameras and photographic supplies, optical goods, thermometers, safety check paper and automatic check writers, buttons, gears, and glass-lined steel tanks. New York City is the Nation's major industrial center. Yet the city is far more important, in terms of dollars, as a market than as an industrial center.