Retreat from Progress

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cast Iron ◽  
Pig Iron ◽  
Blast Furnaces ◽  
Principal Product ◽  
Wrought Iron ◽  
The Face ◽  
Adam Family ◽  
Difficult Terrain

Salisbury ironmakers throve by selling wrought iron rather then cast iron through the first half of the nineteenth century. Their finery forges and puddling works converted nearly all of the pig produced by the district’s furnaces to bar iron or forged products. However, by the 1860s, when the district’s ironmasters were smelting up to 11,800 tons of pig iron per year, they converted little of it to wrought iron. The demise of the forges left just one principal product, cast iron used mainly for railroad car wheels. Milo Barnum and Leonard Richardson had started making railroad castings in 1840. When Milo Barnum retired in 1852, his son W. H. Barnum took his place in the partnership with Richardson. The partners expanded the business by acquiring the Beckley and Forbes furnaces in 1858 and 1862, respectively, from the Adam family in East Canaan. Upon Leonard Richardson’s death, Barnum and the Richardson heirs reconstituted the business as the Barnum-Richardson Company, the firm that gradually gained control of all mines and blast furnaces in the northwest, except for the Kent furnace. A new railway facilitated the Barnum-Richardson operations. Dedicated residents of the northwest, in the face of much skepticism, raised the capital needed to build the Connecticut Western Railroad from Hartford to State Line, where it joined with the Dutchess & Columbia line running to Beacon, New York. Salisbury residents eagerly awaited its 1871 completion: they wanted to be rid of the heavy ore wagons that kept their roads a rness passing from Ore Hill to the furnaces in East Canaan. The Connecticut Western passed through Winsted, traversed difficult terrain in Norfolk, and crossed the Housatonic Railroad at Canaan, where the two companies built a handsome union station . Railroad enthusiasm also led residents in the northwest to propose impractical schemes. The Shepaug Railroad had been completed in 1872 from Danbury to Litchfield. A correspondent writing to the Connecticut Western News that year proposed extension into the Salisbury district.

Cast with Style: Nineteenth-Century Cast-Iron Stoves

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
tammis kane groft
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cast Iron ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Hudson River ◽  
Full Production ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
Cook Stoves ◽  
Rococo Revival

Cast With Style: Nineteenth-Century Cast-Iron Stoves During the nineteenth century Albany and Troy, New York manufacturers were considered to be among the largest producers of cast-iron stoves in the world. Stoves made in these two upstate New York cities were renowned for their fine-quality castings and innovations in technology and design. The strategic location of Albany and Troy, located nine miles apart on opposite banks of the Hudson River, afforded easy and inexpensive transportation of raw materials to the foundries, and finished stoves to worldwide markets. Cast-iron stove making reached its highest artistic achievement and technological advancements between 1840 and 1870. Flask casting and the advent of the cupola furnace permitted more elaborate designs and finer-quality castings. Stove designers borrowed freely from architectural and cabinet-makers design books, a process that resulted in the use of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Rococo revival motifs; patriotic symbols, and lavish floral designs, all reflecting current taste and sentiment Stove types produced included Franklin, box, dumb, base-burner, parlor, cook stoves and ranges and parlor cook stoves. However, the stoves that attracted the most attention and helped to secure the reputation of Albany and Troy, as innovators in technological and decorative designs were the column parlor stoves produced during the 1830s and 1840s. These stoves were a focal point for a Victorian parlor because the overall designs incorporated current tastes in architecture, furniture and other decorative arts. The decline of the stove industry in Albany and Troy began slowly after the Civil War, when companies went back into full production and glutted the market. Also, new deposits of iron ore were discovered in the Great Lakes region, and entrepreneurs were quick to see the potential of large western markets and began building foundries in Chicago and Detroit. As the century closed, the demands for iron were shifting toward steel.

At-Home Humbugs: Freaks and Fakes in the Nineteenth-Century Parlor Museum

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Michael D'Alessandro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Surface Area ◽  
Hair Growth ◽  
The Body ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Hybrid Species ◽  
Long Line ◽  
The Face ◽  
Madison Square Garden

In April 1885, a New York Herald journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high. . . . His whole body is covered by a very thick growth of long, tow colored hair . . . and the peculiar formation of his head [is] very suggestive of the Russian dachshund.” At first, Jo-Jo appeared docile, but as the scientists prodded him more and more, he started “snarling, showing his three canine teeth” and asked his guardian if he could bite the inspectors. Jo-Jo was decidedly not a dog-boy, or not exactly. He was, in fact, a Russian teenager suffering from hypertrichosis, a condition causing excessive hair growth all over the body, including nearly every surface area of the face. Barnum had signed him to perform a year earlier, and the boy made quite an auspicious debut. However, Jo-Jo was simply the latest in a long line of supposed hybrid species and exotic curiosities that Barnum had been displaying since midcentury. The famed showman built his name in part by presenting human creation itself as a continual spectrum. Barnum's attractions ranged from live tigers and giraffes to enigmatic simian performers to wax statues of America's degraded lower classes. As much of a draw as he became, even Jo-Jo had to share a bill with Tattooed Hindoo Dwarfs, Hungarian Gypsies, Buddhist Priests, as well as a menagerie of animals including baby elephants, kangaroos, lions, and twenty-foot-long “great sinewy serpents.” But Jo-Jo's specific appeal was tied to his inexplicability. Even given the closer inspection of the dog-faced boy, “none of the physicians present would hazard an opinion as to his ancestry.”

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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