‘Fence-ing lessons’: child junkers and the commodification of scrap in the long nineteenth century

Abstract

This article considers the circulation of junk in nineteenth-century American markets, concentrating on its various stages of commodification – and the people responsible for that commodification – as scrap was transformed from worthless garbage found on the streets into lucrative materials suitable for industrial use. The study adds to historians’ understanding of the emergence of capitalism, whose formation happened as much from the bottom up as the top down. The often-overlooked populations who engaged in petty and often illegal entrepreneurship, including the children discussed here, had a very real impact on the emerging economy. Looking at scrap more clearly elucidates the processes of commodification and the logic of capitalism at work – the transformation of miscellaneous, valueless goods into aggregated abstractions with significant economic worth.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• children
• junk
• law enforcement
• poverty
• theft

Notes

1. Brooklyn Eagle, “Juvenile Thieves,” May 26, 1857.

2. Brooklyn Eagle, “Gang of Juvenile Burglars Arrested,” November 27, 1856.

3. Carl Zimring briefly discusses the relationship between junk dealing and juvenile delinquency in the later part of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century in Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America, see esp. 67–69. The issue of child labour appears throughout Martin Medina’s The World’s Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Consumption and Production, which focuses on contemporary and global issues. The contributions of urban children to recycling make cameo appearances in Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Although their involvement with the junk trade is only briefly mentioned, Christine Stansell’s City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 helpfully contextualises the roles of impoverished children in the emerging American city. The work of David Nasaw is likewise useful in explaining the larger social and economic environments within which late-nineteenth-century urban children lived. He touches only briefly upon their involvement with the scrap trade, but extensively covers the newsboys, who were often involved in petty criminal activities as well. See Children of the City: At Work and At Play. Timothy Gilfoyle’s work explores more directly nineteenth-century children’s criminal activities, with a particular focus on pickpocketing. See especially “Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York, 1850–1900.”

4. Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. For more on the history of rubbish, see Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York the Last Two Hundred Years.

5. Pennsylvania Evening Post, “Ready Money,” January 6, 1776 and “ready Money,” July 16, 1776; Albany Centinel, “J. & Norman Landon & Co.,” December 22, 1797; Pennsylvania Evening Post, “Threepence per pound given,” March 12, 1776 and “Ragged Newcastle and Maryland Money, Exchanged,” April 13, 1776. Parts were often greater than the whole, and objects made with valuable materials became the targets of thieves who, by melting something down into its base form, could render it both more valuable to potential buyers and also unidentifiable to former owners. See, for example, Pennsylvania Evening Post, “Was Stolen,” September 12, 1776.

6. Pittsfield Sun, “Iron and Nail Factory,” August 15, 1821.

7. Connecticut Gazette, “John Manierre, Has for Sale,” June 19, 1816; Boston Commercial Gazette, “Edward D. Peters,” October 15, 1821.

8. The Oxford English Dictionary, volume V. See also Morison, The Old Ropemakers of Plymouth: A History of the Plymouth Cordage Company, 1824–1949, 10.

9. Boston Gazette, “By Joseph Ripley,” June 12, 1815.

10. For descriptions of these enterprises, see New York Times, “Brooklyn News. Extensive Seizure of Stolen Property,” August 8, 1864; W.O. Stoddard, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “New York Harbor Police,” October 1872, 672–683.

11. Hampden (Mass.) Federalist, “Sales by Auction,” January 4, 1816; A Description of the United States Armory at Springfield, (Mass.) (n.p., 1818]), 3–4.

12. To cite but a few suggestive examples: Louisville grocers Tillay & Norton advertised “Cash paid for Rags, Feathers, Ginseng, &c.” in The Louisville Directory for the Year 1832, 171; bookstore proprietor John B. Perry’s ad noted, “Books bought in quantities and cash paid for Rags,” O’Brien’s Philadelphia Wholesale Business Directory for 1844, 52. The title page of the captivity narrative God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Exemplified in the Captivity and Surprising Deliverance of Elizabeth Hanson, contained an ad for rags: “The third edition … Danvers, near Salem: reprinted and sold by E. Russell, next the Bell Tavern, MDCCLXXX. At the same place may be had a number of new Books, &c., some of which are on the times. – Cash paid for Rags.” Newspaper ads are even more abundant. A search in Readex’s American Historical Newspapers, 1741–1922 for the phrase “cash paid for rags” yields 1457 hits.

13. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885, 27–28. She notes that expenses for rags was about four times that of labour (195).

14. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 67; Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, 19.

15. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 191–192, 195.

16. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine, 193.

17. New Hampshire Patriot, “Franklin Iron Foundery [sic],” March 23, 1829.

18. Hampshire Gazette, “Stoves!! Stoves!!,” November 4, 1835.

19. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, specifically 23–24, but more generally to explain steel-making processes much more adroitly.

20. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, 43. See also Medina, The World’s Scavengers, 38–40, for more extensive lists of waste items that can be recycled, and their future uses.

21. Stoddard, “New York Harbor Police,” 673.

22. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, 28, 30–1.

23. See [Charles Loring Brace] New York Daily Times, “Walks Among the New-York Poor. The Rag and Bone Pickers,” January 22, 1853.

24. In Madeline Leslie’s The Rag Pickers, two women working a field get into a skirmish over territory. See The Rag Pickers, and Other Stories, esp. 14–15.

25. For more on Jews in the scrap and used goods trades, see Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, esp. 37–38, 44–58; Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire; and Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression, esp. chapter 5.

26. Philadelphia Inquirer, “Enforcement of the Ordinance Against Dogs,” June 2, 1862. For more on the importance of marginal economies, see Luskey and Woloson, Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America.

27. For more on these urchins, see Gilfoyle, “Street-rats and Gutter-snipes.”

28. Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago. Report of the Investigating Committee of the City Homes Association, 150.

29. Quoted in Carey, An Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land, 13.

30. Prisoners’Friend, “Juvenile Depravity in New York,” April 1850, 339.

31. Rees, Mysteries of City Life, 53.

32. [Thomas Gill], Selections from the Court Reports Originally Published in the Boston Morning Post, from 1834 to 1837, 228–229.

33. New York Times, “Police Reports. Young Burglars and Their Abettors,” August 16, 1860.

34. Stoddard, “New York Harbor Police,” 678.

35. De Koven Bowen, Safeguards for City Youth at Work and at Play, 163.

36. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington), “With the Occasional Aid of the City Police,” December 6, 1856, reprinted from the New York Journal of Commerce.

37. Seventeenth Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum, 37, 40.

38. Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum, 86. New York was representative rather than exceptional. In turn-of-the-century Detroit, crimes against property accounted for 57% of boys’ arrests, a figure which certainly included the theft of scrap metal. See Wolcott, Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940, 43–44.

39. Campbell, Darkness and Daylight; or Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 153–154, 165.

40. New York Times, “Young Burglars and Their Abettors”; “Encouraging Youthful Enterprise,” February 8, 1860; Inter Ocean, “Nurseries of Crime,” May 22, 1876. In 1919 the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago commissioned a study on the subject. See Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency. An Investigation Made for the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago. The authors estimated ‘that 90% of the delinquency [among teenage boys] was traced to the junk business’, 10. For more on urban youth culture see Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play.

41. New York House of Refuge, Inmate Case Histories, New York State Archives, Albany, NY. Entry for John McCarthy, April 7, 1855 (hereafter NYHR, ICH). For more on the history of handling disorderly children, see Shelden, Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A Critical Introduction to the History of Criminal Justice, esp. 196–230.

42. NYHR, ICH, entry for Andrew Reinhard, April 10, 1855.

43. NYHR, ICH, entry for John Kennedy, April 19, 1855.

44. NYHR, ICH, entry for Edward Pounder, April 11, 1855.

45. NYHR, ICH, entry for Anthony Witz, June 9, 1855.

46. NYHR, ICH, entry for John McDonnelly, May 16, 1855.

47. NYHR, ICH, entries for Valentine Treehart and Casper Cohen, May 17, 1855.

48. [Charles Loring Brace], New York Daily Times, “Walks Among the New-York Poor,” March 4, 1853, 2.

49. NYHR, ICH, entry for William H. Jackson, Nov. 10, 1855.

50. NYHR, ICH, entry for Joseph Grimm, December 10, 1855.

51. NYHR, ICH, entry for Henry C. Turner, Jan. 4, 1856.

52. Letter from J.G.B. to Charles Loring Brace, transcribed in Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, 130.

53. Stoddard, “New York Harbor Police,” 678.

54. NYHR, ICH, entry for Joseph Walch, April 25, 1855.

55. NYHR, ICH, entry for Hiram Patterson, May 5, 1855.

56. NYHR, ICH, entry for Bartholomew Chaffer, May 21, 1855.

57. NYHR, ICH, entry for Jacob Kepler, May 26, 1855.

58. Daily Evening Transcript (Boston), “Juvenile Depravity,” June 16, 1849.

59. Girls tended to steal petty luxuries like handkerchiefs, shoes, ribbons, loose change, and occasionally clothing because they often worked as domestics and these were the most convenient kinds of things for them to take. Adults tended to steal more valuable items such as cash, pocket watches, clothing, and jewellery.

60. Hoffman and Felkner, “The Historical Origins and Causes of Urban Decentralization in the United States,” (www.jchs.harvard.edu/.../von_hoffman_w02-1.pdf), 6.

61. Hoffman and Felkner note that in the nineteenth century ‘Low-income housing developed in relatively inexpensive damp lowlands, which were most prone to flooding and unsanitary conditions’, 3.

62. In Cash for Your Trash, Carl Zimring describes the five main tiers of the scrap trade – collectors, peddlers, dealers, processors, and brokers (52–53). These tiers were already well in place by mid-century, with dealers and processors becoming more numerous after the Civil War.

63. US Department of Justice Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Strategies for Combatting the Criminal Receiver of Stolen Goods, 8, original emphasis. The report also describes ‘passive’ vs. ‘active’ fences. The former accepts everything; the latter discriminates, which in turn influences the actions of the thief, who ‘will steal only those items he knows them to handle’, 9.

64. Stoddard, “New York Harbor Police,” 677.

65. The Baltimore City Directory for 1845. Copper and tin worker Charles Collier’s ad noted “Old Copper, Brass, Pewter, and Lead bought or taken in exchange,” 134. McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory for 1847; George Adams, The Boston Directory … 1848–9. It is difficult, if not impossible, to disaggregate some of these numbers to determine more precisely which dealers were trading in new or used materials. Likely most dealt in both.

66. Bell, “Diary of William Bell, Inspector of Second-Hand Dealers & Junk Shops, 1850–1851.” Hereafter Bell Diary.

67. National Police Gazette, “Receivers of Stolen Goods,” July 1, 1857, 4.

68. New York Daily Tribune, “Arrest of Junk Shop Keepers,” June 19, 1852, and New York Times, “Police Intelligence. Unlicensed Junk Shops,” March 24, 1855. People engaged in junk dealing were hard to count because not all of them obtained licenses and were on a city’s books. Many others engaged in similar occupations were not required to register with authorities, such as sellers of paper stock, iron merchants, used furniture dealers, metal workers, soap makers, secondhand clothing dealers, and others.

69. At the other end of the spectrum legally and logistically from petty theft of marine junk was the ‘systematic dismantling of vessels’, through ship-breaking operations such as the ones that thrived in places such as San Francisco. See Pastron and Delgado, “Archaeological Investigations of a Mid-nineteenth-Century Shipbreaking Yard, San Francisco, California,” 61–77.

70. Brooklyn Eagle, “City Intelligence. Robbery of a Vessel,” January 20, 1846.

71. Stoddard, “New York Harbor Police.”

72. Based on Samuel Augustus Mitchell’s City of New York … Entered 1850, map and addresses taken from D.T. Valentine, The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York, for the Year 1849, 271–273.

73. City directories include many listings for female junk shop keepers. Early female junk dealers in New York included Mary Bubser, Hannah Burrows, Catharine Carroll, Elizabeth Dunican, Bridget Gallagher, Mary Holly, Jane Kirkbride, Mary McHugh, Elizabeth McManus, Mrs. M. McManus, Mary Regan, Ann Smith, and Janett Watts. See, The New-York Business Directory for 1844 & 1845; Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1845 & 1846; Wilson’s Business Directory of New-York City. In Five Hundred Employments Adapted to Women, Virginia Penny described the business enterprises of several ‘junkwomen’, 122.

74. Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, 686. She describes dealers in secondhand goods as ‘the most annoying class’ of receivers, 688. See also Woloson, In Hock, 128–129, 137.

75. Lowell Daily Citizen and News, “City Items,” May 12, 1857.

76. Daily Cleveland Herald, “The Junk Ordinance,” April 22, 1869.

77. “Nurseries of Crime.”

78. New York Times, “Mayor’s Black Book. Complaints,” January 19, 1855 and “Mayor’s Black Book; Complaints,” January 23, 1855. “A junk-shop in Seventh-avenue is in the habit of receiving stolen goods and encouraging crime” (New York Times January 19, 1855) and “James Matthews, junk-shop keeper, Third-avenue, was fined $5 for purchasing from children” (New York Times January 23, 1855).

79. See, for example, New York City Common Council, A Law to Regulate Pawn-Brokers, and Dealers in the Purchase or Sale of Second-Hand Furniture, Metals or Clothes. Passed July 13th, 1812, 3–4. For representative articles about receivers, see: “Capture of a Gang of Forgers, Robbers, and Receivers of Stolen Goods,” Salem Gazette May 9, 1834; “A Gang of Thieves Broken Up,” New York Aurora April 27, 1842; “Police Court,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture December 4, 1847; and “A Junk-Shop Keeper Arrested,” New York Times March 18, 1858.

80. Bell Diary, entry for January 23, 1851.

81. “Police Statistics,” National Police Gazette June 12, 1847.

82. Bell diary, entry for November 25, 1850, emphasis added.

83. As Frederic Thrasher noted, ‘The distinction between picking up some discarded object to sell and appropriating the unguarded property of others can hardly be very clear to the adolescent in the gangland environment’ (The Gang, 149). I would argue, however, that most boys could tell the difference but it was likely of little concern.

84. New York Daily Times, “Junk Dealers,” March 14, 1853.

85. New York Daily Times, “Court of General Sessions,” December 14, 1853.

86. Harper’s Weekly, “Scene after the Disaster on the New York Central Railroad,” September 29, 1866, 614.

87. “Criminal Court. The Felsenthal Junk Dealers Sent to the Penitentiary for One Year,” (Chicago) Inter-Ocean February 19, 1874. For more on this, see, James McCabe, Secrets of the Great City, esp. “The Thieves’ Exchange,” in which he observes that a fence’s most pressing duty was to remove ownership marks, continuing, ‘A melting-pot is always over the fire, to which all silver ware is consigned the instant it is received. … Jewelry is at once removed from its settings, and the gold is either melted or the engraving burnished out, so as in either case to make identification impossible. … Cotton, wool, rags, and old ropes, require no manipulation. When once thrown upon the heap, they defy the closest scrutiny of the owners. … The “fence” is as well skilled as any lawyer in the nature of evidence,’ 364–365. It was for this very reason that many local ordinances required junk dealers to document from whom they purchased goods and that they keep property tagged and ‘in certain piles’ for five days, ‘without removing, melting, cutting or destroying any article thereof’. Frank Gilbert, Bender’s Supervisors’, County and Town Officers’ Manual, 408. See also, New York Times, “Receivers of Stolen Goods,” July 1, 1857.

88. Thrasher, The Gang, 36.

89. Thrasher, The Gang, 153.

90. American Railway Times, “Scrap Iron Forgings,” January 1857, 2.

91. National Police Gazette, “Receiver of Stolen Goods,” August 28, 1847, 403.

92. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “The Robber Gang,” January 10, 1850 and “Arrest,” January 30, 1850.

93. New York Daily Times, “Minors and Junk Dealers,” March 2, 1855 and “Nurseries of Crime.”

94. Thrasher, The Gang, 153–154.

95. “Annual Report of the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism,” 35; Brooklyn Eagle, “The Courts,” December 22, 1857.

96. New York Times, “Police Reports. Larceny and Receiving Stolen Goods,” July 27, 1860.

97. Brooklyn Eagle, “Receiving Stolen Goods,” February 8, 1860. The article gives the purchase amount as 14 shillings, each equivalent to about 25 cents. See Tim Watkins, “Some Details of Everyday Life in 1860,” http://www.royalengineers.ca/lifedetail.html.

98. Brooklyn Eagle, “New York City News. Buying Stolen Goods,” October 29, 1859. The article noted, ‘He appears to be a man of good character – albeit successful in his trade …’.

99. Galveston (TX) Daily News, “Junk Shops and Their Connections,” June 23, 1874.

100. E.M. Cross & Co.’s Baltimore City Directory, 1863–4. The phrase “omniverous maw” comes from The Great Industries of the United States, 379. The passage continues, ‘[the junk shop] can digest almost every article of commerce and send it through the appropriate channels …’.

101. The Great Industries of the United States, 379.

102. Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), “Rags, Sacks, and Bottles,” July 31, 1875.

103. “Fortune in Scraps,” reprinted in The Farmer’s Cabinet 69.39 (April 13, 1871), 1.

104. The Great Industries of the United States, 123.

105. “The Junk Trade,” Cleveland Morning Daily Herald May 11, 1872.

106. P.L. Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: A Synopsis of Progress, 106.

107. The source emphasised that good sorting determined a mill’s reputation ‘for producing high grades of goods with uniformity’. See The Great Industries of the United States, 915. ‘Abb’ refers to low grade wool from the edge of the fleece; ‘tags’, to wool caked in mud or faeces.

108. Cleveland Morning Daily Herald, “The Junk Trade.” Reprinted from the Boston Commercial Bulletin. See also, Railway Times, “Bessemer Scrap and its Uses,” December 19, 1863, 401.

109. Penny, Five Hundred Employments, 122.

110. Barringer, The Story of Scrap (New York: Institute of Scrap, Iron and Steel, Inc., 1939), 6–7.

111. Barringer explains that ‘Small [scrap] dealers sell either direct to consumers, or to larger dealers or brokers. Large dealers usually book orders directly from consumers, which they may fill entirely from their own accumulation or may distribute among other dealers. Brokers function without yards, frequently buying and selling without having a definite supply or an outlet, respectively.’ The Story of Scrap, 6.

112. American Railroad Journal, “Nathan Caswell, Metalbroker,” February 16, 1850, 108.

113. American Railroad Journal, “Wm. D. McGowan, Iron Broker,” January 20, 1867, 79.

114. Railway Times, “Trade and Manufactures of Cleveland,” June 10, 1871, 183. Pig and scrap tonnages were not disaggregated.

115. Scientific American, “Old Rubber Shoes,” October 26, 1895, 267. For more on rubber and the vulcanisation process, see Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, esp. 25–26.

116. Banker’s Magazine, “Twenty Thousand Tons of Old Iron in a Single Scrap Heap,” December 1909, 914.

117. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 5.

118. Maine Farmer, “Passing of Trades. Features of the Old Time City Life That Are Fading Away,” June 3, 1897, 6.

119. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash, 34–35. On immigrants, dirt, and contamination, see Bushman and Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America”; and Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness.

120. Rosen, “Different Perceptions of the Value of Pollution Abatement across Time and Place: Balancing Doctrine in Pollution Nuisance Law,” 319.

121. Riis, “The Making of Thieves in New York,” 110, 111.

122. Addams, “The Subtle Problems of Charity,” 173.

123. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 6.

124. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 7.

125. Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline, “Annual Report of the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism,” 32; Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 25.

126. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 30.

127. Thrasher, The Gang, 154, 155.

128. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 32–35.

129. Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 45–47.

130. Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), “The Junk Trade,” June 30, 1870; Grigg and Haynes, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency, 33.

131. Kaempffert, “What Junk Has Done. Some Men Grow Rich on What Other Men Throw Away,” 29.

132. Kaempffert, “What Junk Has Done,” 63.