Joshua Gilpin

Joshua Gilpin (1765–1840) was an American merchant and manufacturer who toured industrial Britain at the very end of the eighteenth century. On his return home (in 1801), he introduced to America the technique of chemically bleaching paper-stuff in 1804 and following his second trip, 1811-1815, his brother, Thomas Gilpin, jr, manufactured in 1817 the first paper-making machine in America.

Biography

Joshua Gilpin was born in Philadelphia on 8 November 1765, the son of Thomas Gilpin, a prosperous merchant, and Lydia Fisher, of the well-known Philadelphia family. Both his parents were Quakers. With his brother, Thomas, he inherited from their family property on the Brandywine Creek, and in Wilmington and Philadelphia. They had an extensive business in Philadelphia as general merchants, and on the Brandywine Creek as manufacturers of paper, and woolen and cotton textiles.

The family originated in England and migrated to America at the end of the seventeenth century. They came from Kentmere in Westmorland, and maintained links with their English cousins, including William Gilpin, the artist. Thomas Gilpin owned flour mills in Maryland and on the Brandywine, in Delaware, as well as other properties in Wilmington and Philadelphia. Thomas was a member of the American Philosophical Society, was a correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, and helped establish, in 1771, a grammar school at Wilmington.^[1] During the American War of Independence he was suspected of disloyalty and was exiled to Winchester, Virginia, where he died in 1778.^[2][3][4]

Joshua Gilpin was educated by tutors and at the grammar school at Wilmington. In 1787, Joshua, the younger Thomas, and their uncle, Meirs Fisher, began making paper at a mill on the Brandywine Creek, Delaware, which had been built by their maternal grandfather, Joshua Fisher in 1765. The first paper was despatched in June 1787. The entrepreneurs had help from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1788, lent Meirs Fisher some French books on papermaking.^[5] In time the mills prospered, specialising in banknote paper. The Gilpins supplied many States' banks as well as the United States Treasury.

On 6 June 1795, just before his 30th birthday, Joshua Gilpin came to England, travelling from Philadelphia on the William Penn.^[6] He spent the next six years visiting not only the haunts of a young man on the grand tour, but also the factories and mills of the newly awakened Industrial Revolution. His journeys took him the length and breadth of Great Britain and Ireland as well as the Low Countries, France and Switzerland. Gilpin was at great pains to discover all he could about modern methods of paper-making, but visited many other industries as well. He kept a diary of his travels with voluminous notes about the people he met and the processes he inspected as well as his impressions of the towns and countryside .

He married on 5 August 1800, Mary Dilworth, (1777-1864) at the Quaker meeting house at Yealand Conyers (Lancs) She was a daughter of John Dilworth, (1745-1830) ^[7] a Lancaster merchant and banker. They returned to America on 15 October 1801.^[8]

Over the next ten years the mills prospered, and Gilpin and his wife had six children:

• 1). Henry Dilworth Gilpin (1801-1860)
• 2). Sarah Lydia Gilpin (1802-1894)
• 3). Elizabeth Gilpin (1804-1892). She married Matthew Maury, (1800-1877), a New York merchant, on June 7, 1841.
• 4). Jane Gilpin (1806-1806)
• 5). Thomas William Gilpin (1806-1848)
• 6). Mary Sophia Gilpin (1810-1890).

During his time in England he had gathered information about the application of chlorine to the bleaching of paper-stuff and lost no time in applying it to his mills in America. At that time paper was made from ground-up linen rags, which after fermenting and disintegrating needed to be bleached to make white paper. He witnessed the process first October 1795 in William Simpson's Polton Bank mill at Lasswade in Scotland, and later, in March 1796, in James Smith's mill at Maidstone, Kent. The process had been discovered by the French chemist Berthollet and introduced into Scotland by 1791 and England the following year.^[9]

In 1811, Gilpin and his family returned to England, where they became trapped by the War of 1812 and had to remain until it was over. They lived in Yealand Conyers, Lancashire, and Gilpin was able to get more information about new methods, this time the cylinder-mould paper-making machine, developed by John Dickinson. The Gilpins returned to America in 1815 with two more children:

• 7). Richard Arthington Gilpin (1812-1887). He was an engineer and architect and married Mary Elizabeth Caret Lord Watmough on August 5, 1854.
• 8). William Gilpin (1815-1894).

Thomas Gilpin built the first paper machine in America, after several years spent in obtaining information about the Fourdrinier and Dickinson machines. The Gilpin machine first produced paper in February 1817 and was used in the printing the edition of Poulson's Daily Advertiser published in that month.^[10]

For a time the Gilpin mill prospered as a result of the new methods, but the depression in 1819, coupled with Joshua's expenditure on a new house,Kentmere, (named after their Westmorland origins), as well as the cost of improvements to the mill caused a decline in fortune. The mill was damaged by a fire and flood in the 1820s: the brothers tried to sell the concern without success until 1837, when a group of Philadelphia businessmen purchased it. The last paper made by the Gilpins was in June 1837, just 50 years since the enterprise began.

The Gilpin family were promoters of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The elder Thomas Gilpin was an early proponent who undertook a survey and proposed it to the American Philosophical Society in 1770. The matter lapsed due to the Revolutionary War.^[11] Joshua Gilpin was elected in 1803 one of the board of directors the newly formed canal company, and was involved in making a new survey.^[12]

Thomas Gilpin, jr. was involved in the planning of the Fairmount Dam and Waterworks, designed in 1812 to supply Philadelphia with water.^[13]

Joshua Gilpin died in 22 August 1841 and was buried at Laurel Hill cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[14]

Joshua Gilpin's writings

Joshua Gilpin was not only an industrialist, but he emulated the 'man of leisure' in that he travelled and was a writer. His published writings were:

• Verses Written at the Fountain of Vaucluse (1799)
• Memoir of a Canal from the Chesapeake to the Delaware (1821)
• Farm of Virgil and other poems (1839)

His "Journey to Bethlehem", comprising an account of a trip to Bethlehem, Penn, in 1802, and "Journal of Western Travels", detailing a journey through Western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and back, in 1809, were published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1922 and 1926-7 respectively. The latter was published in an edited edition in 1975.^[15]

Joshua Gilpin's travels

Gilpin's travel diaries for his first trip to Europe are in the Pennsylvania State Archives.^[16] They now comprise over 60 numbered notebooks, but a number are now missing, and it is not possible to establish an exact record of his itineraries. Several main European tours can be established:

• 1) A journey up the east coast of England to Scotland and returning to London via Liverpool. 20 September - 14 December 1795. He saw a paper mill at Polton Bank ^[17]
• 2) Two brief trips in the spring of 1796 examining paper mills in Kent ^[18] and Hertfordshire.^[19] 8–12 March 1796 and 24–25 March 1796.
• 3) A journey along the south coast of England from London as far as Plymouth, returning by Taunton and Bath. 22 April - 15 May 1796.
• 4) A brief journey to East Anglia. 29 May - 11 June 1796.
• 5) A journey to Ireland ^[20][21] via Gloucestershire ^[22] and South Wales. His return to London from Ireland was by way of the Black Country and the industrial Midlands. 11 July - 1 December 1796
• 6) The diaries are fragmented from here but there are an incomplete accounts of:

A journey including Bristol.^[23] 12–17 February 1797

A journey from Bath to Windsor. 27 February - 3 March 1797

A journey from Kingston on Thames to Westminster. 10–19 July 1797

• 7) A major journey to Continental Europe taking in Holland, France and Switzerland. 25 August 1797- [no date] April 1798 There is also a volume summarising his impressions of the entire journey.
• 8) The diaries are again fragmented from here but there are an incomplete accounts of:

A journey from London to Matlock, Derbyshire via Birmíngham, 21–29 August 1799

A journey lasting a week and half in and around Manchester, September 1799

A journey from Lancaster to Liverpool, 1–17 April 1800

A journey from Broadway (Glos) to Blenheim Park (Oxfordshire), 18–19 August 1800

A journey from London to Lincolnshire via Cambridge. 23–25 March 1801

There is also a volume of observations on the Lancaster Canal.

On his return to America he made several journeys in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and these have been published in the twentieth century. See section 2 above These diaries are in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.^[24]

For his second trip to England, between 1811 and 1815, a number of notebooks survive including one describing paper-making machinery ^[25] and another textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

References

Sources

Thomas Gilpin [jr], "Fairmount Dam and Water Works, Philadelphia", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 37. No. 4, (1913), pp 471–479. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086141

Joshua Gilpin, "Journey to Bethlehem", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 46. No. 1, (1922), pp 15–38. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008467

Joshua Gilpin, "Journey to Bethlehem (continued", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,Vol. 46. No. 2, (1922), pp 122–153. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008475

Thomas Gilpin [jr], "Memoir of Thomas Gilpin", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 49. No. 4, (1925), pp 289–328. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086581

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 50. No. 1, (1926), pp 64–78. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086594

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809 (continued)", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 50. No. 2, (1927), pp 163–178. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086605

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809 (continued)", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 50. No. 4, (1926), pp 380–382. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086622

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809 (continued)", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 51. No. 2, (1927), pp 172–190. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086637

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809 (continued)", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 51. No. 4, (1927), pp 351–375. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086650

Joshua Gilpin, "Journal of a Tour from Philadelphia Thro the Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Months of September and October, 1809 (continued)", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 52. No. 1, (1928), pp 29–58. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20086657

Harold B. Hancock & Norman B. Wilkinson, "Thomas and Joshua Gilpin, papermakers", The Paper Maker,Vol. 27, 1958, No. 2

Harold B. Hancock & Norman B. Wilkinson, "The Gilpins and Their Endless Papermaking Machine", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 81 No. 4, (Oct., 1957), pp 391–405. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20089015

Sidney M. Edelstein, "An American Industry First: Rare document proves papermakers first to use chlorine for bleaching in the United States", Tappi Vol. XLIII, (April 1960) 40Aff.

Harold B. Hancock & Norman B. Wilkinson, "Joshua Gilpin: An American Manufacturer in England and Wales, 1795-1801". Part 1. Newcomen Society Transactions Vol. 32 (1959–60), pp 15–28 http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/tns.1959.002; Part 2 Newcomen Society Transactions Vol. 33 (1960–61), pp 57–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/tns.1960.004

Harold B. Hancock & Norman B. Wilkinson, "An American Manufacturer in Ireland, 1796", The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland,Vol. 92, No. 2, (1962), pp 125–137. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25509475

Robert F. Oaks, "Philadelphians in Exile: The problem of Loyalty during the American Revolution", The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 96, No. 3, July. 1972, pp 298–319. 321-35. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20090650

A. P. Woolrich, "An American in Bristol and Gloucestershire", Transactions of the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Vol. 92, 1973, pp 169–89.

Joseph E. Walker, ed Pleasure and Business in Western Pennsylvania: The Journal of Joshua Gilpin. 1809, Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1975

John Bidwell, "Joshua Gilpin and Lord Stanhope's Improvements in Printing," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 76, no. 2 (Second Quarter, 1982): 143-158. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302712

G. E. Bentley, Jr "The Way of a Papermaker with a Poet: Joshua Gilpin, William Blake, and the Arts in 1796" Notes and Queries 1986, 33 (1), pp 80–84

A series of articles published in The Quarterly, issued by the British Association of Paper Historians.

A. P. Woolrich, "Scottish Mills as seen by Foreign Observers: The Travel Diaries of Joshua Gilpin, 1795, and Eric Svendenstierna, 1803", The Quarterly No. 19 - July 1996

A. P. Woolrich, "The Travel Diaries of Joshua Gilpin: Some Paper Mills in Kent, 1796", The Quarterly, No. 20 - October 1996

A. P. Woolrich, "The Travel Diaries of Joshua Gilpin: Some Paper Mills in Hertfordshire, 1796", The Quarterly, No. 21 - January 1997

A. P. Woolrich, "The Travel diaries of Joshua Gilpin: Some Paper Mills in Ireland, 1796", The Quarterly, No. 22 - April 1997