Lehigh Valley Silk Mills: The Other Industry
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
When people think of the Lehigh Valley's industrial past, they think of steel, of the vast Bethlehem Steel furnaces that once lit the night sky. But for nearly three generations, from the eighteen eighties to the nineteen fifties, a parallel industry quietly employed more people than steel in some years, and that industry was silk.
The Lehigh Valley silk industry began in eighteen eighty when the Phoenix Silk Manufacturing Corporation opened its first satellite mill in Allentown, drawn by cheap land, good rail connections, and an available labor supply. The timing was deliberate. The iron and coal industries that had driven the valley's first industrial wave were faltering after the Panic of eighteen seventy-three, and silk offered diversification.
The labor force the silk mills drew upon was specific and, by modern standards, troubling. The anthracite coal mines and the steel mills employed immigrant men. Their wives and children, considered a secondary labor pool and paid accordingly, were available for the lighter work of silk weaving. Women and young children worked in the Lehigh Valley silk mills by the thousands, often logging the same hours as their husbands and fathers in industries that paid far less.
By nineteen hundred there were twenty-three silk establishments operating in the Lehigh Valley, making Pennsylvania second only to New Jersey in national silk production. Growth continued through the early twentieth century. In nineteen twenty-eight, the industry reached its peak with one hundred and six mills operating simultaneously across the valley, a density of textile production that few American regions have ever matched in any industry.
Then came the Depression, then synthetic fabrics, then foreign competition. The mills closed one by one through the thirties, forties, and fifties, leaving behind brick buildings that still stand in Allentown, Bethlehem, and the smaller towns of Northampton County, repurposed now as apartments, offices, and arts spaces. The story of the women and children who worked in them has been carefully preserved at the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem.
