Silk City: Allentown's Other Industrial Life

Most people know Allentown as a steel town, or more precisely as the city adjacent to the steel town. But before steel defined the Lehigh Valley's working life, there was silk. For half a century, Allentown was one of the biggest silk-weaving centers in the United States, and the women and girls who ran the looms built the city as much as any canal boat captain or blast furnace operator.

The Adelaide Silk Mill opened in November of eighteen eighty-one, the first in the valley. Within two years it was followed by the R. H. Simon Silk Mill and others. The timing was not accidental. The Lehigh Valley offered what silk manufacturers needed: reliable waterpower, access to railroad networks, and crucially, a large population of women and girls willing to work for wages that men in heavier industries would not accept.

By nineteen hundred, twenty-three silk establishments operated in the Lehigh Valley, and the region had become the second-largest silk producer in the world, behind only New Jersey. By nineteen twenty-eight, the count had risen to eighty-five mills, and Allentown had acquired its second nickname: Silk City. The looms ran six days a week. The noise was constant.

The labor was also constant and hard. Child labor was common throughout the Pennsylvania silk mills. Many families needed every income they could find, and girls as young as thirteen worked full shifts at spinning and weaving machines that required nimble hands and steady attention. Early reform efforts in Pennsylvania specifically targeted silk mills as a site of underage labor.

The Great Depression devastated the industry. Foreign competition finished it. By the nineteen fifties, most of the mills had closed or converted to other uses. But the buildings remain in the landscape, their brick facades and sawtooth rooflines visible across Allentown's industrial neighborhoods, monuments to an industry that most of the city has half-forgotten.