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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.
Contents
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. During the American War of Independence he was suspected of disloyalty and was exiled to Winchester, Virginia, where he died in 1778.
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. 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. 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) a Lancaster merchant and banker. They returned to America on 15 October 1801.
Over the next ten years the mills prospered, and Gilpin and his wife had six children:
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.
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:
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.
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. 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.
Thomas Gilpin, jr. was involved in the planning of the Fairmount Dam and Waterworks, designed in 1812 to supply Philadelphia with water.
Joshua Gilpin died in 22 August 1841 and was buried at Laurel Hill cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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:
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.
Joshua Gilpin's travels
Gilpin's travel diaries for his first trip to Europe are in the Pennsylvania State Archives. 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:
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.
For his second trip to England, between 1811 and 1815, a number of notebooks survive including one describing paper-making machinery and another textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire.