The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life. Allison Chisolm
As the New Year arrived for 1855, Charles began a new diary. He faithfully filled in nearly every day for the entire year, offering a unique and valuable glimpse into his daily life at age 24, his struggles to support his family and his aspirations to learn new skills and live a healthy life. He found solace in attending religious services, and appreciated the wonders of nature on his long walks. He chronicled visits to relatives and documented their health troubles. In his short entries, he shared how devoted he remained to his extended family even while traveling and searching for work.
In the diary’s back pages, he began a daily accounting of his cash position, annotated with the phrases: “Earn before you spend” and “Pay as you go.” For the months of January through May, he followed these rules in part, earning more than he spent in February and March. But his essentially freelance relationship with his employers typically found him short on cash until completion of a project, with a large check then going to cover earlier debts and basic living expenses. He lived in a time when economic survival often meant reliance on family and friends. An honor system created an informal credit market where hand-written promissory notes would form the basis for short-term loans. Charles was meticulous in tracking his debts and repaid them as soon as he could, thus maintaining his honor and standing in his community.
It was a year of travel for Charles, both local and long-distance. He started the year in Nashua, New Hampshire, en route to Lawrence to collect payment from his employer. Within four days, his check for $66.75 was quickly redirected to paying off a $16 debt he owed a friend in Lawrence, $25 as a partial repayment on a $100 loan from C.W. Blanchard, former agent for the Clinton Company and the town’s first school committee chair, and a $25 loan to his father.
Given his cash position, he owned no horse or carriage. Once back from Nashua, Charles walked the seven or eight miles from Clinton to Shrewsbury to be with his wife and baby son, who lived on the Plymptons’ farm while he travelled for work. The next morning, he walked another seven miles or so to Worcester, where he continued to work on the Merrifield project for the Lawrence Machine Shop. Coaches between Clinton and Shrewsbury or Worcester cost 25 cents and train service to Worcester was 50 cents.
The mechanical plans of the previous year were complete. Charles would spend the next two months helping to build the enormous beam engine for the Merrifield buildings. The engine got its name from an overhead beam used to apply a vertical piston’s force to a vertical connecting rod to generate power. Morgan noted the new engine would be a 40-inch cylinder, 72-inch stroke machine, so large that laying the foundation for it required that 24-foot piles be driven into the ground. After the first six feet, Morgan noted, each blow sank the piles in another three inches. The engine’s globe valve alone weighed 560 pounds (without the hand wheel) and the total weight of the beam engine came to 101 tons. The team produced a durable and high-quality engine. Known as the “Lawrence,” it remained in continuous service for the next 46 years, retiring only in 1900.
While he worked in Worcester, Charles rented a room for $10 a month, which he paid in five-dollar installments to “Mr. Benjamin.” Sometimes he had to borrow the money from his father to pay on time, but he always paid him back. To cover his expenses in February, he sold his stove to his father-in-law for $10. The largest expense that month was actually paying his father-in-law what he owed for 14 weeks’ room and board for Harriet, and for two weeks over the holidays, himself. Their agreed-upon rate was about $1.50 per week.
After paying 86 cents to resole his shoes, he wrote in his diary February 9, “drained of cash.” He managed to borrow $10 from a co-worker on the beam engine, and paid him back a month later after getting paid for the job. The last week of February, Harriet and baby Harry moved back to Clinton to live with Hiram, a widower for the past seven months, and “keep house for him.”
With all the walking Charles did, he certainly recognized the hazardous conditions pedestrians encountered on Clinton’s roads. A February 3, 1855 letter to the editor of the Clinton newspaper complained that carriages would not give way to pedestrians. “It may be safely stated that 9 out of 10 of those who travel in carriages compel all pedestrians where the track is narrow, to turn into the snowdrifts.”
The constant worry about money clearly took its toll on Charles’ health. He wrote on January 13: “have been troubled all the week with Indigestion. Spirits very much depressed.” A month later, he “stayed away from church on account of a dose of Physic.”
In trying to address both his health and his financial issues, Charles knew he had to make a change. “Have been for some time past trying to mature a plan for making a Sea voyage or going West for my health,” he wrote on February 15, “may God’s Providence direct and may I patiently do his will.”
The weather wasn’t helping him feel any more patient. The next day, he described “the weather for a few days has been rainy and foggy which aggravates my disease, making me stupid & spirits depressed.” February was not a good month for Morgan. “Have been just able to get about today,” he wrote February 22. “This frail mortal tenement is surely out of repair.” When he sought medical advice, Dr. Rogers advised him to “travel south or southwest with a book or paper agency—take much exercise, bathe often, think but little about my complaint and study but little.” Given Morgan’s inquisitive and thoughtful nature, the doctor asked too much, but he considered his advice carefully.
For his work on the Merrifield beam engine, Morgan received $129, or roughly $2.50 a day. Given the typical 10-hour work day of the period, his pay averaged 25 cents an hour, or about $6.85 in today’s dollars, below the Massachusetts minimum wage. Just to receive his pay, he had to travel back to Lawrence, which cost $1.35 in coach fare one way from Clinton. The roads in New England could be treacherous, especially in March as snow melts turned to mud. Wandering livestock were constant hazards. On the journey back to Clinton via Lowell, he recounted, “we ran over a cow, but by the mercy of God none of us were injured.”
When he was home between jobs, Charles cheerfully helped his wife with household chores and caring for little Harry. He also took to baking. “Baked bread for Father had good luck,” he wrote in one entry. His diary included several tasty recipes for corn cakes, custard, ginger bread and sponge cake. On March 20, 1855, he offered this report:
Baked a custard – 1 qt. milk, 4 tbsp. sugar –
2 [tbsp.] Flour, 6 eggs –
beat eggs and sugar together mix flour with milk, baked 40 mins in a deep dish –
very good custard!
WORKING “OUT WEST”
He had a far longer journey planned, intending to “go west.” For a machinist in 1855 New England, that meant Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His destination? The Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s machine shop, where he hoped to find some work and learn more about railway engines.
After he sold his rooster to his father for 50 cents, and “let Hatty have $14.80,” Morgan began his westward journey with $35 cash on hand.
It took about a week to get to Pittsburgh. He travelled from Clinton to Worcester to New York in a day, crossing the Long Island Sound on board the steamship Connecticut with his friend Edward W. Goodale and his wife. After spending three nights together in New York, he continued on to Philadelphia, staying overnight at Girard College, north of the city line in what would have been open fields, known today as the Fairmount neighborhood.
He wrote to Hatty every few days throughout his journey. On March 31 he wrote in his diary that he was using “the roof of Girard College for my writing desk.” The 24-year-old Morgan must have climbed to the top of the school’s only building, Founders Hall, a huge Greek Revival classroom building completed only seven years earlier and already a tourist destination. Built to educate fatherless boys in academics and mechanical trades, the school was tuition-free, thanks to its benefactor, the late Stephen Girard, known as the richest man in America at his death in 1831. A bed for the night may well have been free.
Charles travelled on to Lancaster, where he met S.S. Spencer from the Conestoga Steam Mills, renowned as the country’s first steam-powered