Elfreth's Alley Museum
Of Mysteries and Muntins: Historic Windows in ...

Historic houses contain layered stories from the people who have lived there over decades and centuries. Historic house museums often also have additional layers of meaning and mystery created by the process of preservation and restoration. Recently Board Member Emily Taggart Schricker looked back over Elfreth’s Alley Association minutes and the logbook of the restoration of house #126 to learn more about the layers in our museum today.

Elfreth's Alley Museum
Symposium: Rowhouse City: History and ...
Elfreth's Alley Museum
On Display Now: "The Power of Experimentation ...
Elfreth's Alley Museum
Season 2 of 'The Alley Cast' is Underway!

shovels

The Mortons, the Wilsons, the McCraes: Black Factory Workers ca. 1930

House #135 is the largest on Elfreth’s Alley, taking up 26 feet of the street frontage. Its size is partly due to the fact that it was built over top of a cartpath, incorporating it into a tunnel.

It is the home’s history in the 20th century that I want to explore a little bit today. In 1930, the home was rented to three Black families, then the only Black residents on the street: Robert and Gladys Morton and their daughter Goldie, Charles and Elinore Wilson, and Nettie McCrae and her infant son Robert. We talk a lot about these folks in episodes 5, 6, and 7 of The Alley Cast, but I wanted to explore what we know about these folks a little more here in this series of blog posts about African American residents of Elfreth’s Alley over the years.

What I Learned About Shovels!

In research for episode 5 of The Alley Cast, I came across a seemingly simple piece of information:

Robert Morton and Charles Wilson, residents of house #135 in 1930 worked at a shovel factory.

This single fact took me down a few serious rabbit holes, and I learned some really interesting stuff, but the episode ultimately wasn’t about the shovel factory and I couldn’t ever nail down any more specifics of Morton’s and Wilson’s employment. But I wanted to share my little research journey here, because I think it’s interesting!

I started with a simple question: where was the factory?