David Rotenstein wrote off list in reference to my comments:
>I think your assessment that "there really weren't so many urban horses in
>big nineteenth-century cities" is more impressionistic than a reflection
>of past reality.
My comment:
There were lots of horses in the cities. Your numbers confirm this. The
point is that many of the draft horses were removed from the city before
they died, because they were supported by factory-owned hay farms. If the
big factories had kept their horses in town, equine populations would have
exploded, and conditions would have been messier than they were.
Was it Frak Leslie or Harper's that ran the really disgusting pictures of
the urban milk industry? But in fact there were a lot of dairies outside
town and a number of families kept a cow on their premises in town, like
Mrs. O'Leary in Chicago.
David writes:
>Furthermore, when you write that "My guess would be that you would look
>for the rendering plants downstream and down wind from the populated
>area," you are projecting your refined late 20th century sensibility onto
>a 19th century urban "other."
My comment:
Don't think so. In Dover. Delaware, tanyards and slaughterhouses actually
defined the downstream edge of town. These businesses require large amounts
of water, whereas gentlefolks wanted "air," and preferred to live on the
high ground.
In Richmond, Virginia, the markets were downtown early in the nineteenth
century, but the actual slaughtering was done on the streams below town.
Those sites are in town now, but they weren't then.
As for smell, the rule in Wilmington, DE, was that certain concessionnaires
(one a signer of the Constitution, by the way) had the privilege of
harvesting road apples from certain streets, but they were required to
leave them a specified time so the homeowner adjacent could claim them if
he wanted. So the streets probably stank of fresh horse manure.
Tanneries in Wilmington were astride the streams like Shipley Run that rose
in the rear of town and flowed downstream. Again the tanneries helped
define the edge of the city along the Christina. Poor tenements were
scattered amidst the Wilmington tanneries, but I suspect that was because
the tanneries were sited along streambeds on less-well-drained building
sites.
Early nineteenth century cities, in my experience, were stratified. The
city fathers were always banishing noisome trades, such as slaughter houses
and tanyards, to ghettoes outside the limits. They commonly bannned
cemeteries, which did not always smell very nice if the soil happened to be
poorly drained.
I also question any generalization about the location of worker housing.
The wealthy factory owners tended to perch on the hills overlooking their
factories in Richmond during the nineteenth century. The now-fashionable
Church Hill neighborhood was populated by the people who owned the
factories in the bottom below, and wanted to live right next door.
Factory hands lived farther away, on back streets, which meant that they
had to walk farther to work than the bosses. So the owners and managers had
the privilege of smelling whatever blew off their factories, while the
workers were frequently outside the odor range. When trolley cars were
introduced, the pattern flipped, because now the white color types could
afford to live a distance away and still get to work in reasonably quick
time. The poor workers who couldn't pay trolley fare still walked to work,
and began to encroach on the formerly wealthy parts of town nearest the
factories.
There are no simple formulae to the locations of disagreeable industries,
but there is plenty of evidence in the record that noisome businesses were
the first victims of the first zoning ordinances.
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