The Betts family of Wilmington, Delaware, produced three generations of innovative founders and machinists. They played an important role in the founding of three of the city's major manufacturing enterprises: the Betts Machine Company, which became the Wilmington Shops of Du Pont; the Harlan & Hollingsworth Company, a builder of railroad cars and an innovator in iron and steel shipbuilding; and the Pusey & Jones Company, a builder of iron ships and machinery.

Mahlon Betts was born in Attleboro, Bucks County, Pa., on March 16, 1795, the son of Jesse Betts (1764-1854), a carpenter, and Hannah Paxson Betts. He came to Wilmington in 1812, where he married Mary R. Seal at the Wilmington Friends Meeting on November 8, 1818. About two years later he purchased a small foundry at 2nd and Justison Streets from Samuel Baldwin and operated it in partnership with Evan Thomas. He built a larger foundry on his own account at 8th and Orange, where the first heat was run on July 20, 1828. Betts's first foundry was worked by horsepower, but the second featured the first stationary steam engine used in the state of Delaware.

One March 1, 1836, Betts formed the new partnership of Betts & Pusey with Samuel N. Pusey for the business of manufacturing railroad cars at a plant at Water & West Streets. He leased the foundry at 8th and Orange to his son Edward, who carried on the business as Betts & Stotsenburg. Samuel Harlan, a skilled cabinetmaker, joined the car-building firm in 1837, and after Mahlon Betts retired in 1849 it became Harlan & Hollingsworth. Mahlon Betts died in Wilmington on March 4, 1867.

Mahlon Betts's oldest son Edward (1825-1917) formed a partnership with Evan C. Stotsenburg (1807-1882), another founder, in August 1837. They rented the old Betts foundry at 8th & Orange as the “Wilmington Iron, Brass and Bell Foundry and Steam Engine Manufactory” and, in addition to those goods, made railroad wheels and axles. Stotsenburg left the partnership in August 1849 and established his own foundry at the foot of Washington Street, which he operated with his sons, Enoch M. Stotsenburg and Evan C. Stotsenburg, Jr. However, the partnership of Betts & Stotsenburg was not dissolved until all debts were settled in 1861.

With the withdrawal of Stotsenburg in August 1849, Edward Betts formed a new partnership, E. Betts & Company to operate the old foundry at 8th & Orange. His partner was Joshua Seal (1820-1896), his first cousin and a former employee of Betts & Stotsenburg. In 1851, the partners joined with the machine-building shop of Pusey & Jones, which had been established in 1848 at the foot of Poplar Street. The resulting firm was styled Betts, Pusey, Jones & Seal.

Betts, Pusey, Jones & Seal was established in 1851 by the merger of Pusey & Jones and E. Betts & Company. The partners were Edward Betts, Joshua L. Pusey (1820-1891), John Jones (1818-1897) and Joshua Seal. In an early form of vertical integration, the firm operated both the former Betts foundry at 8th & Orange and the former Pusey & Jones machine shop and steam engine factory at the foot of Poplar Street. In January 1854 the firm was restyled Betts, Pusey & Company.

Betts, Pusey & Company continued the business of Betts, Pusey, Jones & Seal with the same partners. Edward's younger brother Alfred Betts (1835-1918) joined the firm as a draftsman. In 1857 the firm divided into its original components. Edward Betts and Joshua Seal retained the lease of the old Betts foundry at 8th & Orange as Betts & Seal. Joshua L. Pusey, John Jones and Alfred Betts formed the partnership of Pusey, Jones & Betts to operate the machine shop at the foot of Poplar Street. They later branched into iron shipbuilding. Alfred Betts left Pusey and Jones to rejoin his brother in 1860, and the firm became Pusey, Jones & Company. It was incorporated in 1879 as the Pusey & Jones Company and became an important shipyard and machine-builder.

After splitting with Pusey and Jones in 1857, Edward Betts and Joshua Seal continued to operate the foundry at 8th & Orange as the partnership of Betts & Seal with the trade name of Wilmington Iron Foundry. The firm advertised a full line of gears and pulleys made to order and custom-made castings of all sorts. Mahlon Betts, the owner of the building, died in 1867, and Joshua Seal apparently left town around the same time, although he later returned to Wilmington. The last heat was drawn on December 21, 1867, and the property was then sold to Robert Scott for other uses.

After losing the link with Pusey & Jones, the Betts brothers decided to form their own machine shop and reenter the more advanced trade of machine-building. In 1860 they formed a separate partnership of E. & A. Betts and constructed a large machine shop on the Newport Pike (now Maryland Avenue and Beach Street). Alfred left Pusey, Jones & Betts, but Edward continued as partner in Betts & Seal as well and E. & A. Betts. With the closing of the old building at 8th & Orange in 1867, a new and larger foundry was added to the plant on Maryland Avenue. The firm was incorporated as the Betts Machine Company in February 1879, with Alfred Betts as president. The company soon came to specialize in large machine tools, particularly planing and boring machines. In 1879 the company bought the machinery, patterns and patents of Richards, Hand & Taylor of Philadelphia which had developed a line of standard gauges, measuring machines and precision tools. The company continued to operate until 1917, when it was purchased by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, which had outgrown the machine shop located at its Brandywine Works. The plant on Maryland Avenue became the Betts Shops of Du Pont and was renamed the Wilmington Shops in 1923. It continued to operate into the 1980s.

After its closing in 1867, Edward Betts took the records of the 8th & Orange Street foundry to his home at 704 West Street, where they were left in an attic. The space was subsequently sealed and not reopened until the building was being remodelled in 1997. The result is a rare, time-capsule look at the workings of a small but innovative foundry during the first phase of American industrialization.

While the records are not complete, particularly for the pre-Betts & Seal period, they nonetheless provide a fairly close look at the foundry's operations. As might be expected of a small, one-building operation, account books predominate. However, there is one wage book covering the years 1848-1868, and other entries for wages are scattered through the other account books. The latter also contain data on the partners' earnings and expenses, business travel, inventory and furnace operations. They record the purchase of scrap iron and brass for remelting, coal and charcoal for fuel, oyster shells for flux, and moulding sand from Dutchess County, N.Y., and Gloucester County, N.J. The Works Diaries are actually a kind of daily accounting journal with notations of castings made with the weight in pounds. The cupola account (1851-1867, incomplete) shows the consumption of raw materials and the output of the melting furnace. The Debit Ledger No. 2 (1844-1846) contains an apprenticeship agreement for E. B. Taggart. The Order Books (1828-1849) are a chronological list of orders, usually with dimensioned sketches of the pieces to be made. These include gears, pulleys, shafts, flywheels, axles, pipe, flywheels, anchors, railroad car wheels and pump parts.

The records render a good description of the relationships among the different partners in the firm and between the firm and its workers, customers and suppliers. Naturally, the main focus of the firm's trade was in the immediate area of Wilmington, where they were a prime supplier of metal goods to the many mills that clustered along the Brandywine and nearby creeks. The foundry's customer list reads like a who's who of early New Castle County industries, including the Du Pont powder mills, the flour mills of the Tatnalls, Leas and Canbys, the Garrett snuff mills, the textile mills of the Bancrofts, Deans, Puseys and Riddles, the paper mills of Jessup & Moore, turbine inventor Emile Geyelin and the iron works of the Alan Wood family. Of course, they dealt heavily with businesses owned by related families such as Harlan & Hollingsworth and Pusey & Jones. The firm also enjoyed good trade with the millowners along the streams lying between Wilmington and Philadelphia, such as the Crozers, Leipers, Daniel Lammot, and even Joseph Ripka of Manayunk, the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Thomas Wood's Fairmount Machine Works, and the new metalworking industries of Chester. There was a smaller trade with mills and machine shops on the less industrialized New Jersey side of the Delaware. Moving farther afield, the firm found many customers along the traditional overland trading routes between Wilmington and Chester and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania and the portage to Chesapeake Bay. Its long-distance trade is skewed to the south to points around the Chesapeake basin, rather than to the north and east, which were well-supplied with foundries of their own. Even so, the records show an exchange of tools and parts with important northern foundries and machine shops, such as Corliss in Rhode Island, the Novelty Iron Works in New York and Cyrus Alger's South Boston Iron Works.

Perhaps most importantly, the records include good runs of both incoming and outgoing correspondence for the years of Betts & Seal's tenure. These include fairly detailed descriptions of castings being ordered, usually with dimensioned sketches in the margins, that give a good sense of the work involved in making individual pieces. In addition to orders for castings, there is also correspondence relating to the purchase of tools and supplies and freight bills for shipments by rail and water.

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Purchased from the Ministry of Caring

August 1998

Processed by Warren Adams