Pay: $16.00 per hour
Part-time
15 hours per week, 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM.
Hagley Museum and Library is a unique place to work, where history, education, and community come together on a beautiful 235-acre campus along the Brandywine River. We are seeking a dependable and energetic Part-Time Custodian to help maintain our facilities and support the many visitors, staff, and events that make Hagley a special destination.
This 1908 photograph shows employees of the Westinghouse Machine Company at East Pittsburg station, waiting for their evening train. The photograph is part of Hagley Library's Westinghouse Machine Company album (Accession 1983.247), which reported that it required six trains to accommodate their traffic.
The Westinghouse Machine Company was formally organized in 1881 by George Westinghouse, who was also the founder of a host of "Westinghouse Companies" bearing his name (including the Westinghouse Air Brake Co., Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, and Westinghouse Church Kerr & Co.) as well as other enterprises.
The Westinghouse Machine Company's role in George Westinghouse's portfolio was to manufacture of gas and steam engines, turbines and mechanical stokers out of a 50-acre factory complex in East Pittsburgh (the 'h' in Pittsburgh was apparently largely optional until the early 1920s). Around the time this photograph was taken, the company employed approximately 3,500 workers at this location.
In 1854, the Westmoreland Coal Company began mining coal in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, primarily for sale to steelmakers, railroads, and coal gasification plants. Within a few decades, the company was providing coal to fifty-eight gasworks along the east coast. Today, the company is one of the coal industry’s oldest independent companies.
The company's biggest growth period occurred after World War I, when it began a period of acquisition and expansion well beyond its original Westmoreland County fields, beginning with a 1917 merger with the Penn Gas Coal Company and the Manor Gas Coal Company.
This ca. 1935 photograph is from the company's colliery in Stonega, Virginia. The colliery was originally part of the Stonega Coke & Coal Company, a company on founded in 1902, for the purpose of acquiring an operating a colliery plant leased the Virginia Coal & Iron Co., a land company partly owned and managed by John S. Wentz, a coal magnate who was also a major shareholder in the the Westmoreland Coal Company.
Patents and patent models represent one person's unique solution to an everyday problem. When we think of nineteenth-century inventions, we tend to picture things like the locomotive, the steam engine, or the telephone. But these represent only a tiny fraction of the innovations that emerged during the Golden Age of Inventing. Nineteenth-century Americans used inventing to improve every aspect of their lives, turning to machines and industrial processes the way modern Americans turn to the internet, apps, or AI to make life easier, cheaper, or safer.
Last year I processed a fascinating new addition to Hagley’s extensive collections related to color studies—the Color Marketing Group (CMG) records. CMG is an international professional association founded in 1962 that focuses on color marketing and forecasting, color trends, and design. (Read a related article I wrote here.)
As we head into October and the year's "spooky season," many of us will begin to contemplate our Halloween costumes. No doubt a popular choice will be the timeless classic: witch. Unfortunately, witches, and the women who have been accused of being them, have a fraught history in the United States, as well as around the globe. Let's take a look at one such case highlighted by a film in Hagley's Cinecraft collection:
October is nearly here, and lurking about all the ghosts, ghouls, and jack-o-lanterns is another perennial holiday season favorite: Philly Archives Film Fest! 
This week's Hagley Vault is visiting Ohio to take a look at the Austin Powder Company's mills under construction in Glenwillow, Cuyahoga County, on the southern end of Solon, Ohio.
The company, now the oldest manufacturing enterprise in the Cleveland area, produces industrial explosives and detonators, as well as blasting services. But back when it was founded in 1833 by brothers Daniel Hudson Austin (1804-1878), Alvin Austin (1806-1872), Cyrus Austin (1809-1842), Lorenzo Buchard Austin (1812-1886), and Linus Austin (1817-1887), it produced black powder explosives.
The 2026 winners of the Hagley Prize in Business History are 
Ana María Otero-Cleves’ Plebian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia