The Swamp: Tanneries, Bucktails, Loco Focos & Democracy

“The Swamp” was a lowland area in Lower Manhattan centered around Beekman’s Swamp, bounded roughly by modern-day Gold, Frankfort, Pearl, Water, and Ferry streets just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in the Financial District.

In the 17th century the marshy wetland was known by the Dutch as Bestevaer’s Kripplebush. It was later acquired by the Beekman and Roosevelt families and filled and drained over the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Fresh water running into the wetland and its close proximity to the East River docks made it ideal for early industrial operations that demanded fresh water. As a result the neighborhood became the center of the city of New York’s hide processing, tanning and leather working industry.

Even after it was filled, it was called The Swamp due to the foul smells from waste and toxic runoff produced by treating animal hides. Even after the foulest work was no longer done in The Swamp, the area remained the city’s primary wholesale hide and leather trading district well into the 20th century.

In 1901, Frank W. Norcross, editor of the Shoe and Leather Reporter, published A History of the New York Swamp (1910), which has been condensed, edited and annotated below by John Warren.

Dutch Tanneries in New Amsterdam

Ancient indigenous peoples introduced tanning to what is now New York State. Later, Dutch men under the rule of Peter Minuit and his successors commonly wore leather; artisans wore leather aprons.

Saddlers and cordwainers (leather workers) manufactured and repaired essential agricultural equipment like leather saddles, harnesses, collars, and bridles used when clearing land, farming, and pulling carts and wagons.

This leather was mostly made from deer skins from animals that could be killed near Beekman’s Swamp. In the possession of the Beekman family are antlers of deer which William Beekman (1623-1707) shot in Beekman Street and its vicinity about 1688.

In 1664, when New Amsterdam was relinquished to the English, some tanners from London came to New York and introduced the apprentice system. Seven years was the term of service for a boy of the age of fourteen years at which they were indentured.

The early tanners made their leather into shoes and the leather-making and shoe-making trades were not separated until about the time of the American Revolution.

In 1669 a patent was granted to Adriasen and Christopher Van Lear for a mill to grind or rasp the rind of bark of oaks to be used in tanning. The tanning properties of the hemlock tree were then unknown.

Outside of New York there was a tannery owned by the Hulst family at Greenwood in Brooklyn. All the rest of these establishments with their contiguous shoe shops were located near the present corner of Broad and Beaver streets.

Coenraedt Ten Eyck (1617–1686) was among the first tanners. He located near that corner in 1653. Tanners were ordered outside of the city wall (north of current Wall Street) at the time of the English occupation and were located near Maiden Lane.

A relic of the old Dutch tanners has come down to the present day. It is the coat of arms of John Harpending (Jan Harberdinck, c. 1640s-1722/24), who owned most of “Shoemakers’ Pasture,” a name given to sixteen acres of land running north from Maiden Lane, between Gold and Nassau streets, to the Commons (City Hall Park).

He gave the money and land with which to build the church at the corner of Fulton and William streets, and his coat of arms, consisting of an old fashioned graining plate and beam, surmounted by a currier’s knife, used by tanners, hung over the pulpit until it was demolished in 1875.

[A currier dressed, finished, and colored tanned leather.]

Five tanners in 1680 bought and occupied Shoemakers’ Pasture. Eventually it came into the possession of Harpending / Harberdinck, one of the original purchasers.

In 1696 he cut it up into 164 house lots, and from the proceeds of their sale he became a very rich man. It is now the center of the mercantile section of New York, but it was a wild, rough tract when the tanners bought it.

[Shoemakers’ Pasture ran from Broadway to the East River above Maiden Lane. This was an early example of private owners subdividing their parcels into grid-like blocks Valentine’s Manual, 1860.]

After this tract was sold the tanners settled around the “Collect,” or lake, on Centre Street. Only upper leather [the upper parts of a shoe] was tanned here in those early days, and it was thought necessary for the hides to lay in the vats for a year.

All sole leather was imported from London. As late as 1768 New York Governor Sir Henry Moore wrote to the “Lords of Trade” in London:

“The tanning of leather has been carried on here (in New York) for many years. Leather is greatly inferior, in quality, to that made in Europe, and the tanners have not yet arrived at the perfection of making sole leather.”

The capacity of early tanneries was 1,000 to 2,000 hides a year, or their equivalent in deer skins, which were plentiful. The slaughter hides used were bought from the butchers. The tan vats were oblong boxes and no tannery had the luxury of a roof.

The beam house was a shed open at the sides and fronting lime vats and pools. In a circular trough made of hewed timber, bark was ground or crushed by stone rollers propelled by a horse.

[A beam house (or beamhouse) was the area of a tannery where raw animal hides were prepared before the actual tanning process began. It gets its name from the tanning beam — a slanted, curved wooden or stone block over which a worker (the beamer) would drape a wet hide to scrape off hair, flesh, and fat by hand. This was the most labor-intensive, wet, and foul-smelling part of a tannery.]

The mill ground two “floorings” of bark, or about half a cord a day. Some calfskins were tanned. Only rich gentlemen wore shoes made of so fine a material as calfskin.

[A “flooring” was a traditional unit of measure used by millers and tanners. It referred to the amount of material spread out over a specific floor area or a single batch processed by the machinery at one time.]

[A cord is equal to 128 cubic feet (typically a stack 4 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 8 feet long). Grinding half a cord a day means the mill processed about 64 cubic feet of bark daily.]

Frankfort Street

All the first tanneries in The Swamp were built in Frankfort Street and curriers pursued their trade there, residing over their shops. It was laid out in 1725 as far as Vandewater, and cut through to Pearl Street in 1800, and was the northernmost boundary of The Swamp.

There were fine dwellings in the street in the 18th century, and rich merchants lived there. A leading citizen was Francis Lewis (1713-1802), a hide and fur merchant who came from Wales in 1735 and had his house and store at the corner of Frankfort and William streets.

[To collect furs and buckskins, Lewis regularly traveled deep into the interior of New York State, and is said to have also traveled to Russia and Africa.]

[While serving as a British military clothing contractor and aide at Fort Oswego in 1756 during the French & Indian War, he was captured by French forces. According to tradition his Welsh language oddly mirrored a dialect spoken by some Native American allies of the French, saving his life before he was shipped to France as a prisoner of war.]

[After being released in a prisoner exchange, he returned to New York, and in April 1775 retired from business and entered politics. He was elected to the Second Continental Congress and signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.]

[After the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, British soldiers destroyed his estate in Whitestone, Queens, and captured his wife Elizabeth, whose health was permanently broken by the harsh imprisonment; she died in 1779.]

The second son of Francis Lewis was Morgan Lewis, who was elected Governor of New York in 1804, defeating Aaron Burr, and was a Major General in the War of 1812. He was a Grand Master of Masons in 1830.

The fashionable shoemaker of New York, before and for some years after the Revolution, was Anthony Bolton. His house and shop were at 13 Frankfort street.

His son, Thomas Bolton, while making shoes also studied law in his father’s house. He became a City Alderman, president of the Phenix Insurance Company, and from 1830 to about 1840 was clerk of the Common Council.

The “Swamp Church” [the Old Christ Church Lutheran] was a landmark on Frankfort Street near Vandewater Street for many years. Philip Lydig (possibly the grain merchant and baker, ca. 1722-1781), who lived at the southeast corner of Gold and Ferry streets, was largely instrumental in raising the building fund for this church, which was erected in 1766.

[The church’s first pastor after the Revolutionary War began was Frederick Muhlenberg. He later entered politics and became the first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and so signed the Bill of Rights.]

During the American Revolution the Swamp Church was occupied by the British troops, some of whom were buried in the adjoining cemetery. Dr. [John] Christopher Kunze (1744-1807) preached in the Swamp Church. Kunze’s daughter Anna married Jacob Lorillard, the tanner.

[Jacob Lorillard (1774-1838) was born in the city of New York, a younger son of the founder of Lorillard Tobacco, Pierre Lorillard (1742-1776), the French-American tobacconist who began business in the city in 1760.]

[Jacob Lorillard made his own fortune as a leather merchant, operating his tannery in The Swamp and later entering the family tobacco business. He was a director of several companies and President of the Mechanic’s Bank.]

Tanners Among the Revolutionary Elite

The tanners did not remain very long at the Collect Pond. About 1790 they began to cluster around the Swamp. James Brooks and Jacob Lorillard, who had formerly tanned in Centre and in Magazine streets, appear in the directory of 1800 in Jacob Street.

George Washington once lived on the border of The Swamp. In 1798, having taken the oath of office as first President of the United States on the spot where his statue now stands in Wall Street, he took up his official residence in the large mansion at 3 Cherry Street, near Frankfort Street.

This remained the Executive Mansion for one year, when the capital was moved to Philadelphia. The members of the cabinet were housed in Franklin Square, at the junction with Frankfort Street, and its vicinity.

Every day after dinner the state coach with four cream-colored horses, drove Lady Washington and the President either up the leafy Bowery or through Pearl Street to the Battery, the great pleasure ground of New York.

In the evening the “Republican Court” was held in Cherry Street. Mrs. Washington, surrounded by the first ladies of the land, received. The ladies dressed in white satin and silks shot with silver thread.

The men wore silk small clothes (knickerbockers), silk stockings and pumps. Their coats were faced with yellow silk or buckskin. Military men wore uniforms, boots and swords.

Visitors to the Executive Mansion had to pass The Swamp, for it was the northernmost boundary of the city. All beyond was pasture, or at best, farms and forest. To most of them, the view of tanneries, with the vats laid down in parallel rows was an unwanted sight, but not will all.

General Anthony Wayne was familiar with the pungent odor of bark, for the “hero of Stony Point” had been a tanner in Pennsylvania. General William Sutton (1800–1882) owned a tannery in Salem, Massachusetts, which was owned by the Sutton family up to about 1870.

Colonel Oliver Spencer (1736-1811) and Colonel Matthias Ogden (1754-1791), of Newark, New Jersey, were tanners and officers in the Revolution. Alexander H. Read was a general in the Army and served on Washington’s staff. He was a tanner at Wardsboro, Vermont, and brought up five sons in the trade.

Colonel John Mansfield (1748 – 1823), a Massachusetts shoemaker, commanded the Lynn and Salem Regiment at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Roger Sherman (1721-1793), a Connecticut shoemaker, and Francis Lewis, the New York hide dealer, represented these trades in the First Continental Congress. They were among the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

These men probably visited George Washington, and later perhaps partook of the hospitality of their fellow craftsmen in Frankfort Street. The original Tammany Hall was built at the head of Frankfort Street at Nassau.

The Pewter Mug, a tavern just in its rear, was a noted political rendezvous.

About 1800 The Swamp was a favorite place for turkey shooting on Thanksgiving day and other holidays. The Pearl street boys used to build forts of the spent tan, piked with cattle horns, and defend them against the invaders who came from Fly Market [established on Maiden Lane in the 1690s], or across the Fields, as the City Hall Park was called.

Some idea of the value of swamp property in the early part of this century can be obtained from the purchases of Jacob Lorillard. In 1809 he bought from John Roosevelt [Jr., (1741-1833)] the property 14 Ferry street, running back to Beekman Street, for $3,000. On it was the brick house in which he lived.

[Johannes, or John Roosevelt Sr. (1689–1750) was merchant, real estate investor, and served as an Assistant Alderman and Alderman. He was one of the earliest prominent landowners in the Beekman Swamp area and accumulated large tracts of land near Ferry Street, Peck Slip, and Wall Street. When he died, his large estate was passed down to his sons (John, Cornelius, and Elbert).]

[As New York City expanded rapidly north of Wall Street, the Roosevelts began subdividing and selling off their inherited Swamp properties to the rising leather manufacturing magnates like Lorillard.]

In 1815 Lorillard bought the lot on the northwest corner of Ferry and Jacob streets for $1,620, and other property on Ferry Street for which he paid $1 per square foot. He bought 72 Gold Street for $6,500; there was a brick house on it.

In 1832 a large lot, 32 x 75, at 6 to 10 Ferry Street, was acquired for $4,000, also the lot 76 Gold Street for $3,800. There was a tannery there belonging to John Weber which ran to about 80 Gold Street; it was cut into lots and Lorillard bought a part of it.

He also bought 41 Spruce Street, for $1,043.50, and assumed a mortgage for $950. This lot ran back and included 85 Gold Street, which he bought from James Flynn for $5,800, and 20 feet adjoining from John B. Cheeseman, for $2,650.

He also bought the unimproved lot at 24 Spruce Street in 1815 for $1,550. In 1833, eighteen feet across the front of this estate was taken to improve Spruce Street, for which the city paid him $2,415.

Early Swamp Tanners & Politics

The old tanners who did business in The Swamp previous to 1800 sold their product to dealers on the west side, who in turn supplied the shoe makers who were their only customers.

Tanners’ methods were primitive. Leather was taken out when half tanned, rubbed over a beam with a stick, and then skived down to the required thickness, and the skivings [excess, skin, fat, etc.] was thrown away or dumped into the creek that emptied into the East River.

Splitting leather was then unknown. Sole leather was finished by rolling a smooth grindstone over it.

The early members of the trade were merchants on a small scale. They bought and sold, and did a good deal of dickering business. They had close relations with oak leather tanners in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The sailing packets brought the leather here and there was very little, except this oak sole, known.

There were tanneries in Massachusetts where hemlock bark was used and sole leather made. It was mostly sold and used there. The first hemlock sole leather tannery in New York State located at Hunter, was of sufficient importance to be mentioned in the 1810 Census; its capacity was 5,000 hides a year.

[This was Edward’s Tannery, built by Colonel William Edwards (1770-1851) on Hunter Mountain in the town of Greenland in Greene County in the Catskills, which was renamed Edwardsville until after the tannery closed, when it took its present name Hunter, after John Hunter an early landowner.]

[Backed by The Swamp leather merchants, the “New York Tannery” was officially established on the upper Schoharie Creek in 1817 and operated for just over 20 years until 1839. It is considered the first modern large-scale tannery in the United States built completely under a roof to protect operations from winter weather.]

On Jacob Street, extending through to Gold Street, was the tannery of Daniel Tooker. He died in 1806, aged 83 years. Michael Ortley had a tannery on the corner of Gold and Frankfort streets. By 1811, there were some 20-odd tanneries in The Swamp.

The Swamp began to figure in the political history of New York about 1800. The prominent leather dealers became leaders in the political parties and officers of the organization had their headquarters at Washington and Tammany Halls.

The headquarters of the Federal party, 1800 and later, was at Washington Hall, a massive building, mostly used like Tammany for hotel purposes. Washington Hall was built by the rich John G. Costar (1762-1844).

It stood on the corner of Broadway and Chambers street, and was purchased, together with the land, by [dry-goods merchant] A. T. Stewart for $60,000, and on this and two additional lots he built the splendid store used for his wholesale business. He moved into this in 1848 and the whole cost of the building and land at that time did not reach $300,000.

The Swamp Clique Tammany Hall Tanners

The first tanner who is recorded as an office holder in the city of New York was Albert Clock, who was Assistant Alderman of the “Dock Ward” from 1710 to 1714.

The next was Jeremiah Wool, who held the same office in the North Ward in 1783, and was Alderman of the South Ward from 1784 to 1791. Thomas Hazard, a currier, was Alderman of the East Ward in 1786 and 1787.

[The Tammany Society, also known as Tammany Hall or the Columbian Order, was a powerful American political organization founded in the city of New York in 1786, formally organized in 1789 by William Mooney. It started as a patriotic social and benevolent club to oppose the elitist and aristocratic tendencies of the Federalists in early American politics.]

[The Society co-opted Native American terminology, culture, and imagery. It was named after Tamanend (c.1625–c.1701), a Lenape leader from the Delaware River Valley.]

For a time the Tammany Society originally met at local taverns, including at Martling’s Tavern at the corner of Nassau and Spruce streets. The kitchen was on Nassau Street, and directly in the rear was “Martling’s Long Room.” Members also often met at the Pewter Mug tavern near the corner of Frankfort and Nassau streets.]

These were the headquarters of “the Democracy” or, as they were then called, the “Republican party” [Democratic Republicans, as opposed to Federalists], until Tammany Hall was finished in 1812 at the southwest corner of Park Row and Frankfort Street.

[This building cost $28,000. The corner stone was laid May 13, 1811. The whole of second story was a hall were meetings, banquets and balls were held. Its upper floors acted as a hotel to offset costs.]

[From the 1780s until the until 1820s during the First Party System, Tammany Hall came to be considered the Democratic Party headquarters and the center of  Jacksonian Democracy in New York. In 1867 William “Boss” Tweed arranged for the sale of the Tammany at The Swamp property to The Sun newspaper and moved uptown into a new Tammany Hall.]

The frequenters of Tammany Hall affected Indian costume and manners at their meetings and parades. The chief officers were “Sachems,” [masters of ceremonies were called “Sagamores,” and members “Braves”]. When marching in processions they went in single or “Indian file,” the officers dressed in indigenous-inspired costumes. At the admission of new members, a song was sung with an “Indian chorus.”

Another place of meeting for the Democracy was Harmony Hall, in Frankfort Street, at the northwest corner of William. In this building, owned by David Bryson, “the Swamp clique” would sometimes mature their plans before giving them the broader endorsement of Tammany.

Although Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans generally agreed among themselves on professed principles in national affairs, splits occurred in these newly forming political parties.

The Bucktails

The “Bucktails” [led by Martin Van Buren] were those opposed to the election of De Witt Clinton, and took their name from the fact that they wore the tail of a deer in their hats. John Jacob Astor [who made his fortune in the fur trade] used to have two or three boys stationed on the steps of Tammany Hall on meeting nights to sell these fur badges.

One branch of the Bucktails [from the Manhattan’s West Side] split on a city government question and was called the “North River Squad” from the fact that its leaders resided in that portion of the city.

Their opponents were called the “Swamp Clique.” Among its leaders were Abraham Bloodgood (1764-1837), John P. Anthony, curriers and leather dealers, and James Tylee (1750-1826, previously a Federalist), the leather inspector, who was a Sachem of Tammany during the latter portion of the 18th century.

Party spirit ran high in those days, and no pains were spared to win an election. In 1801, prior to a charter election, Jasper Ward, a member of the Swamp Clique, bought from Abraham Bloodgood a lot of ground in the Fifth Ward, which, with the currying shop on it, was said to be worth $2,000.

This he immediately deeded over to thirty-nine persons, as tenants in common, to enable them to vote. (The property qualification required every voter to own property valued at $50.)

The Ward was carried by the help of these votes, giving twenty-five majority to Arcularius and [his running mate] Drake, the Anti-Federal candidates, but the election being contested, and the property proving to be worth only about $1,500, they were not allowed to take their seats.

[Philip J. Arcularius’s daughter later married anti-loco foco James Harper, co-founder of the Harper & Brothers publishing house, who went on to become the Mayor of New York City in 1844.]

The Swamp Clique used to meet in the store of Abraham Bloodgood, 62 Frankfort Street, nicknamed “Swamp Place.” Bloodgood was an alderman from 1804 to 1807 and State Prison Inspector 1807 to 1812.

John P. Anthony, a tanner, was a prominent Bucktail elected an Alderman from 1819 to 1827. Anthony was elected by the Jacksonian Democrats as Alderman in 1827.

Abraham Bloodgood was a currier and leather merchant in the Swamp for many years, and did a large business. His store was at 62 Frankfort Street. He retired from the leather trade in about 1815, and afterward resided at 52 Frankfort Street. He died in 1837 at the age of 75 and left a large fortune to four children. Bloodgood was president of the Continental Fire Insurance Company.

David Bryson, a celebrated leather dealer, John M. Bloodgood, son of Abraham Bloodgood, and Jonathan Trotter (ca. 1797-1865), a well-known morocco dealer and politician, were Sachems of Tammany.

[Morocco dealers worked with goat skin to create a product that resembled fine Moroccan leather. Trotter was elected the second Mayor of Brooklyn in 1835.]

At the time of which we treat, the Federalist party nicknamed the Republicans or Tammany Hall men “Democrats,” as a term of reproach, it being then applied to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. The party adopted the title after the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency in 1828.

Loco Focos & The Equal Rights Party

The cognomen of “Loco Focos,” which for many years clung to the Democratic Party as a way to paint them as radicals, originated in Tammany Hall after a minor organizational coup d’état on October 29, 1835. The evening the left wing of the Democracy gained control of the hall for an meeting, but found that their more conservative opponents had carried off the lamps.

This was a game, obviously played before, for which they were prepared, as each man had a candle, and the general striking of loco foco or brimstone matches to light them caused the hall to be filled with the smell of sulfur. Two prominent Swamp tanners, Jackson Schultz and Frederick Fawcett, carried candles that night.

The next morning the Courier and Enquirer called these insurgent Democrats loco focos, and around the country for many years after Democratic opponents derisively painted the Democracy as radical by calling them “the Loco Foco Party,” they themselves preferred “Equal Rights Party.”

The Equal Rights Party declared uncompromising hostility to paper money, opposition to monopolies and the creation of vested rights by legislation; it was largely led by William Leggett (1801-1839, the loco foco editor of the Evening Post.

Among other prominent tanning industry operators was Richard Cunningham, who first appeared in the Directory for 1799 as a tanner and currier at 47 Ferry Street. He took as partner Hugh McCormick, and the firm of Cunningham & McCormick was for many years well known in the Swamp. McCormick married a sister of industry fellow William Kumbel, who learned his trade there.

Cunningham lived in James street and was an Alderman in 1810, 1811 and 1812. In 1815 he sold a large estate on Bloomingdale Road to Jacob Lorillard for $12,000.

McCormick’s son became part of the industry and his grandson Richard C. McCormick, born in Jacob street, was Governor and Delegate to Congress from the Territory of Arizona, Assistant Treasurer of the United States Treasury and Commissioner to the World’s Fair in Paris in 1878. He married a daughter of Senator Allen G. Thurman, of Ohio.

John M. Bloodgood was a Sachem of Tammany and a noted character in his day. He succeeded his father in business, and his name appears in the directory of 1816 as a currier, at 62 Frankfort Street. He rebuilt the store on his father’s old place, did business as a boot crimper for many years, failed and retired from the trade about 1828. Jack Bloodgood served many years as a Police Magistrate.

In 1810 Strangers Guide to New York described Chatham and Frankfort Streets as “elegant streets, the most spacious in the city.” Fulton Street was widened that year and lined with fine residences.

Mail stages left daily 1 Cortlandt Street for Boston and went through in thirty-eight hours; fare, $15. Mail stages left for Washington every day, fare $24; for Philadelphia every noon, arriving there the next morning, fare $10.50.

Such were the methods of traveling of “the fathers of the leather trade.”

Read More About New York’s Tanning or Political History

Illustrations, from above: “Der Lohgerber” (The Tanner) illustrates a small nineteenth century tannery from Was willst du werden? Bilder aus dem Handwerkerleben (What Do You Want to Be? Pictures from the Life of Craftsmen), 1880; detail from “A plan of the city of New York from an actual survey,” 1755, showing the Swamp leather working area, including streets at the east end of Frankfort, with notable connections to the tanning trade such as Skinner’s, Hage, Jacob, Beekman and Gold streets, and also two tan yards; a map of Shoemakers’ Pasture from Valentine’s Manual, 1860; an early outdoor tannery of the type located in The Swamp; detail from “Plan for the the city of New York,” based on a 1728 survey by James Lyne and engraved around 1730 by John Carwitham, showing an unfinished Frankfort Street and Beekman’s Swamp; Bernard Ratzer’s 1776 map “Plan of the city of New York in North America, surveyed in the years 1766 & 1767” showing the Collect Pond and Swamp tanneries; the Swamp Church; George Washington’s entry into New York in 1783 (Currier and Ives, 1857); gentlemen smoking in a tavern in the mid-19th century (National Cigar Museum); interior of a colonial era tannery showing the lime pits and rinsing tanks from A Text-book of Tanning (1885) by Henry R, Procter; Woodland Tannery in Woodland Valley in the Catskills, ca. 1860; Tammany Hall in 1830 (Valentine’s Manual, 1865); a political cartoon of the Congressional brawl between representatives  and when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut attacked Democratic-Republican Matthew Lyons from Vermont on February 15, 1798; and “A Democratic Voter,” a satirical cartoon showing an Irishman being wooed by Loco Foco and Tammany factions of the Democratic Party, 1836.