Henry William Stiegel

Introduction

Henry William Stiegel (born May 13, 1729, in the Free Imperial City of Köln [Freie Reichsstadt Köln]; died ca. January 10, 1785, in Charming Forge, Pennsylvania) was part of an early wave of German entrepreneurs who journeyed to British North America in the late seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. He established himself as both an ironmaster and a glassmaker before the American colonies declared their independence from Britain in the 1770s. Known as much for his eccentric personality as for the collectible glass he produced at his glassworks, Stiegel achieved financial and personal success in the colonies before losing everything and dying in poverty. Glass and mosaics specialist Emma Papert of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art referred to Stiegel as “an immigrant of such drive, vigor, and imagination that he became a legend in his own time.”[1] Stiegel’s life story is both complicated and heart-wrenching. Among the locals of southeastern Pennsylvania, however, he is remembered as the man who put the county of Lancaster on the map.

Family and Ethnic Background

The eldest of six children — and one of only two who survived to adulthood — Henry William Stiegel (born Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel) was born to John Frederick and Dorothea Elizabeth Stiegel on May 13, 1729, in the Free Imperial City of Köln (Cologne).[2] Stiegel was just twenty-one years old when he left Köln for British North America. By then, his father and four of his siblings — three sisters and a brother — had died. Henry William, his mother, Dorothea, and his last surviving brother, eleven-year-old Anthony, were among 270 passengers who sailed from Rotterdam in the Netherlands aboard the ship Nancy and arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 31, 1750, at the height of German immigration through the port of Philadelphia.[3]

Pennsylvania was a key destination for many German immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[4] Founded in 1681 by the English religious reformer William Penn, the Quaker colony quickly gained popularity among immigrant populations due to its expansive land, fertile soil, hardy crop output, and extraordinary reputation for religious tolerance and ethnic diversity.[5] The remarkable surge in immigration to Pennsylvania began around 1700, particularly among migrants of German and Scotch-Irish backgrounds. Throughout the eighteenth century, about three-quarters of the 100,000 immigrants who left the German states for colonial America settled in Pennsylvania.[6]

Stiegel lingered in Philadelphia for just over a year before finding work in 1752 as a clerk and a bookkeeper in an iron foundry owned by Jacob Huber. The foundry, called Elizabeth Furnace, was located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, approximately eighty miles to the west of Philadelphia. Iron making was a major enterprise in Lancaster and surrounding counties throughout the second half of the eighteenth century due to nearby iron ore deposits, abundant stands of timber, which were used to make charcoal to fuel foundry furnaces, streams for powering foundry equipment, and the presence of a road and river system that could be used to transport cast iron goods to Philadelphia and Baltimore.[7]

The same year he arrived at Elizabeth Furnace, Stiegel married his boss’s daughter, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Huber, the furnace’s namesake. Elizabeth and Henry William Stiegel had two daughters: Barbara (born 1756) and Elizabeth (born 1758). On February 13, 1758, ten days after giving birth to their second daughter, Elizabeth Huber Stiegel died. Within a year, Stiegel married Elizabeth Holtz. They had a son and named him Jacob, presumably after Stiegel’s first father-in-law.

Records indicate that Stiegel spent the rest of his life primarily in Pennsylvania. As local Pennsylvania historian C.F. Huch speculated, “It is not known that he at any time revisited his old home” in Köln.[8] Based on extensive research, however, Hunter feels quite certain that Stiegel did take one trip to Europe, most likely between October 1763 and January 1764.[9]

Late in life, Stiegel achieved notoriety by taking the title of baron. An 1896 New York Times article stated that he was descended from a noble family and was quite well off financially, having arrived in Pennsylvania with an impressive sum of money.[10] Neither claim can be substantiated. The Stiegel name was not included on any known lists of German nobility and Stiegel did not possess £40,000 in cash capital when he arrived in the colonies; in fact, he had very little money at all. Stiegel’s biographer Frederick William Hunter noted, “He was a young fellow of ability, energy, and some means, working hard to place himself in a new land — and not a man of large wealth and social distinction.”[11] The authors of a 1937 American Collector article reasoned that if Stiegel had “arrived with the sizable capital claimed, he would have fallen into some promising and attractive mercantile venture in Philadelphia… instead of setting forth into the interior [of the Pennsylvania colony] to carve out a fortune through pioneer industry.”[12]

Business Development

Stiegel’s work at Elizabeth Furnace kept him very busy. “[He] was undoubtedly hustling during those years between 1752 and 1756.”[13] He gained ownership of the furnace in 1756, and his account books show that by the fall he had formed a partnership with the Stedman brothers of Philadelphia — Charles (a merchant) and Alexander (a lawyer) — and another associate, John Barr. The Stedman brothers were involved heavily in international trade and prior to 1755 had operated numerous ships that exported foodstuffs from the North American colonies to Europe and returned with German immigrants in their holds. In fact, the Nancy, on which Stiegel and his family had arrived in Philadelphia in 1750, was owned by the brothers. When the immigrant trade began to decline in 1755, shortly after the outbreak of the French and Indian War, the Stedman brothers sold most of their merchant fleet and invested the proceeds into Elizabeth Furnace.[14]

Stiegel’s agreement with the Stedman brothers allowed him to maintain a one-third interest in the forge while the other partners controlled the remaining two-thirds of the property. The partners managed the operations of Elizabeth Furnace for two years before purchasing it, along with the 400 acres of land upon which it sat, from Jacob Huber in 1758. The bill of sale lists Stiegel’s name last among the list of investors, but it does not include a record of how much capital each man contributed to the purchase.[15] It is known that Stiegel served as general manager of the ironworks. Within two years, seventy-five men (some of whom may have been indentured German servants transported by the Stedman brothers) were employed at Elizabeth Furnace, and business was booming. “The variety of ironwares produced at Elizabeth Furnace made it capable of supplying many different people and places with goods, and its economic success was not contingent on one specific market.”[16] According to Hunter, Stiegel, as manager of the Elizabeth Township furnace, “was not only energetic, but had imagination. He soon began to specialize… [in products] that particularly appealed to the needs of the time and the neighborhood. He began to improve the crude heating devices of the country and gradually evolved a type of stove that made his name known far and wide.”[17] Stiegel’s improvements to the Benjamin Franklin open hearth design conserved fuel and delivered heat in a more efficient and targeted manner than the original model conceived by Franklin.[18]

Stiegel’s ironworks generated considerable economic activity locally and in neighboring areas. Heating Elizabeth Furnace required enormous amounts of wood, and that need for fuel provided farmers in the area with extra work. Trees from Stiegel’s land (and sometimes from the farmers’ own land) were felled and cut, and the resulting fire wood was sold for cash or exchanged for goods at the company store. (Some of these goods may have been obtained by the Stedman brothers through their international trade networks.) “The store served as a frontier trading post, trading items like shoes, knives, utensils, clothes, or even liquor. Thus, many people in the surrounding area came to the store to shop or trade. In exchange, Stiegel and other furnace owners got a cheap and constant supply of the cordwood they needed to keep [their] furnaces in blast.”[19]

Elizabeth Furnace produced wood-burning stoves, kettles, pots, pans, irons, and other assorted items made from cast iron. An accomplished ironmaker, Stiegel is known to have advertised his specialty goods in the Pennsylvania Gazette; among these goods were iron sugar refining utensils and boilers for use in the West Indies sugar refining industry. “The statements in the Stiegel account books, showing the sums realized from the West Indies sugar refiners, are evidence that the advertisements did produce results.”[20] The Stedman’s financial connections to Elizabeth Furnace and their close ties to Atlantic World trade networks emanating from Philadelphia also meant that bar iron produced at the furnace was likely traded for slaves by Philadelphia merchants on the west coast of Africa during this era.

Beyond Lancaster, a growing regional market for iron castings arose in the increasingly populated areas of Reading and Philadelphia. High demand in these cities for iron goods brought significant profits. Advertisements and ledger entries indicate that Stiegel employed agents, one in particular named Michael Hilligas, to take orders for products from customers in Philadelphia.[21] These orders were then forwarded to Stiegel via letter, who would produce the specialty items to the given specifications and ship them directly to the buyer. In addition to the special orders made for individual buyers, “mass-produced utilitarian wares like kettles, pots, and stoves were sold to shopkeepers in these areas who in turn sold them in their stores. This regional market comprised the bulk of the trade in which Elizabeth Furnace engaged.”[22]

In the early 1760s, with a workforce of more than two hundred men —half of them German — and steady business at Elizabeth Furnace, Stiegel sought to increase his landholdings and expand his entrepreneurial activities. The profitability of the ironworks in Lancaster prompted Stiegel to purchase what would later become Charming Forge in nearby Berks County. Eventually, this acquisition allowed him to cast state-of-the-art ovens for heating and cooking at Elizabeth Furnace using bar iron produced at Charming Forge. The partners also sold the bar iron at a considerable profit to other forges, making Charming Forge a “sound business.”[23]

Around the same time, the Stedmans bought the land on which the future village of Manheim would be built. John Barr had already sold his interest in the original land and was no longer included in the partnership; however, Stiegel and the Stedmans remained coinvestors for several more years. Stiegel sold a one-half interest in the Charming Forge property to the Stedman brothers, and the Stedmans sold a one-third interest in the Manheim Township property to Stiegel.[24]

These “wide land investments may have been unwise” during the French and Indian War and the uncertain period that followed the Peace Treaty of Paris in 1763.[25] The partners saw financial ups and downs over the next decade, and the final outcome for them was economically devastating. In the early-1760s, however, they did not know that their partnership would dissolve and their fortunes would be lost. Using their memory of the layout of small German villages as a model, the partners went ahead with their plans for the design and construction of the town of Manheim nearly from scratch. Stiegel’s larger-than-life persona and proclivity for opulence apparently emerged around this time. Between 1763 and 1764, in the area of Manheim now known as Market Square, he built his offices and his homestead on the choicest lots at each end of High Street. No ordinary house, the Stiegel home was an ornate mansion, forty feet long by forty feet wide, and made of imported red brick; it included a second-story chapel from which Stiegel preached (in German) the tenets of the Lutheran faith, as well as a rooftop performance area to accommodate the instrumental concert band formed, at Stiegel’s behest, by his employees.

It was not until 1763 that Stiegel began dabbling in glassmaking, building a small factory at Elizabeth Furnace and hiring three glassblowers to make window panes and bottles, which, as Hunter indicated, “were the prime need of the community” and “what all the early glass plants in [the United States] gave their first if not their entire attention to.”[26] Within a year, he was the neighborhood’s leading supplier of glass, and by 1765, he had constructed a second glass factory in Manheim.[27] Although his primary income was still generated by the ironworks, Stiegel soon took an entrepreneurial leap of faith, focusing all of his efforts on producing fine glass in the European tradition.

For more than a century, the colonies had imported most of their glass from European sources (Venice, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Bohemia, and various locations in the German states, for example). Stiegel wanted to make glassware in the colonies that rivaled the finest European glass, eliminating the need for imports. Since 1766 was a very good year for Elizabeth Furnace, perhaps partially due to increased demand for cast-iron products as a result of a renewed surge of German and Scotch-Irish immigration into Pennsylvania after the end of the French and Indian War, Stiegel decided to move ahead with the expansion of his glassmaking business. Specifically, he sought to raise enough capital to enlarge his factory space and build additional ovens for the glassworks. However, increasingly strained political and economic relations between England and her American colonies throughout the mid- to late 1760s made it impossible for Stiegel to find a buyer for his Elizabeth Furnace and Charming Forge properties.

To finance the venture without proceeds from the sale of the iron furnaces, Stiegel obtained loans and mortgaged virtually everything he owned. His goal was to produce glass exclusively, but making glass — especially fine quality art glass — had not yet become a profitable industry in the colonies. England, in particular, “looked with disfavor on the ambitions of industrially minded Americans.” The English had encouraged colonial merchants to export the raw materials for glass production to Britain, but they wanted the colonists to leave the actual glassmaking process to the Europeans.[28] Furthermore, the Stamp Act of 1765 was promulgated shortly before Stiegel’s glassworks opened, making any new business venture all the more risky.

The Stamp Act required American colonists to pay a tax on all paper products, including newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and all legal documents. The proceeds from the tax did not stay in the colonies but went directly to England to pay for British military presence in North America. The colonists feared that this tax — imposed without the approval of the colonial legislatures — was just the first of many taxes the British would impose on them to cover the costs of the Seven Years’ War, which had been waged at great cost by the British. The colonial economy suffered a major downturn with the passage of the Stamp Act. While most entrepreneurs took a “watch and wait” approach to business expansion at this point, Stiegel decided to forge ahead with his plans to expand his glass manufacturing venture.

According to Jane Spillman, curator of American glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, Stiegel had what it took to succeed in glassmaking. She explained that early glassmakers “required three types of knowledge and skill: the ability to construct a furnace that could maintain a temperature of at least 2,300 degrees [Fahrenheit]; a knowledge of glass recipes; and proficiency in glassblowing…. Sand and other raw ingredients, ceramic pots for melting these materials, and wood for firing the furnace were additional necessities.”[29] Certainly, Stiegel’s knowledge of stoves from his ironworks allowed him to produce a furnace suitable for glass production. In addition, his early life in the German states has fueled speculation that he may have had at least a rudimentary understanding of glassmaking before reaching the colonies.[30] Other factors at work in the 1760s, however, should have given Stiegel pause about proceeding with his plans for business expansion.

Hunter points out that by 1768, Stiegel’s relationship with the Stedmans was breaking down. Several forces had converged that “helped to disturb relations that had begun so amicably,” among them the poor economy in the colonies, Stiegel’s increasing dedication to glassmaking, his lack of attention to the management of their iron manufacturing business, and his aforementioned propensity for spending money lavishly.[31] Stiegel seemed bent on “mortgaging everything he owned” to pour money into a much larger and more ambitiously equipped [glassmaking] plant…. The nearer he drew to bankruptcy the more he acted as though the Manheim plant had made him a millionaire.”[32]

In 1769, four years after building the original glassmaking factory in Manheim, Stiegel replaced it with an even larger glasshouse capable of turning out the finest in lead glass tableware. Around the same time, the Stedmans, facing financial problems of their own, broke with Stiegel and sold their interest in Manheim. Stiegel bought their shares in the winter of 1770, adding additional debt to his already overextended credit. By all accounts, though, Stiegel was happy at this point in his life. He was pursuing his dream of producing fine art glass. What was once a sideline had become the centerpiece of his business.

The stoves for his new Manheim glassworks were cast at Elizabeth Furnace. Stiegel began with the production of glass bottles, often in cobalt blue or amethyst, ranging in size from large gallon-sized bottles to small “pocket bottles.” By the early 1770s, he was producing an array of glass items, including decanters, tumblers, wine glasses, cruets, pitchers, mugs, covered candy dishes, salt cellars, mustard cruets, cream pots, egg cups, garden pots, candlesticks, jelly glasses, a variety of bowls, ink jars, andbottles and vials for chemists and apothecaries. Advertisements for his wares ran in newspapers from Philadelphia to New York. In the summer of 1772 — by all accounts his most successful year — he named his Manheim glassworks the American Flint Glass Manufactory. By this time, Stiegel employed nearly one hundred craftsmen at the glass factory, and he was known to pay them generous wages.[33]

Stiegel produced both clear and colored glass, including ambers, pale to vivid greens, and the well-known bright blues and purples. Some of his pieces were highly artistic, with ornamental etchings and hand-painted designs; others were simple and sturdy for everyday use. Most were quite small — less than twelve inches in height. One of the most popular designs to come out of Stiegel’s glassworks was the daisy-in-diamond pattern, which adorns many of his bottles. This relief design was produced by first impressing the liquid glass in a patterned mold, then blowing it “in the open air by hand, giving such pieces a distended, asymmetrical appearance that is far from displeasing and that gives a wide variety of form among individual specimens.” The range of styles embodied in the various kinds of glass made at the Manheim works can be attributed to the different nationalities of the craftsmen recruited by Stiegel from England, Ireland, Germany, and Italy.”[34] Items positively attributed to Stiegel’s glassworks have been described variously as “charming,” “delightfully crooked,” and possessing a “pleasing irregularity in the engraving which is indicative of hand-work.”[35]

Historians and critics have pored over Stiegel’s business records from 1772 to 1774 in an effort to determine what led to the collapse of his glassmaking operation. Within those two years, the glasshouse at Manheim went from its most profitable year to “irretrievable ruin.” According to Hunter, whose exhaustive research on Stiegel included reviewing financial and business-related data from ledgers and journals on his ventures at Elizabeth Furnace, Charming Forge, and the Manheim works, Stiegel’s finances were “a hopeless tangle” in the years leading up to his economic losses.[36] Stiegel’s inability to maintain consistent records of his business expenditures led to major flaws in his bookkeeping and accounting, but biographers can only speculate as to why he did not — or would not — heed the signs of economic trouble before losing his businesses completely.

The colonial economy reached its lowest point in the last year or so prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution. In the face of mounting debt, Stiegel was forced to mortgage virtually everything he owned. In February 1774, he lost the glasshouse at Manheim. That November, he was sent to debtor’s prison. Having reached the point of near despair, Stiegel composed a prayer on the blank pages of his hymnal, asking God for strength in the face of adversity.[37]

Stiegel was released from debtor’s prison by an act of the Pennsylvania General Assembly on December 24, 1774. The new owner of the glasshouse at Manheim, George Ege, was one of Elizabeth Holtz Stiegel’s nephews, and he allowed the “baron” to stay on at the house. A short time later, during the first few years of the Revolutionary War, Stiegel is said to have served as caretaker at Elizabeth Furnace. He then stayed for a time at the parsonage of the Lutheran Church he helped establish. In 1780, Stiegel reportedly moved to Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, where his lived with his younger brother, Anthony, and nephew. Barely surviving on income generated by teaching and providing music lessons. Stiegel is believed to have died on or around January 10, 1785, at the age of 56. A record of his death and burial place has yet to be found.[38]

Social Status and Personality

Stiegel is generally regarded as an eccentric character with a penchant for extravagance.[39] Even in the face of financial difficulties, he maintained a mansion at Manheim. He also had several tall towers built and outfitted with cannon at his home and at Elizabeth Furnace. “His goings and comings were announced to the village by the cannon reports, and his coach, in which he rode from one place to another, served to accentuate his love of show, and no doubt had much to do with giving him his courtesy title of Baron.”[40] The author of a retrospective of early American craftsmen, published in 1915, saw no need to strip Stiegel of the title: “His extravagant habits of ostentation and the feudal elegance and lavishness of his manner of living certainly proved the aptness of the title, and it stuck.”[41]

Stiegel demonstrated a lifelong devotion to the Lutheran faith. In 1772, in the midst of his land acquisitions and entrepreneurial activities, he granted a choice piece of land — very close to his own home on High Street — to members of the Lutheran congregation of Lancaster County for the construction of a church. On that tract of land, the congregation built Zion’s Lutheran Church. Stiegel asked that the deed to the land be paid for not with an annual fee but with a one-time token fee of five shillings and the presentation each year of a single red rose to the Stiegel family.

Shortly thereafter, Stiegel’s already strained financial situation began to worsen. He is believed to have “lawfully demanded” the symbolic red rose only twice before leaving Manheim for Elizabeth Furnace. No mention of the token rose is made again until 1892, when “a local physician, J.H. Sieling, conceived the idea that an all-day festival might well be built around a revival of the payment of one red rose to a descendant of Stiegel.”[42]Thus, the Festival of the Red Rose was instituted — a celebration that continues each June in Manheim “to symbolize the indebtedness” of the Zion Lutheran Church to Baron Stiegel.”[43]

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Most historians agree that Stiegel’s business acumen reached its height early in his career, when he worked as an ironmaster. Prior to his foray into glassmaking, the ironworks reaped considerable profits. “If he had been of the plodding sort he might have died a rich man; but he was speculative and splurgy.”[44] The production of fine art glass was in its infancy in colonial America when Stiegel began his glassworks, an indication of his trendsetting power. America’s immigrant craftsmen did not realize sustained profits as glassmakers until the post-Revolutionary War period, especially the 1820s, when the glass-pressing process became common.[45] The fact that Spiegel achieved any degree of success as a glassmaker in the pre-Revolutionary years is surprising but speaks to his entrepreneurial bent.

Stiegel made a point of hiring skilled immigrant glassmakers to work in his factories. His access to these workers of German and other European ethnicities was likely facilitated by the Steadman brothers and their Atlantic trade connections. The craftsmen employed an eclectic array of techniques from their home countries. English glassmakers from Bristol provided plain bottles and kitchenware. Dutch craftsmen used wheel engraving and diamond-hatched floral patterns on their wares. Glassmakers from the German states and Switzerland employed bright enamels and folk art patterns.

Contrary to European custom, the glassware made in Stiegel’s factories was unsigned and bore no identifiable marks.[46] This has made the process of authenticating Stiegel glass quite difficult; when absolute confirmation is impossible, items are sometimes referred to as “Stiegel-type” glass. Pieces of art glass directly attributed to Stiegel must be traced to the time when his glassworks were in operation, must be consistent with the style and design of other glass produced by his glassworkers, and must be deemed by experts as more than likely originating from his factories. Surviving pieces of Stiegel art glass are highly collectible and examples of his work are featured in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Historic Manheim Preservation Foundation, and the Hershey Story Museum.

Conclusion

Henry William Stiegel and his glassworks met an unfortunate end, but as a figure in the history of German-American immigrant entrepreneurship, he was nothing short of a visionary. That he “should elect to gather together his modest resources and, taking his family with him, should seek a chance for his doubtless very consciously possessed talents and abilities, as well as for the investment of his capital, in a new world—this is quite the most comprehensible thing on earth.”[47]

Stiegel’s lavish lifestyle and his neo-feudal aspirations, which helped inspire the annual “Feast of the Roses” in Manheim, the town he co-founded, have led him to be remembered locally “as a Christian churchman when he had practically been forgotten as a glassmaker and as an ironmaster.”[48]

Stiegel’s flamboyant character, unbridled enthusiasm for his new life in the Pennsylvania colony, and entrepreneurial spirit have earned him a lasting place in early American history. He should be remembered for his commitment to producing glassware in the colonies that matched the quality of European imports. Despite his financial difficulties late in his career, he remains a significant early German-American entrepreneur due to his successful iron making career and most especially for persisting in his quest to produce exceptional crystal clear, blue, and amethyst art glass.[49]

Notes