During the 1700s boys in their teens learned a skill by serving as apprentices to master workmen. After five to seven years of training, apprentices usually became wageearning journeymen. The master's workshop commonly functioned as both a tiny factory and small store. One journeyman shoemaker in Rochester, New York, explained the process:
It was customary for the boss, with the younger apprentices, to occupy the room in front where, with bared arms and leather aprons, they performed their work and met their customers. A shop in the rear or above would be occupied by the tramping journeyman and the older apprentice....The shops were low rooms in which from fifteen to twenty men worked...
Because they lived and worked under the same roof, masters commonly treated apprentices almost as their children. Journeymen usually lived in boardinghouses near the masters'workshops; if they proved industrious, talented, and frugal, they became master workers, opened a shop of their own, and hired apprentices.
But economic growth during the 1820s and 1830s eroded the ties between masters and workers. Historian Paul Johnson (A Shopkeeper's Millennium) described how this process worked in Rochester, New York. In 1823, the Erie Canal had been completed as far as that city, enabling grain from the Genesee Valley to be loaded onto canal boats and taken to markets in New York City. During the next ten years Rochester became the fastest growing city in the nation. Master workers enlarged their shops, hired more workers, and focused on profits rather than traditional obligations of masters to workers. Manufacturing processes were increasingly moved out of the shops, which now became shoe stores. Journeymen, with paid assistants, performed the work of shoemaking in separate locations.
This physical separation of masters and journeymen is reflected in the accompanying maps. In 1827, for example, most journeymen lived near their masters'shops. But by 1834 journeymen were scattered throughout Rochester. A similar separation of journeymen and masters was found among skilled workers in the building trades. In Johnson's words, the journeymen and apprentices "worked for men they seldom saw."The gulf between masters and workers widened.
Johnson found the same shift, from apprentice and journeyman to wage earner, and from master to merchant capitalist, in many other trades.
Class formation: Journeymen and master shoemakers in Rochester, New York take separate residences, 1827-1834
° Residences of journeymen shoemakers Masters’ households
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World History
