Asian Pioneers in the Eastern United States: Chinese Cutlery Workers in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in the 1870s

Figures

Figure 1.

American Manufacturer (Pittsburgh), 23 November 1876, p. 7; courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Figure 2.

Ah Chuck. Courtesy of the Beaver Falls Historical Society Museum; used with permission.

Figure 3.

Lee Ten Poy. Courtesy of the Beaver Falls Historical Society Museum; used with permission.

Figure 4.

Chew On. Courtesy of the Beaver Falls Historical Society Museum; used with permission.

Figure 5.

Unidentified woman, probably Chew On’s wife. Courtesy of the Resource and Research Center for Beaver County and Local History; used with permission.

By 1869 Chinese had been living and working in the United States in large numbers for twenty years, during which time their population had risen to nearly 60,000. Until then, they were almost all confined to the Pacific coast and the Rocky Mountains. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in May of that year, however, they were able for the first time to venture east relatively easily, where coincidentally their labor was in sudden demand. For in both the rapidly industrializing North and the post-Civil War South, factory workers and newly emancipated slaves were exhibiting far too much independence to suit their respective bosses. The Chinese, it was thought, might provide a feasible solution to their problems. Thus, almost as soon as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were connected, sizable groups of Chinese began showing up in different parts of the eastern United States, to join the relative handful in Atlantic seaports who had come decades earlier with the China trade. In January 1870, 250 Chinese from California arrived in Robertson county, Texas, to help build the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Five months later, 75 Chinese, also from California, detrained at North Adams, Massachusetts, to commence work in Calvin T. Sampson’s shoe factory. Others soon followed. In the south, 900 Chinese went to work on the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, and another 150 on the Millaudon sugar plantation near New Orleans, while in the North, 300 Chinese came to the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville, New Jersey, and an equal number to the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. ¹

Very little is known about these pioneering Asians east of the Rockies, as scholarly attention has focused on their far more numerous fellow countrymen in the West. Furthermore, the handful of accounts that have been written about the Chinese in the East have dwelt not so much on the Chinese themselves as on the controversies, both pro and con, that their coming invariably engendered among the local population. The Chinese thus tend to come off in these studies not as the subjects but as the passive objects of history, not as acting but as acted upon. Nevertheless, these controversies serve a useful purpose, for they elicited practically all the information that is now available on these early Chinese immigrants, who left few records of their own. This article attempts to overcome the inherent biases of the sources (mostly newspaper reports) and reconstruct the life and work of one of these first Asian American groups in the eastern United States, the Chinese at the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company in the 1870s. It will also compare their experiences with those of other Chinese elsewhere in the East at the time.

The Coming of the Chinese

Beaver Falls is a small industrial town in southwestern Pennsylvania, twenty-eight miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It is situated on the Beaver River, three miles above its confluence with the Ohio, and served by a major east-west rail line, then the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad. Aside from its superior location, it is also well endowed with natural resources, including water, coal, and gas. As a result, it quickly developed in the early 1870s into a regional manufacturing center, known particularly for its production of hardware for...