Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
November 1, 1817
Primary Source Reference:
Peale Museum Accessions Book, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, p. 88
Additional Source Text:
"Taken from the Dock along side of the new Wharf at Gloucester Point in digging with the mud machine."
Notes:
Gloucester Point is on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River opposite Philadelphia, just south of the present-day Walt Whitman Bridge.
The mud machine may have been Oliver Evans's Orukter Amphibolos, or "Amphibious Digger," a steam-powered dredge he built in Philadelphia in 1805. However, it had been scrapped for parts by the Board of Health in 1808. Steven Lubar, "Was This America’s First Steamboat, Locomotive, And Car?," Invention and Technology, 21 (2006) / https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/was-america%E2%80%99s-first-st…
William Donaldson was a Philadelphia mastmaker.
